The concept of heritage is full of conflicts and contestations. The UNESCO’s intervention in the form of the “World Heritage Convention” enriches the meaning of heritage but may exacerbate the intrinsic tensions in heritage while expanding its economic significance through tourism. Heritage tourism is an effective means to realize the economic potential of heritage. This is a major reason why developing countries like China apply for UNESCO world heritage designation. However, some stakeholders take more benefits while others bear more costs in the interplay of heritage conservation and tourism. Achievement of a balance among resource conservation, tourism development, and local community well-being is a pressing challenge for planning and management of World Heritage Sites. This research examines the implications of World Heritage designation for conservation of the world heritage and, particularly, for the lives of local people living in and around the site. It is argued that such people often bear the most costs while often being ignored or disadvantaged in terms of benefits. Sustainability of local life is interdependent with sustainability of heritage conservation and tourism. A key goal of heritage planning should be to mitigate heritage contestation and dissonance, and to sustain local people’s livelihoods and enhance their life quality. This would be conducive to the overall sustainability of the heritage resource. Using Mount Taishan, a UNESCO world heritage site in China, as a case study, employing a plan and implementation evaluation approach, and taking a community perspective, this thesis evaluates the plans for the world heritage site and their implementation from three perspectives: resource conservation, visitor experience and local well-being (particularly local involvement in, and benefit from tourism). A mixture of quantitative and qualitative research methods is used and the transferability and applicability of western heritage planning and evaluation methods to China is examined implicitly. It is shown that much attention has been placed on resource conservation on this world heritage site, although the desire for economic returns underpins the conservation. The resource integrity of the heritage mountain has been marred by the construction of several cable cars for tourism. The number of visitors keeps growing. However, visitor experiences are generally positive except for crowding during the high seasons and length of stay has decreased. Local involvement in decision making relating to heritage operations is low. Local involvement in the provision of tourism services is high but uneven, and usually under the organization of the village committees. Faced with land loss, displacement, and livelihood change, villagers are very positive toward and very much dependent on tourism as the major or sole means of making a living. The power-relations that are reflected in the heritage nexus are a key issue. As the most powerful stakeholder, the local government’s intervention produces high efficiency and also inequity. Short-term goals are sought, reflecting the short tenure of officials. Within this context, western heritage planning ideas, including the advocacy of community involvement and public participation, have met many challenges in China, although this could change with socio-political developments in China.

The concept of heritage is full of conflicts and contestations. The UNESCO’s intervention in the form of the “World Heritage Convention” enriches the meaning of heritage but may exacerbate the intrinsic tensions in heritage while expanding its economic significance through tourism. Heritage tourism is an effective means to realize the economic potential of heritage. This is a major reason why developing countries like China apply for UNESCO world heritage designation. However, some stakeholders take more benefits while others bear more costs in the interplay of heritage conservation and tourism. Achievement of a balance among resource conservation, tourism development, and local community well-being is a pressing challenge for planning and management of World Heritage Sites. This research examines the implications of World Heritage designation for conservation of the world heritage and, particularly, for the lives of local people living in and around the site. It is argued that such people often bear the most costs while often being ignored or disadvantaged in terms of benefits. Sustainability of local life is interdependent with sustainability of heritage conservation and tourism. A key goal of heritage planning should be to mitigate heritage contestation and dissonance, and to sustain local people’s livelihoods and enhance their life quality. This would be conducive to the overall sustainability of the heritage resource. Using Mount Taishan, a UNESCO world heritage site in China, as a case study, employing a plan and implementation evaluation approach, and taking a community perspective, this thesis evaluates the plans for the world heritage site and their implementation from three perspectives: resource conservation, visitor experience and local well-being (particularly local involvement in, and benefit from tourism). A mixture of quantitative and qualitative research methods is used and the transferability and applicability of western heritage planning and evaluation methods to China is examined implicitly. It is shown that much attention has been placed on resource conservation on this world heritage site, although the desire for economic returns underpins the conservation. The resource integrity of the heritage mountain has been marred by the construction of several cable cars for tourism. The number of visitors keeps growing. However, visitor experiences are generally positive except for crowding during the high seasons and length of stay has decreased. Local involvement in decision making relating to heritage operations is low. Local involvement in the provision of tourism services is high but uneven, and usually under the organization of the village committees. Faced with land loss, displacement, and livelihood change, villagers are very positive toward and very much dependent on tourism as the major or sole means of making a living. The power-relations that are reflected in the heritage nexus are a key issue. As the most powerful stakeholder, the local government’s intervention produces high efficiency and also inequity. Short-term goals are sought, reflecting the short tenure of officials. Within this context, western heritage planning ideas, including the advocacy of community involvement and public participation, have met many challenges in China, although this could change with socio-political developments in China.

