Opportunities or Threats? The Role of Entrepreneurial Risk Perception in Shaping the Entrepreneurial Motivation

Entrepreneurial risk is an important factor that individuals must consider when starting their own business. The COVID-19 continues to rage, bringing great challenges to China's economy and entrepreneurial activities. In this study, college students encounter greater entrepreneurial risks. There are two opposing views on the role of entrepreneurial risk in shaping individual entrepreneurial motivation: one view that risk is a threat, and the other view that entrepreneurial risk contains opportunity. Existing studies have discussed the issues from individual factors and environment factors, respectively, ignoring the combined effects of individual and environment factors. Person-situation transactions theory points out that individuals usually make their final behavior choices based on their comprehensive evaluation of environmental factors and themselves. Therefore, individual and environment factors should be integrated to investigate the effect of entrepreneurial risk on entrepreneurial motivation. Based on the person-situation transactions theory, this study establishes a theoretical model that entrepreneurial risk perception influences necessity and opportunity entrepreneurial motivation through entrepreneurial self-efficacy and discusses the moderating effect of entrepreneurship policy. A questionnaire survey was conducted on 595 fresh graduates from eight universities in China to obtain relevant data and the Structural Equation modelling was established to test the hypothesis. The results confirm that without the influence of external factors, college students regard entrepreneurial risk as a great threat, which not only weakens their entrepreneurial self-efficacy, but also reduces their necessity and opportunity entrepreneurial motivation. However, with the support of good entrepreneurial policies, entrepreneurial risk can be transformed into an opportunity to improve the entrepreneurs motivation driven by necessity of college students, but the impact on the opportunity motivation is not significant. This study deeply analyzes the dual characteristics of entrepreneurial risk perception in the process of shaping individual entrepreneurial motivation, expands the related research on entrepreneurial risk perception and entrepreneurial motivation, and has important implications for the government and universities to formulate entrepreneurial policies for college students.

How Does Supply Chain Resilience Affect Supply Chain Performance? The Mediating Effect of Sustainability

In recent years, interruption or failure events have occurred due to frequent natural disasters, the outbreak of COVID-19, policy environment turbulence, an increasingly complex business environment, and the increasingly fragile global supply chain. This has reduced the efficiency of supply chains and customer service quality and increased operating costs, creating new requirements for supply chain flexibility and sustainability. When investigating 21 companies based on 200 questionnaires and a structural equation model analysis, the results showed that the elasticity of the supply chain for supply chain sustainability, economic sustainability, social sustainability, and environment sustainability has an obvious positive effect: supply chain sustainability has an obvious positive effect on supply chain performance. Supply chain resilience has no direct positive effect on supply chain performance, but it has a strong indirect effect on supply chain performance under the mediating effect of supply chain sustainability. In view of this, in order to create sustainable supply chain development and improve the performances of supply chains, it is necessary to establish the awareness of risk prevention, root the risk culture in supply chain network organization, and improve supply chain resilience in multiple dimensions. Enterprises in the supply chain should continue to build their resilience and establish effective strategies to integrate supply chains. The intermediary role of sustainability in supply chains and of supply chain flexibility in supply chain performance shows the influence of economically, socially, and environmentally sustainable angles, such as the implementation of supply chain management, the maximization of the interests of the whole supply chain, improving the ability of supply chain enterprises to innovate and develop, establishing customer awareness, and enhancing humanistic ideas. Dynamic selection of supply chain partners while focusing on their green performance promotes the green development of supply chain enterprises.

An Improved Genetic Algorithm for Location Allocation Problem with Grey Theory in Public Health Emergencies.

The demand for emergency medical facilities (EMFs) has witnessed an explosive growth recently due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the rapid spread of the virus. To expedite the location of EMFs and the allocation of patients to these facilities at times of disaster, a location-allocation problem (LAP) model that can help EMFs cope with major public health emergencies was proposed in this study. Given the influence of the number of COVID-19-infected persons on the demand for EMFs, a grey forecasting model was also utilized to predict the accumulative COVID-19 cases during the pandemic and to calculate the demand for EMFs. A serial-number-coded genetic algorithm (SNCGA) was proposed, and dynamic variation was used to accelerate the convergence. This algorithm was programmed using MATLAB, and the emergency medical facility LAP (EMFLAP) model was solved using the simple (standard) genetic algorithm (SGA) and SNCGA. Results show that the EMFLAP plan based on SNCGA consumes 8.34% less time than that based on SGA, and the calculation time of SNCGA is 20.25% shorter than that of SGA. Therefore, SNCGA is proven convenient for processing the model constraint conditions, for naturally describing the available solutions to a problem, for improving the complexity of algorithms, and for reducing the total time consumed by EMFLAP plans. The proposed method can guide emergency management personnel in designing an EMFLAP decision scheme.

