On September 27, 2018, Professor James G. March, a giant in our field, passed away at the age of 90 (1928–2018), just one month after his wife and high school sweetheart, Jayne, passed away. March's impact on the field of organization studies and beyond is profound and long-lasting. The advancement of the field is truly indebted to March's brilliance and dedication to the search of truth as a great scholar. March wrote the inaugural article for Management and Organization Review (MOR) (2005), ‘Parochialism in the Evolution of a Research Community: The Case of Organization Studies’. This article not only provided a critical foundation underlying the editorial structure and philosophy of MOR but also argued eloquently for the salience of indigenous Chinese management studies as a necessary condition for building both contextualized and universal knowledge.

Chinese bureaucracy, with its long history and distinctive characteristics, has provided the organizational basis of governance and played a pivotal role in the economic takeoff in recent decades. Chinese bureaucracy also shows intriguing dualism between entrepreneurial activism and bureaucratic inertia, between formal rules and informal institutions, and between high responsiveness and noticeable loose coupling. In this study, I explore these distinctive features of Chinese bureaucracy through three lenses: Weber's comparative-historical approach helps locate Chinese bureaucracy in a distinct mode of domination; the Confucian lens identifies the prevalence of informal institutions that underlie bureaucratic behaviors; and the Marchian lens sheds light on the organized anarchy and set of mechanisms that shape the key characteristics of Chinese bureaucracy.

Firms in a nascent industry need to search across various technological trajectories and market opportunities with limited prior knowledge. While inter-firm learning (e.g., imitation) helps the focal firm adapt in the process of conformity, intra-firm learning (e.g., independent experimentation) helps a firm stand out from rivals in the process of differentiation, both of which can gain competitive advantages. This study investigates how the conformity-differentiation balance can be achieved from the cross-level learning perspective. Adopting a mixed-method design, we first conduct a case study on the Chinese photovoltaic industry. The case suggests that firms are inclined to conform in upstream and bottleneck technological domains but differentiate in the downstream market applications. We then extend the case findings through a computational simulation based on March's learning model. When experimentation and imitation are possible, the balance between conformity and differentiation can be reframed as the classical balance between exploitation and exploration across the firm and industry levels: while experimentation is often exploitative at the firm level but exploratory at the industry level, imitation is often exploratory at the firm level but exploitative at the industry level. The study makes a new attempt to bridge the optimal distinctiveness literature with the organizational learning literature.

Drawing from conceptualizations of organizational learning and institutional complexity, we advance the understanding of how the coexistence of multiple institutional logics in a community influences firms’ learning. Viewing communities where firms and local governments coexist as clusters, our analysis of 354 firms in 39 township clusters in China shows that government logic negatively moderates the positive effect of community logic on organizational learning; however, social connections between the community and local governments mitigate this negative effect. Modeling the relationship between the two logics in this manner extends prior conceptualizations of interfirm learning as a process of isomorphic diffusion of social norms and advances understanding of the role of institutions in organizational learning. This study also offers new insights for theoretical conversations on the compatibility and incompatibility of multiple institutional logics by demonstrating when logic multiplicity leads to conflicts and when it maintains harmony.

In this article, I propose a typology of thinking pattern that helps us understand the variants of the so-called ‘both/and thinking’ shared by many organizational paradox scholars in the West and China. The variants are distinguished by the ‘primary thinking-secondary thinking’ structure between the combined elementary thinking. One of the variants, i.e., Neither-And thinking, is associated with James March's discussion of logic of consequences and logic of appropriateness. An examination of March's writings reveals an additional ‘principle-practice’ structure underlining March's unique solution to paradox. Incorporating the ‘principle-practice’ structure into the proposed typology in turn helps us better understand the other variants of ‘both/and thinking’ such as ambidexterity, contingency, and Zhong-Yong. The typology shows March's Neither-And solution is unique because it embraces a primary neither/nor thinking while all the other variants do not. To demonstrate the value of March's unique solution, I apply Neither-And thinking characterized by the ‘principle-practice’ relationship to paradoxes outside organization studies, e.g., in Deconstruction, Buddhism, and quantum physics. The wide application of Neither-And thinking implies that James March's unique solution to organizational paradox may have provided a key to understanding paradox in general.

Optimal or rational decision making is not possible due to informational constraints and limits in computation capability of humans (March & Simon, 1958; March, 1978). This bounded rationality serves as a filtering process in decision making among business executives (Hambrick & Mason, 1984). In this study, we propose the concept of CEO reflective capacity as a behavior-oriented cognitive capability that may overcome to some extent the pervasive limitation of bounded rationality in executive decision-making. Following Hinkin's (1998) method and two executive samples, we developed and validated a three-dimensional measure of CEO reflective capacity. Based on two-wave surveys of CEOs and their executive-subordinates in 213 Chinese small-medium sized firms, we tested and confirmed three hypotheses on how CEO reflective capacity is related to a firm's sustainability performance (including economic, societal, and environmental dimensions) through the mediating mechanisms of strategic decision comprehensiveness and CEO behavioral complexity. We discuss the contribution of this study to the literature on the upper echelons and information processing perspectives. We also identify the implications for future research on strategic leadership and managerial cognition in complex and dynamic contexts.

This study investigates the influence of managerial cognition and attention allocation on firms’ responses to negative performance feedback. We explore how managerial cognition, as shaped by managers’ experiences, connections, positions, and industry environments, affects underperforming firms’ attention allocation and, consequently, their decisions to invest in innovation. Utilizing a longitudinal sample of Chinese high-tech firms from 2009 to 2017, we find that firms increase investment in research and development (R&D) when performance falls below aspiration levels. We also document that underperforming firms are associated with an even larger R&D investment increase when their CEOs have an R&D or engineering background, serve simultaneously as the board chair, or are not politically connected. In addition, we highlight the moderating effects of industry competition and industry norms on the relationship between firm underperformance and R&D intensity. We conclude that managerial cognition affects firms’ allocation of attention to innovation as a solution for closing performance gaps and shapes corporate responses to negative performance feedback.

It is of interest in China and across the world to predict whether China will catch up with the most economically advanced nations in innovation capacity. To facilitate an ongoing assessment of China's innovation capacity, the article develops a China Innovation Capacity Growth Index composed of eight separate measures. China's performance in 2020 is compared to the baseline from 2015, showing that China has progressed in six of the eight measures. This article and the accompanying Technical Appendix explain each of the measures, including the sources for the data, and report the changes in performance over time.