Management Modes of Employment Relationship under a Changing and Reforming Circumstance in China： a Competitive Advantage Perspective

Since the 1990s, organizational environments in China have taken an unprecedented, unrelenting and largely unpredictable change, competitive advantage has increasingly depended on core employees, conventional and rigid employment modes have been confronted with a serious challenge. In contrast to pervious work in employment relationship, this paper explores how to achieve and maintain sustainable competitive advantage through differential management of employees in a business climate characterized by increasingly fierce competition and diverse human resources. On the assumption that human capital is idiosyncratic and according to a two dimensional matrix of strategic value and firm-specificity of human capital, the paper establishes a binary matrix model and develops a classification of four types of workers： firm-specific core employees, generic key employees, generic ancillary employees, and idiosyncratic allied employees. Each is viewed as playing a different strategic role in organization and should be developed and supported by different employment modes： commitment management based on skill, productivity management based on job, compliance management based on short-term contact, and collaboration management based on alliance, in order to facilitate employment relationship management in congruence with other HR practices and enterprise strategy for winning sustainable competitive advantage.

Responses of microbial interactions to elevated salinity in activated sludge microbial community

Biological treatment processes are critical for sewage purification,wherein microbial interactions are tightly associated with treatment performance.Previous studies have focused on assessing how environmental factors(such as salinity)affect the diversity and composition of the microbial community but ignore the connections among microorganisms.Here,we described the microbial interactions in response to elevated salinity in an activated sludge system by performing an association network analysis.It was found that higher salinity resulted in low microbial diversity,and small,complex,more competitive overall networks,leading to poor performance of the treatment process.Subnetworks of major phyla(Proteobacteria,Bacteroidetes,and Chloroflexi)and functional bacteria(such as AOB,NOB and denitrifiers)differed substantially under elevated salinity process.Compared with subnetworks of Nitrosomonadaceae,Nitrosomonas(AOB)made a greater contribution to nitrification under higher salinity(especially 3%)in the activated sludge system.Denitrifiers established more proportion of cooperative relationships with other bacteria to resist 3%salinity stress.Furthermore,identified keystone species playing crucial roles in maintaining process stability were dynamics and less abundant under salinity disturbance.Knowledge gleaned from this study deepened our understanding of microbial interaction in response to elevated salinity in activated sludge systems.