Suchergebnisse

This qualitative study sought to explore how women entrepreneurs leverage the Internet to empower their entrepreneurial activities in the Chinese context. To this end, we first conducted semi-structured interviews with 30 women entrepreneurs, and then analyzed their transcripts by following the principles of thematic analysis from grounded theory method. After the three-phase coding procedure, we developed a conceptual model of Internet use of women entrepreneurs which were composed of Internet marketing, Internet purchasing, and Internet learning. The current study provides the first evidence for the multidimensional construct of Internet use with a sample of women entrepreneurs in China. A hypothesis concerning the relationship between Internet use and women entrepreneurial performance is proposed for future investigation. Implications for women entrepreneurs and policymakers are discussed.

Women have become an increasingly important force in entrepreneurship, and their relatively low entrepreneurial competence has aroused widespread attention from the academia. Drawing from the resource-based theory and the social support theory, this study aims to explore the impact of Internet use on women's entrepreneurial competence and the roles of entrepreneurial resource acquisition and family support in this relationship. After collecting a sample of 328 women entrepreneurs in China, this study demonstrates that Internet use is positively related to women's entrepreneurial competence, and this relation is partially mediated by entrepreneurial resource acquisition. Moreover, family support moderates the relation between Internet use and entrepreneurial resource acquisition as well as the mediating effect of entrepreneurial resource acquisition. The results of the current study contribute to revealing how Internet use affects women's entrepreneurial competence, including its direct and indirect effects and boundary conditions. Practical implications for policy-makers and female entrepreneurs are also provided.

PurposeThe purpose of this research is to investigate how postpartum mothers conduct self-disclosure on social media may obtain social support and therefore improve their depressive mood.Design/methodology/approachThe authors extract variables of self-disclosure by manual coding postpartum mothers' 835 posts from a parenting social media in China. The ordinary least squares model and the binary logistic regression model are used to test the proposed hypotheses.FindingsThe study suggests that both mothers' superficial level disclosure and personal level disclosure positively affect online social support received, and the effect of personal level disclosure on social support is much greater than that of superficial level disclosure. Online social support received is related to the content of the post and reduces mothers' depressive mood. The authors further find that the association between personal level disclosure and depressive mood is fully mediated by social support.Research limitations/implicationsThe data are collected from a parenting social network. Although it is the major parenting social media with the most users in China, the generalizability of this model and the findings to other social media need additional research.Practical implicationsThis study offers implications for researchers and practitioners with regard to social media uses and impacts, which also has important implications for policy and interventions for the mental health of mothers.Originality/valueThis paper makes theoretical contributions to the literature of social penetration theory and social support by (1) dividing self-disclosure into superficial level disclosure and personal level disclosure according to the intimacy of self-disclosure; (2) empirically investigating the direct effect of online self-disclosure on social support and the mediating effect of social support between online self-disclosure and mothers' depressive mood.

Purpose
As a standard source of capital for entrepreneurs, crowdfunding has recently gained wide attention in business and academia. With scientific endorsement, some research is conducted to explore the antecedents of online crowdfunding success. The factors that can influence the backers' investment which is the key to success are information from prior backers' and creators' behaviors. Based on the signaling theory, the purpose of this paper is to systematically investigate the dynamic influences and interaction effects of signals with different forms (action-based or opinion-based signals) and sources (creator-sourced or backer-sourced signals) on backers' investment behaviors over a project-funding cycle.


Design/methodology/approach
A panel data set of 3,010 projects with 640,625 transaction records from April 28, 2013 to September 31, 2017 is collected from a famous online crowdfunding platform – Zhongchou.cn in China and the negative binomial panel data model with fixed effect is used to obtain our empirical results.


Findings
The findings demonstrate that the work of different signals is significantly effective at the early stage of a project and decreases with time. Furthermore, our results show that there are both synergistic effect and substitution effect among different signals. Specifically, the direction of interaction effect depends on the forms of signals and the backers' sensitivity toward that signal, and the interaction effects are also dynamic.


Originality/value
This paper has shed light on the roles of different signal types and their interactions in influencing funding behavior over a project-funding cycle, enriched the literature on crowdfunding and provided both theoretical and practical implications.

Qing Zhou,1,* Li Zhang,2,* TieHong Yang,1 Hong Wu1 1Department of Pharmaceutical Analysis, School of Pharmacy, Air Force Military Medical University, Xi'an, People's Republic of China; 2State Key Laboratory of Military Stomatology, Air Force Military Medical University, Xi'an, People's Republic of China *These authors contributed equally to this work Abstract: Polymeric micelles (PMs) have been widely investigated as nanocarriers for drug delivery and cancer treatments due to their excellent physicochemical properties, drug loading and release capacities, facile preparation methods, biocompatibility, and tumor targetability. They can be easily engineered with various functional moieties to further improve their performance in terms of bioavailability, circulation time, tumor specificity, and anticancer activity. The stimuli-sensitive PMs capable of responding to various extra- and intracellular biological stimuli (eg, acidic pH, altered redox potential, and upregulated enzyme), as well as external artificial stimuli (eg, magnetic field, light, temperature, and ultrasound), are considered as "smart" nanocarriers for delivery of anticancer drugs and/or imaging agents for various therapeutic and diagnostic applications. In this article, the recent advances in the development of stimuli-responsive PMs for drug delivery, imaging, and cancer therapy are reviewed. The article covers the generalities of stimuli-responsive PMs with a focus on their major delivery strategies and newly emerging technologies/nanomaterials, discusses their drawbacks and limitations, and provides their future perspectives. Keywords: nanomedicine, polymeric micelles, stimuli-responsive, drug delivery, cancer therapy