Research on the Sustainable Development of Enterprises That Evoke Industrial Heritage—A Case Study of Taoxichuan

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Authors, 

The topic is quite intetesting but you could not make it intetesting for the readers. However, some major chnages recommended before acceptnace. There are: 

1. Abstrcat: There are clear cut problem statemnts, vague of research questions. The resarchers should add the theoretical contributions of the study. Thus, the abstract should be structured and emphasize your work’s aim first and better. Moreover, the theoretical and practical implications of your work should be very clear when reading the Abstract, but I cannot revise them at the moment.

2. Introdcution: I have the questions why authors won't come out with latest literature reviews? It seems to be since second para of the introduction. It is very important to identify the recent studies otherwise how could identify the research gap.  More, From a management perspective, industrial heritage can be perceived as a corporate resource, and studies on how industrial heritage resources enable enterprises to achieve sustainable development are scarce- whose study/studies observed it? The readers need evidences while the authors could not write without the justifications. Can you clear that which theoretical gaps you have identified here- In response to the above theoretical gaps, this research aims to explore how to evoke industrial heritage resources for the sustainable development of enterprises. Industrial heritage project has diverse and complex attributes, reflected in various aspects such as economy, history, social, emotion, and materials? How could you justify it-Therefore, the study should be supported by a theory that can explain the interaction between the context of resources, the attributes of heritage resources, and the perception of managers. Affordance theory originates from ecological psychology and describes how people or animals perceive what actions are possible with a given object in different contexts. The core idea of this theory is that the same object or resource produces different affordances based on different perceptions. According to the affordance theory, the key to evoking industrial heritage resources lies in how managers perceive the affordances of heritage resources and implement organizational behaviors to achieve the affordances? Please clear more. 

There are very limited justifications authors provided-which infact could not justify the problem statements, research gap, theoretical gap and research objectives. 

Thus, I advised after revising the major issues in the Introduction, which will need great work to be improved. In particular, I suggest adopting a commonly used scheme, structuring this section as follows:

•       Broad theme or topic;
•       Academic and practical importance;
•       Literature summary;
•       Gaps, inconsistencies, controversies to be addressed;
•       Focus of the study and research question(s), here or in Section 2;
•       Applied methods;
•       Main results and contributions;
•       Structure of the article (remainder).

At the moment, some of these parts are a little bit vague (i.e., theoretical and practical relevance, research gap) or missing (i.e., paper’s main results and implications, remainder). Moreover, you should try to better position your paper into the current scientific debate. In this sense, take particular care also to avoid supporting recent trends with old references. This happens even in the first lines of the article and several other times throughout the paper (i.e., also with references published in 2010). I also suggest providing a clear cut concise explanation of what Industrial heritage is and does since the Introduction to help international readers contextualizing your analysis and generalizing its results.

Considering Section 2, I suggest mobilizing part of those concepts in the other paragraphs of the literature review since I cannot revise any great value added by this section. Moreover, several sentences are not that clear to me. For example, what do you mean when stating “because everything is interconnected, nothing can be separated to be studied”? Or when saying “Moreover, if we do not know what the natural limitations are, then we should operate in such a way that we never exceed them”? In addition to that, you should at least provide a reference supporting the following sentence “With the old industrial technologies gradually replaced by new technologies, a host of industrial facilities, including factories, docks, warehouses, municipal utilities, and their ancillary facilities, have been left idle or abandoned. These obsolete means of production then become industrial heritage resources”? I’m not that sure that this is the goal of the industrial heritage setup, which usually investigates the role and functioning of industrial heritage and its associated with which institutions?  I also cannot get the logical connection with the sentence linked to that one and related to physics and waves and particles. Maybe it would be better to use the space in Section 2 to describe what scholars have done to date to investigate this or similar topics and describing how the factors composing your model are supposed by previous studies to effect on tourists attraction. I also suggest you to make clear what novel analysis you are performing and in what sense you are leveraging a theoretical framework and analyses performed in 2018-2022 by some authors (which should be referenced explicitly). This aspect is somewhat linked to identifying a clear research gap and the paper's positioning.

Regarding the Materials and Methods, I think that a better justification for investigating IH should be provided. What distinctive elements make its investigation interesting? What novel insights can be derived from such analysis? Then, some lines dedicated to describing the advantages of adopting the method should be added. In addition to that, you should add some lines to explain how data have been collected and through this information you can draw a geographical chart and How can it ensure the best fit with your research's aim? Were the questions open-ended or not? What variables did you use to measure the different constructs? Did you select them according to previous literature on the topic? 

I suggest also giving more attention to developing the discussion of your results, trying to better link it to the current scientific debate and the literature leveraged in Section 2. 

I still cannot capture the distinctive elements that support the relevance of your study. Similarly, the theoretical and practical implications of your work, as well as its limitations and possible further developments, should be added in the Conclusion paragraph or in a separate section of the paper.

Good Luck with your paper!

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper is well-written and easy to follow. I have only minor comments about it:

In 3.2, you state "The research team collected and sorted out plenty of primary and secondary data''. Please be more specific, 'plenty' is not scientific language.

Most importantly, I feel a disconnect between Figure 2, and the structure of the findings. I would have expected to see your findings aligned with each of the elements in Figure 2. A potential way to solve this would be to at least show the structure of the coding from your interviews/documents. The paper is well written but it's hard to understand why you focused on the things you focused.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

1. Pls add more Literature reviews. 

2. Please identify the novelty of the research. What is theoretical implications of the study? Pls justify!

3. The English checking is required.

Thank you 

Author Response

Please see the attachement.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf