Purpose: The absence of government intervention and market supervision cannot effectively promote green process innovation in manufacturing industries. As a new government regulation approach, environmental taxes provide a platform to internalize the externality of environmental pollution. This paper empirically investigates the impact of environmental taxes on green process innovation and the moderating effects of industry pollution heterogeneity and green credit.Design/methodology/approach: This research collects manufacturing industry data ranging from 2008 to 2020, resulting in a total of 351 observations. Time-individual, two-way fixed effect models are constructed to examine the hypotheses.Findings: The results indicate environmental taxes have an inverted-U effect on green process innovation in manufacturing industries. Implementation intensity of the current environmental taxes on China's manufacturing industries does not reach an inflection point. Further analysis suggests that environmental taxes exert influence on the inverted-U relationship with low-pollution industries displaying a steeper curvilinear pattern than high-pollution industries. Moreover, the analysis shows that green credit plays a moderating role in the inverted-U relationship, as low green credit provides more limited stimulus than high green credit in terms of the effect of environmental taxes on green process innovation.Research limitations/implications: This study offers empirical evidence to accommodate negative externalities of corporate production and provides new perspectives in nudging corporate green-process innovation.Originality/value: This paper verifies the effect of environmental taxes on green process innovation amid industry pollution heterogeneity by introducing an industrial-level analysis unit. This study improves the means by which environmental taxes are measured. Existing literature has narrowly used pollution discharge fees as a proxy for environmental taxes. The authors have summed up the taxes on vehicle and vessels, urban land use, urban maintenance and construction, vehicle purchases, waste gas, wastewater and solid waste to measure the effect of environmental taxes in this study.

Sino-foreign cooperative universities (SFCU) represent the advanced manifestation of transnational education in China and has profoundly shaped the country’s higher education landscape. Despite the tremendous development of SFCUs, there is limited research on the motivations and driving factors of students choosing to study at SFCUs. To bridge this research gap, this study employs the grounded theory approach to examine why Chinese high school graduates choose SFCUs as study destinations. This study reveals that Chinese students’ choice of SFCUs results from personal considerations, institution-level characteristics, and social contexts. A theoretical framework is further proposed to better understand Chinese students’ motivations behind their choice to SFCUs. We also draw theoretical contributions on students’ mobility and marketing strategies that attract Chinese students to study at SFCUs with the findings.

While previous studies show that risk perceptions vary across populations and domains, there is little empirical evidence on the interplay between individual-level characteristics and risk domains in shaping perceived social risks in a country such as China. This study examines empirically the effects of individual-level characteristics on risk perceptions across different domains. Based on a large sample survey data from 31 provincial capitals in China, our analysis demonstrates that risk perceptions fall into four domains: contingencies, health threat, natural hazards, and social security. The multilevel model estimates indicate that confidence in local government responsible for risk management and being a male are uniformly and significantly correlated to less risk perceptions among all risk domains. Education presents a consistent pattern in amplifying risk perceptions, with only some effects on perceived health threat and contingencies displaying statistical significance. Also, age and income exhibit mixed associations with risk perceptions, only with age significantly attenuating perceived contingencies. The results also demonstrate that religious faith, party membership, and Hukou are related to risk perceptions. We discuss the theoretical and policy implications of our findings and conclude with research limitations and future research avenues.

Under the VUCA background, enterprises need to actively change to meet the requirements of internal and external environmental changes. This article surveyed 250 employees. Using statistical software SPSS 27.0 and Process 4.1, we address the outcome of secure-base leadership on employees’ taking-charge behavior by considering the influencing mechanisms and boundary conditions. The results indicate that secure-base leadership positively shapes employees’ taking-charge behavior, and psychological availability plays a mediating role in the relationship between secure-base leadership and such employee behavior. Independent self-construal positively moderates the impact of psychological availability on employees’ taking-charge behavior and positively moderates the indirect impact of secure-base leadership on such behavior through psychological availability. Our findings could enrich the empirical research on employees’ taking-charge behavior by secure-base leadership, thereby promoting the sustainable development of organizations.

Existing research has documented that public attitudes towards waste incineration plants are determined by various factors, such as risk perception, economic impacts, and social trust. However, the diversity in perceptions within communities hosting waste incineration plants is understudied. Adds to existing knowledge, the present paper employed the Q methodology to examine the perceptions of residents living in the vicinity of a waste incineration plant in Xuzhou, China. The results revealed four perspectives on residents’ perceptions towards waste incineration plants: I do not trust them and feel besieged by risks; I trust local governments but I am unfairly treated; I attach this place a lot but I am unfairly treated; I possess knowledge of waste incineration and feel besieged by risks. Our data show that risk perception, trust perception, and political efficacy perception are underlying reasons for local acceptance of waste incineration plants. The diversified subjectivities we obtained supplement existing literature that quantitatively documents the influencing factors. These findings demonstrate that it is necessary to explicitly consider the deep-seated values and perspectives among hosting residents’ for the siting of the waste incineration plant.

In a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world, the question of how to effectively harness employee role behaviour, such as proficiency, adaptability, and proactivity, is inciting heated discussion among academic societies, and it is a vital practical issue to address. Employing self-determination theory, this study examines the mechanisms by which supervisors’ developmental feedback influences employees’ work role performance. The two-wave survey data from 497 respondents obtained via hierarchical regression analyses reveal that supervisors’ developmental feedback positively impacts employee work role performance, that thriving at work plays a mediating role in the relationship, and that this mediating relationship has conditional effects on the moderator variable of trait mindfulness. These findings could enrich the understanding of the effects of supervisors’ developmental feedback on employees’ work role performance and provide insight about how to facilitate this process.