The importance of social knowledge in the theory and practice of international construction engineering is growing, yet related contract failures are still frequent to date, and much less is known about the inner content of social knowledge and how to realize its full potential in international projects. Therefore, this study attempts to demonstrate the internal structure of social knowledge in the context of the current intercultural era to enhance the development of international construction engineering. Considering the commonalities between the social knowledge iceberg and the liquid crystal, the study regarded liquid crystal as a metaphor for the social knowledge iceberg and embodies the flow path of social knowledge from internal formations to external effects. A multiple case study was used to verify the proposed metaphorical model and visualize the internal structure of social knowledge. We find that cross-cultural leadership, which determines the stability of the social knowledge iceberg by adjusting the degree of cultural integration within the range of 20–40% and thereby promoting the catalytic effect of social knowledge for contract completion, is the core of social knowledge creation. This paper theoretically explores the structure, influencing factors, and functions of social knowledge stability and, in the meantime in practice, provides guidance for the success of international construction engineering by combing knowledge management and chemistry theory.

Purpose Based on the Chinese context, this study uses severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreaks as examples to identify the risk factors that lead to the major emerging infectious diseases outbreak, and put forward risk governance strategies to improve China’s biosecurity risk prevention and control capabilities. Material and Methods This study combines grounded theory and WSR methodology, and utilizes the NVivo 12.0 qualitative analysis software to identify the risk factors that led to the major emerging infectious diseases outbreak. The research data was sourced from 168 publicly available official documents, which are highly authoritative and reliable. Results This study identified 10 categories of Wuli risk factors, 6 categories of logical Shili risk factors, and 8 categories of human Renli risk factors that contributed to the outbreak of major emerging infectious diseases. These risk factors were distributed across the early stages of the outbreak, and have different mechanisms of action at the macro and micro levels. Conclusion This study identified the risk factors that lead to the outbreak of major emerging infectious disease, and discovered the mechanism of the outbreak at the macro and micro levels. At the macro level, Wuli risk factors are the forefront antecedents that lead to the outbreak of the crisis, Renli factors are the intermediate regulatory factors, and Shili risk factors are the back-end posterior factors. At the micro level, there are risk coupling, risk superposition, and risk resonance interactions among various risk factors, leading to the outbreak of the crisis. Based on these interactive relationships, this study proposes risk governance strategies that are helpful for policymakers in dealing with similar crises in the future.

The continued severity of the global epidemic situation has led to a rising risk of imported cases in China, and domestic cluster epidemic events caused by imported cases have occurred from time to time, repeatedly causing nation-wide disruption. To deeply explain this phenomenon, this study adopted the grounded theory method, using the 5·21 Guangzhou COVID-19 outbreak and 7·20 Nanjing COVID-19 outbreak as examples to study the risk transmission mechanism of domestic cluster epidemic caused by overseas imported cases. The study found that the risk factors for the phenomenon mainly include the following seven aspects: external protection, operations and supervision, international and domestic environment, contaminated objects, virus characteristics, management efficacy, and individual factors. These risk factors together constitute the “detonator”, “risk source”, “risk carrier,” and “risk amplifier” in the risk transmission process. In addition, this study also found that the transmission mechanism of domestic clusters caused by imported cases is a process of secondary risk amplification. The increase in risk carriers leads to a surge in secondary risks compared with the first, which leads to the outbreak of domestic clusters. Finally, based on the characteristics of the transmission mechanism and risk transmission components, this study provides some suggestions on risk mitigation for public departments to optimize China’s epidemic prevention policies.