In this thesis, we are studying the issue of transformational leadership in Chinese context, which is subjected to social science category. The reason why we concentrate on this research issue is based on the limited available references of Chinese transformational leadership, on our personal interests of transformational leadership and on the rather interesting and mysterious Chinese context covering the influence of globalization, digitalization and so forth. At the same time, we will focus on two major research questions, what leaders and followers’ expectations are during transformation in Chinese companies and what skills and abilities Chinese transformational leaders need in practice.Since we have ascertained the research issue and questions, the methodology of grounded theory and relevant literatures of organizational change, full range of leadership model, followership, and skill approach laid the solid foundation for our further data collection and data analysis. And the way of interviewing and questionnaire as specific methods of data collection played a crucial role in gathering empirical data, which gives contributions to theory development for our research.Through collecting and analyzing data, we constructed our theory of Chinese transformational leadership. For improving transformation performance in Chinese companies, transformational leaders is required to take both leaders and followers’ expectations into consideration and to lead the transformation with effective leadership skills and abilities. In addition, we found that there is a new implication of transformational followership for readers and a comparatively vague concept of trust in transformation process in Chinese companies for further study.

When exploring business in China we noticed that companies behaved in a different way, Corporate Social Responsibility was seen as integrated in companies’ business models as an integral part in order for them to grow and sustain. This seemed to be a new approach to us as well as poorly discussed in the literature we had experienced. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to explore the content of Business Model, the conceptualisation of corporate social responsibility in the Chinese context and the importance of including the concept of corporate social responsibility in firms’ Business Models. Based on the exploration, we decided to employ the hermeneutics perspective of social science. Accordingly, the research was conducted through a qualitative study with an inductive approach. Based on interviews of the respondents’ organisational and personal perspective of the Chinese context, with literature review as reference to and reflection on the findings to have in-depth understanding of the concepts, we conducted this study, which is shaped by the following major findings. Business Model and Corporate Social Responsibility are dependent on the complexity in a certain context, the studied Chinese context, and therefore need reconfiguration. Sustainability in China is assumed to move, but rather in its own direction than similar way to the development in West. The focus of Business Model is moving more towards creating value in terms of economic, social and societal rather than only considering money making. The Chinese government is seen to have political power and influence on the business market with heavy interference in the business’s direction, operation and management. As a result, collaboration with government can guide, facilitate and increase success of businesses. Business Model for Sustainability should be created on an aggregate level, where businesses should consider integrating Corporate Social Responsibility as the foundation in their business model, which is pushed and driven by the government. A business model for sustainable development in China is proposed with the two integral constituents: Corporate Social Responsibility and Politics represented by the government. Lastly, reflecting on the literature review of the studied fields respectively, it has been dragged behind the current state of the evolving world. What is happening in China, the second largest economy in the world and one of the biggest countries suggests that more intensive attention of researchers should be paid to business practice with Corporate Social Responsibility as an integral part of business model. With a focus more on the contextualisation, new dimensions or horizons of the literature development can be revealed when hidden or untouched aspects such as political influence in business are investigated. Accordingly, the heterogeneity in perspectives on conceptualisation and configuration of Business Model and Corporate Social Responsibility in the literature along with that in practice is inevitable. It is more important to see how the concepts look like and work in close connection with the context, rather than trying to shape the literature in one particular way to prove that it works in all contexts.

La présente recherche se situe dans le contexte chinois d’enseignement-apprentissage du français en tant que langue étrangère. Plus particulièrement, elle concerne l’article français dont l’emploi constitue un obstacle qui se dresse devant les apprenants sinophones dans leur parcours d’apprentissage du français. Les« règles » produites par les apprenants chinois dans une pré-enquête nous ont conduite à interroger les descriptions grammaticales de l’article français qui ont informé ces apprenants. Ces descriptions, proposées par les enseignants locaux, semblent prendre des formes variables par rapport à la description de référence de l’article français rédigée par les auteurs francophones. Ces formes de variations sont appelées contextualisation (DILTEC, 2011), qui renvoie à un ensemble de gestes d’adaptations, réalisées par les enseignants en fonction des cultures éducatives et métalinguistiques de leur public. L’étude consiste à examiner les descriptions grammaticales portant sur l’article français dans dix-neuf ouvrages de grammaire française élaborés par des auteurs chinois et édités en Chine. L’analyse porte sur la façon dont les auteurs locaux adaptent les descriptions de référence en fonction des connaissances à disposition des apprenants chinois. Les données analysées permettent de dégager onze modalités de contextualisation, basées sur le répertoire linguistique et les cultures éducatives et métalinguistiques des apprenants. Cette recherche débouche sur des réflexions critiques et des propositions d’amélioration en mettant les descriptions contextualisées à l’épreuve des descriptions linguistiques et des représentations des apprenants chinois sur l’article français / The present research is based on the background of French teaching as a foreign language in China. More particularly, it concerns the French articles because the use of this grammatical category constitutes an obstacle for Chinese learners in their learning of French. The “rules” produced by Chinese learners in a pre-survey led us to interrogate the grammatical descriptions of the French articles. These descriptions proposed by Chinese teachers seem to diverge from the reference description of the French articles written by French authors. These variable forms are called contextualization (DILTEC, 2011), which refers to the whole of adaptations made by teachers according to the educational and metalinguistic cultures of their public. The study consists in examining the grammatical descriptions of the French articles in nineteen French grammar books written by Chinese authors and published in China. The analysis focuses on the ways in which local authors adapt reference descriptions to the Chinese learners’ prior knowledge. The data analysis provides eleven contextualization modalities, based on the learners’ linguistic repertoire, educational and metalinguistic cultures. This research leads to critical comments and improvement suggestions, by testing the contextualized descriptions with the linguistic descriptions and Chinese learners’ representations