PurposeLive streaming commerce, a new form of social commerce where firms integrate with broadcasters, community members and customers in live chat rooms for real-time interaction to help sell products, has become increasingly popular. However, factors that impact the success of live streaming commerce are not fully explored. The purpose of this study is to examine these factors by exploring the relationships among customer trust (i.e., trust in broadcasters, community members, and products) and customer engagement, and the mediating role of swift guanxi.Design/methodology/approachThe authors surveyed 422 customers who have watched Taobao Live, one of the largest live streaming commerce sites in China, and used their questionnaires to test the research model employing partial least squares modeling.FindingsThe authors’ results indicate that trust in broadcasters has a positive effect on trust in products and community members, which positively influences trust in products. Additionally, swift guanxi has a fully mediating effect on the relationship between customers' trust in broadcasters and customer engagement.Originality/valueFirst, from the theoretical perspective, this study comprehensively identifies three types of trust, explores the transfer relationships among trust in broadcasters, community members, and products based on Trust Transfer Theory. In addition, this study examines the mediating influence of swift guanxi on the relationship between customer trust and engagement. Second, from the managerial perspective, the study provides insights to help broadcasters and practitioners use live streaming to facilitate shopping.

Organizational goals shape performance feedback and have salient influences on strategic behaviours and outcomes. I develop a model of goal‐setting by combining performance gap and bureaucratic control theories. I predict that governments set goal levels historically in line with their past goal levels and attainment discrepancies, horizontally targeting the comparable peers' goal levels and performance gaps, and vertically aligning with the upper‐tier authorities' mandates. Using the data on annual economic growth of 31 Chinese provinces from 2000 to 2012, the within‐between random‐effects model substantially supports these hypotheses.

Internationally, the public sector is adopting social media applications (e.g. Twitter and social networking services) to harness cutting-edge information technology developments, but we know little about what drives the diffusion of these applications.In this paper, I adapt the Berry-Berry policy and innovation diffusion model to explain the diffusion and assimilation of government microblogging, supplementing its four dimensions (learning, competition, upper-tier mandate and public pressure) with organizational resources and capacity. Data on 282 prefecture-level cities in China are employed to test several theoretical hypotheses empirically. Horizontal competition is found to be significantly and positively associated with the assimilation of government microblogging, although the other three dimensions are found not to be its key antecedents. Consistent with the study's hypotheses, the results support the significantly positive effects of fiscal resources and IT capacity. Municipal wealth, size and administrative ranking are also positively and significantly correlated with the number of government microblogs.

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The article examines more than 80 winners and finalists in the Innovations and Excellence in Chinese Local Governance (IECLG) awards programme between 2001 and 2008. Our results show the main types of innovation in the Chinese public sector to be management, service and collaborative innovation, although instances of technological and governance innovation are emerging. State and party agencies at the city and county levels in eastern China appear to be more innovative than their counterparts at other levels in central and western China. We identify several factors that affect innovation in China, and find the country to have some distinct innovation characteristics relative to other countries. Our analysis contributes to an understanding of the state of the art in public sector innovation in China and suggests directions for further international comparative research.

Citizens' trust in government and others is crucial to the perceptions of social risks. In this study we examine the effects of institutional and social trust on citizens' risk perceptions. Our analysis of a 2013 national survey conducted in thirty provincial capitals in China reveals that risk perceptions focus on two factors, public emergencies (e.g., traffic accidents) and public health threats (e.g., food safety). We found that only citizens' trust in central government was significantly negatively correlated with perceived emergencies, while trust in local government was marginally positively correlated with emergency perceptions. Social trust was not correlated with perceptions of emergencies, and none of the three trust variables are significantly correlated with perceived health threats. Our results reveal that the demographic variables gender, age, education, media exposure and religious belief are all relevant for citizens' risk perceptions.

Despite the fact that performance management has been ubiquitously adopted in the public sector across the world today, there is limited and inconclusive evidence that it improves citizen satisfaction with the government. In this article, we use survey data and multilevel modelling to analyse the effects of multiple performance management components on citizens' perceptions of government performance across 19 major cities in China. The results reveal that performance management does have a positive impact on citizen satisfaction. In addition, citizen participation, performance feedback and accountability, and information openness are positively associated with citizen satisfaction along various performance dimensions in different magnitudes. While we should take account of and mitigate its unintended consequences, our results suggest that it is still promising for public organizations to implement performance management.

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