This study draws on the resource dependence theory and institution-based view to examine political connections in the home market and home formal institutions for their impact on the internationalization of emerging market firms in the context of China. The results suggest that political connections at home may prevent emerging market firms from implementing internationalization strategies by reducing the dependence constraints imposed by local governments and foreign firms, whereas home formal institutional development may promote the strategy transition of emerging market firms from building political connections to international expansion and also reduce the negative impact of political connections. Overall, our findings indicate that political connections and formal institutions at home play an important role in shaping emerging market firms’ strategies of outward internationalization.

This article responds to recent calls for organizational research to address larger, more globally relevant questions and to pay attention to history, by analyzing the crucial debate over intellectual property rights (IPR) between the United States and China. Despite the recent US position, the United States has not always been a leading IPR advocate. Rather, it was a leading IPR violator during the nineteenth century. An institution-based view of IPR history suggests that both the US refusal to protect foreign IPR in the nineteenth century and the current Chinese lack of enthusiasm to meet US IPR demands represent rational choices. However, as cost-benefit considerations change institutional transitions are possible. We predict that to the same extent the United States voluntarily agreed to strengthen IPR protection when its economy became sufficiently innovation-driven, China will similarly improve its IPR protection.

This paper examines how the rise of a market economy in urban China redefines the rules governing economic activities and affects on earnings inequality. We identify three causal mechanisms linked to institutional change that are transforming the firm's employment practices: the higher marginal productivity of a private enterprise economy relative to state-owned enterprises, competition by firms for skilled and semi-skilled labor following emergence of labor markets and the end of state monopoly on labor allocation, and increased emphasis on merit-based reward systems in firms. Analyses of survey data from urban China show how these three causal mechanisms stemming from the transition to a market economy contribute to new patterns of earnings differentiation that increase income returns to human capital and private-sector entrepreneurship.

Researchers who are fortunate enough to collect large datasets sometimes wish to publish multiple papers using the same dataset. Unfortunately, there are few guidelines that authors can follow in managing these multiple papers. In this article, we address three main questions including: (i) how do authors know if they have a dataset truly worthy of multiple papers; (ii) what procedures do authors follow when they are ready to submit multiple papers from a single dataset to top tier journals; and (iii) what are the main issues when attempting to publish multiple papers from a single dataset? We provide a set of concrete recommendations for authors who wish to maximize their data collection efforts with multiple papers.

Since the mid 1990s the State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC) has emerged as a key institution governing firm ownership in China, but its impact on firm performance is understudied. Through an analysis of Chinese firms listed on the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges from 1994-2003, we examine how the changing ownership patterns following the rise of SASAC influenced firm performance. We have three findings. First, contrary to the popular view that state ownership in China's listed firms has declined, we find that the state shares have been moved from the original state offices to the SASAC in the format of ‘state institutional shares’. Second, compared with the old state shares, the SASAC institutions affect firm performance more positively. Third, after controlling for state and SASAC ownership, ownership concentration is a strong positive factor in firm performance. Our findings fit squarely within a long tradition of agency theorists who argue that ownership concentration helps solve the free-rider problem and thus has positive effects on firm performance. However, we focus on the ways in which ownership concentration allows firm owners to monitor and stabilize firm behaviour, which has more important implications for emerging economies such as China's domestic capital markets.

Although a substantial literature on the management of technological innovation exists, several scholars argue that much of this research has been rooted in Western contexts, where key assumptions are very different from those in emerging economies. Building on this viewpoint, we investigate the current state of knowledge on technological innovation in two of the largest and fastest growing emerging economies: China and India. We undertook a bibliometric analysis of author keywords and combined different quantitative approaches – frequency analysis, cluster analysis, and co-word analysis – to review 162 articles on technological innovation published about China and India for the period 1991–2015. From the analyses, the trends in technological innovation research in the two countries and the dominant themes of discussion were identified. These themes were further classified into eight sub-themes. Our key findings indicate a near absence of research on the management of technological innovation based on India, limited volume of research on indigenous aspects of innovation, and a lack of theory-building based on these countries’ contexts. Several suggestions for future research are offered based on the gaps identified.