Editorial

(Ma et al., 2019) It is necessary for theoretical studies to further examine solution modes of a sharing economy that focus on social issues and how to promote social innovation and entrepreneurship by means of sharing values and concepts to verify the relationship between social innovation and social value creation and understand various problems, such as how social innovation and entrepreneurship and sharing values and concepts can realize interactive promotion. [...]it is necessary to explore how we can break through the conceptual limitations of the “means-ends” relationship in the economy and society, so as to not only improve the survival ability of social organizations but also prompt enterprises and organizations to return to their essential attributes: social subjects. [...]nonprofit organizations engage in voluntary public welfare or mutual assistance activities, which can make up for the shortcomings of the government and other public departments and help them provide more effective social services to meet social needs while creating social value. Theoretical studies based on the concept of sustainable development have addressed the issue through paradigms of active social changes, such as CSR, the bottom of the pyramid (BoP) and SE (Mair et al., 2016;Zahra and Wright, 2016). [...]increasingly more organizations are beginning to pay attention to economic value and social value simultaneously. [...]according to the organizational paradox theory, in theoretical studies, we must first recognize that these two value goals have long existed in enterprises and are interrelated and contradictory. [...]the paradox theory advocates treating the tension of contradiction as an organizational opportunity and finding innovative ways to solve complex problems, such as sustainable development, through the exploration of the relationship between the relevant elements of the contradiction (Hahn et al., 2018;Smith and Lewis, 2011), which is becoming the focus of theoretical studies.

What Type of Social Support Is Important for Student Resilience During COVID-19? A Latent Profile Analysis.

In the face of the sudden outbreak of coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19), some students showed resilience in coping with difficulties while some did not. While different types of students showed different levels of resilience, are there significant characteristics among students with similar levels of resilience? In this study, 3,454 students (aged 15-25 years) were surveyed to understand students' perceived social support-coping modes while investigating the demographic characteristics and mental health status of subclasses of different modes. We found that (1) in the two subgroups of students with extremely low and low levels of perceived social support, the source of students' perceived social support did not have a clear orientation; in the two subgroups with moderate and high levels of perceived social support, the most perceived emotional support was from family and friends, while the least perceived support was companionship from teachers, classmates, and relatives, and problems related to the dependability of friends and communication with family. (2) The degree of social support perceived by students is directly proportional to the coping tendency, i.e., as the degree of perceived social support increases, the proportion of students adopting active coping strategies increases while that of students adopting negative coping strategies decreases; thus, we concluded that high levels of emotional support from family and friends can increase students' tendency of adopting positive strategies to cope with difficulties, while problems related to the dependability of friends and communication with family decrease students' tendency of adopting positive coping strategies. (3) Gender had a significant impact on the extremely low and low levels of perceived social support-negative coping tendencies; these subgroups accounted for 34.6% of the total students. Gender showed no significant influence on other subgroups, a school type had no impact on the distribution of the subgroups. (4) The higher the degree of perceived social support, the lower is the degree of students' general anxiety, and the lower is the degree of impact by the COVID-19 pandemic. The subdivision of student groups allows us to design more targeted support programmes for students with different psychological characteristics to help them alleviate stress during the COVID-19 epidemic.

Perceived city smartness level and technical information transparency: The acceptance intention of health information technology during a lockdown

With the acceleration of urbanization, effective smart city programs need to consider both daily management and crisis management. In this process, to enable health information technology to better contribute to the construction of smart cities, the government and firms need to pay attention to the public's intention to adopt technology. Based on the context of China's response to the COVID-19 pandemic in smart cities, we analyze the influencing factors of the behavioral intention to use health information technology using an extended unified theory of acceptance and use of technology model. Data for this study were collected from 721 inhabitants of 290 smart cities in China. The empirical results showed that performance expectations, effort expectations, social influence, and facilitating conditions positively affected their behavioral intention to use health information technology, whereas perceived risk had the opposite effect. This study found that the positive effects of social influence and effort expectations on the behavioral intention to use health information technology increased with improvement in the perceived level of city smartness and technical information transparency. Finally, we discuss theoretical and practical implications.