Integrating theories of psychological ownership and stewardship, and taking a relational perspective, we examine key antecedents and outcomes of professional managers' psychological ownership in Chinese owner-managed family businesses. We tested the model using a survey of 166 Chinese professional managers (one from each of 166 family businesses). We find that owner–manager relationship closeness at work mediates the effect of both the owner's benevolent leadership and owner–manager friendship ties on the manager's psychological ownership. Psychological ownership, in turn, is positively related to the manager's intention to stay and to stewardship behaviour. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

This study identifies the societal institutional framework as the cause for the tie distribution issue — the sizes of ego-networks of social actors are unevenly distributed across social categories of these social actors. The analysis of 250 Chinese firms showed that managers employed by state-owned enterprises possess more governmental tie channels – conduits to get acquainted with government officials – than those employed by non-state-owned enterprises. Governmental tie channels completely mediated the relationship between ownership types and the number of government ties in the manager's social network.

At the June 2016 meeting of the International Association for Chinese Management Research, MOR organized a symposium to discuss the mounting criticisms of empirical social science and subsequent changes, as part of ongoing discussions affecting journal reviewing policies. This article overviews the history of modern empirical social science as the foundation of management, organization, and strategy research and the criticism of social science research, which has reached the point that some critics refer to current publication norms as encouraging and enabling the publication of junk science. Most importantly, however, this article outlines MOR's strategy going forward and the new reviewing initiatives that MOR is implementing as of Volume 13 (2017).

What are the fundamental factors that promote highly influential creativity? How do these factors differ in Western and Far Eastern civilizations? Many researchers have addressed these questions using historiometrics, a method that tests nomothetic hypotheses about human behaviour by subjecting historical and biographical data to objective and quantitative analyses. These investigations may entail either aggregate-level analyses (e.g., generational time series of creative activity) or individual-level analyses (e.g., cross-sectional studies of creative achievement). Moreover, the empirical findings in each of these two approaches fall into two categories of East-West comparisons: (i) shared variables and convergent results and (ii) shared variables and divergent results. After reviewing representative findings in each of these categories, we discuss what the results imply about the nature of high-impact creativity in the East and West and also explore areas of potential future historiometric research.

This article discusses how organizations exchange with one another in China, focusing on the type of organizational ownership and the form of governance mechanism. The theoretical foundation builds on institutional theory, resource dependence theory, agency theory, and evolutionary theory. Given the three main forms of organizations in China – state-owned enterprises, privately owned enterprises, and foreign-invested enterprises - we show how these organizations choose between two types of governance mechanisms, contracts and guanxi, to manage interorganizational exchanges. We then analyze the possible modes of interaction between organizational forms. We argue that the relative importance of guanxi is likely to decline or that guanxi will shift from being primary in some organizations to complementary in all organizations with the progress of market transition. This conceptual framework is expected to help provide the momentum for further theoretical exploration and empirical study in this area.

Over the past decade, the ownership and control of China's corporate sector has finally begun to depart fundamentally from patterns typical in the socialist past. Students of corporate governance have watched these changes with an intense curiosity about their impact on firm performance. Students of comparative economic institutions have examined them for hints of a new variety of Asian capitalism and have sought to anticipate China's international competitiveness and impact. But these changes potentially will create a new corporate elite with greater compensation, personal wealth, and independence from government agencies than ever before. This transformation of China's political economy may eventually alter the Chinese state itself, although the extent and nature of this change are still far from clear. The key questions of interest are the social origins of the new elite, the scale of the economic assets they control, and especially their continuing relationships with party and government agencies. The answers will vary decisively by sector, four of which are described here: a state-owned sector, a privatized sector, a transactional sector, and an entrepreneurial sector. The evolving mix of these sectors will determine the future contours of the Chinese corporate economy.

I've been asked to comment on this collection of three papers, each of which offers deep insights into the forces affecting the auto industry, particularly as concerns the relative positions of incumbent auto firms with respect to new electric vehicle entrants. Taken as a whole, the papers open a lens on the changes roiling the automotive sector. In this essay, I'll attempt to widen the aperture and provide a framework for a more systemic analysis of the forces reshaping the industry and the prospects for new entrants.

In this article, I argue that it is misleading to dichotomize the West as being either/or and the East as being both/and. The West has thought dialectically since ancient Greece. I offer a typology to compare and contrast three dialectical or non-either/or logical systems or ways of thinking: Chinese Yin-Yang philosophy, Hegel's dialectic, and Niels Bohr's complementarity principle, as well as Aristotle's formal (either/or) logic. I show that the four logical systems have differences and similarities and show that Westerners can and do think dialectically. I also argue that Chinese Yin-Yang philosophy, while useful and powerful in some situations, is not always superior to the other logical systems and philosophies. My purpose is to alert Chinese management scholars to the dangers of overconfidence and to stimulate discussion and debate on the true value of Yin-Yang in particular and the promotion of Chinese indigenous management research in general. To that end, I present my opinion on the merits and drawbacks of Yin-Yang and posit that it may inspire but cannot guide Chinese indigenous management research because Chinese philosophy lacks a well-defined methodology and operationalizable methods.

This study examined the combined effect of family ownership and high-discretion organizational slack on the international involvement of Taiwanese firms. Employing a sample of 179 publicly listed high-tech firms in Taiwan over a period of 6 years (2000–2005), we found that firms with high levels of international involvement, that is, a higher degree of internationalization, (i) were not closely held, and (ii) were not excessively controlled by the family. Further, high-discretion organizational slack (indicated by resources that can be deployed in a flexible fashion such as in cash and receivables) moderated the negative relationship between family control and international involvement. This relationship is stronger with a higher level of high-discretion slack. The results support the hypothesis that family control and high-discretion organizational slack negatively influence the decision to internationalize.

This paper examines the status of boundaries in organizational theory. Tacitly if not explicitly, most researchers view organizations as bounded, tightly coupled and more or less rational systems. Yet organizations may also be open, loosely coupled, hierarchically nested systems whose boundaries are indefinite. In the case of China, incomplete separation of firms from the state, incomplete integration of firms and partial listing of assets have left most Chinese firms with indefinite boundaries. While many Chinese firms are disadvantaged by indefinite boundaries, some have managed their boundaries advantageously. The Chinese group corporation described here has resisted interference from its state owners, one of whom tried but failed to turn it into a captive supplier. It has secured full operational and financial control of subsidiaries despite their independent legal status, fractional local government ownership, and local government representation on their boards. And it has successfully funded and executed an aggressive acquisition strategy and now dominates its industry globally. There are lessons specific to the Chinese context. The most important is that boundaries should be assumed indefinite unless shown otherwise. And there are lessons about firms in emerging economies. Indefinite boundaries are characteristic of such firms; indefinite boundaries pose either threats or opportunities depending on the strategic response; lastly managing indefinite boundaries will be a key strategic priority and a precondition of finding and exploiting market opportunities.

As the largest and fastest growing transition economy in the world, China's entrance onto the global stage has been swift and dramatic. As such, almost every facet of entrepreneurship, from the identification of nascent opportunities to the challenges of managing triple-digit growth to the transformation of firms from dying to emerging industries, can be studied as natural experiments. The four papers in this issue are dedicated to exploring entrepreneurial innovation in the Chinese private economy. They include two clinical studies, one on the impact of the Beijing Olympics on entrepreneurship, and the other on the co-evolution of guanxi networks and entrepreneurial growth. Two studies test theories explaining the organizational drivers of innovation and entrepreneurship. In the best traditions, these four studies offer theoretical insights on the broader implications of entrepreneurship research in the Chinese context. We locate the findings offered by these four papers in the systems, organizational and social contexts of creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship research. Finally, we offer some suggestions for future research and ways in which advances in the theoretical conversation should proceed.

This study examines the factors that affect the choice of location for foreign direct investment (FDI) in China. We identify three groups of factors that may affect the location choice by foreign firms: agglomeration economies, infrastructure, and institutional changes resulting from the economic reform. The study utilizes the most recent data from China's industrial census for the empirical testing. The findings show that agglomeration economies, in particular the clustering of foreign firms and domestic firms, exert the strongest effect on FDI location. Higher FDI concentration tends to attract more foreign firms. The clustering of domestic firms exerts a negative effect on FDI locations. Better infrastructure (electricity, telecommunications, and road) and greater institutional change (open policies, privatization, and legal development) also show positive effects on FDI location. The size of the local economy does not seem to affect the choice of location of FDI.

Firms from transforming economies can leverage the characteristics of their location to develop innovative business models before internationalizing. This note showcases ByteDance's innovative business model for its TikTok app, which became one of the most downloaded apps globally. ByteDance used its large and increasingly demanding home market to experiment with creative combinations of business model elements to develop a unique business proposition that positions the TikTok app as a hybrid of social networking and video-sharing. In addition, TikTok benefitted from China's IT strength supported by national high-tech policy to an AI-based recommendation algorithm as a non-location bound resource. TikTok shows that firms from transforming economies can launch successful global products through business model innovation.