This study examines the role of the strength of the Intellectual Property (IP) institutions of 23 European countries in attracting Chinese Outward Foreign Direct Investment (OFDI) during the time period 2003–2015. Following a dynamic panel data analysis methodology, we find that the strength of IP institutions has a positive effect in attracting higher levels of OFDI from China. This is an important finding for the OFDI literature from emerging markets, since previous studies have researched this relationship from the OFDI perspective of developed countries. However, we also find a weak indication of a potential U-shaped relationship between the strength of IP institutions and Chinese OFDI. To better understand this relationship, we interact a European country's membership in the Former Eastern Bloc (FEB) with the strength of IP institutions and find a negative moderating effect. We therefore find that when investing in FEB countries, Chinese firms are attracted to weaker levels of IP institutional strength. The results of this study have important implications for future studies on the determinants of OFDI from emerging markets, as well as for European and Chinese businesses and policy-makers concerning the importance of IP institutional strength.

This study offers empirical evidence about how the structure of government and private ownership affected productivity in Chinese firms. It uses the microdata of China's last decennial industrial census, covering all of the 23,000 large and medium-sized industrial firms operating in China during 1995. The results show that government decentralization – ‘federalism’ – played an important role in improving the performance of not just collective firms, but also state-owned and mixed public/private ownership firms. This result is strongly confirmatory of much of the recent theoretical work on transition economies that posits a key role for government in the efficient operation of markets.

Using survey data from China and India, we explore the impact of network strategy of new ventures in emerging markets. We focus on two critical dimensions of network strategy, namely, broadening and deepening the network and two types of knowledge: market knowledge and technological knowledge. We find that proactive network deepening is associated with market knowledge and network broadening with technological knowledge. From a network perspective, our work highlights the counterintuitive outcomes of breadth versus depth orientation in network strategy, highlighting differences between advanced and emerging economies. We use a post-hoc multi-group analysis to show the differences even within the two emerging markets: India and China. The direct effect of partnering proactiveness on market knowledge in India is significantly higher than that in China but there is no significant difference as to the effect of technological knowledge. We use this exploratory study to highlight the opportunities for network and entrepreneurship scholars to study emerging markets and, in particular, undertake comparative studies between new ventures in China and India.

With this perspective paper, we seek to help open up an additional and, we believe, especially promising avenue for indigenous management research. We explore the potential for progress through the investigation of executive rationale, an institutional logic guiding managerial action and enabling strategies, structures, and formal integration mechanisms. Drawing on interviews with an elite group of executives including some of the world's most powerful managers, we illustrate variance in executive rationale across five major economies – Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, and the United States – and suggest that action and structures in these economies are broadly aligned with the respective expressions of executive rationale. We consequently hold that indigenous management research may benefit from a focus on executive rationale in particular, and we propose a concrete research agenda.

In this article, we provide a comprehensive examination of the spatial and career mobility of China's labor population. We integrate theories on stratification and social change and exploit the innovative design and measurement of the China Labor-force Dynamics Survey to minimize the undercoverage problem of the rural-urban migratory experience. Our analysis provides several fresh findings: (1) at-birth rural household registration (hukou) status leads to a greater probability of spatial mobility and career advancement than at-birth urban hukou status does; (2) education and gender differentiates rural-origin people, increasing the heterogeneity of urban labor and decreasing the heterogeneity of rural labor; (3) hukou policy relaxation favors later cohorts over earlier cohorts; and (4) among demographically comparable people, having experienced spatial mobility is correlated with having career advancement experience. Work organizations are found to be the arena where the two dimensions of mobility can happen jointly. Our findings provide a rich context for understanding the management and organization of Chinese labor.

Management journals publish research that can be divided into many fields and originate from many theories, but in one regard all are similar: the presentation of data according to professional conventions. The presentation of empirical findings expresses broad agreement across theories, fields of study, and researcher background, an agreement that is upheld by doctoral training and by scholars learning presentation conventions through reading journal articles. The agreement is most easily uncovered by examining empirical papers in other fields of study, which quickly yields two conclusions. First, the fields are different from the management field; second, many of them have greater internal diversity in evidence presentation than management does. In particular, empirical articles outside management use more graphical displays to show the data in addition to showing model estimates, and have a great variety of graphing techniques.

Company brands signify a message to consumers about the quality and value of a product. Countries can also be branded. However, unlike the brands of individual firms, country brands are collective goods. The nature of country brands creates the possibility of free riding, where individual firms benefit – in terms of price or access – from the promise made by a country brand but deliver at a level lower than what is promised by the brand. Such free riding threatens the stability of what the country brand represents unless legal, governmental, or other institutions engage in activities to reduce these adverse effects. In this paper, we investigate the Chinese brand – once standing for average quality at a low price – in the light of recent recalls. We examine how country brands emerge and the incentives that firms operating in a country have to either support or not support a country brand. We also explore the implications of diese incentives for the role of various institutions, including the government, in developing, maintaining and changing a country brand and in developing and enforcing the policies, such as protection of intellectual property, necessary to support firms' efforts toward reinforcing a trusted country brand.

We investigate how trust reduces the tendency to use deception in negotiations from a culturally contextual perspective. We find culturally divergent patterns across Chinese and American negotiators. Specifically, for Chinese negotiators, cognition-based trust decreases the approval of using negative emotional and informational deception, whereas affect-based trust increases the approval of using informational deception. For American negotiators, affect-based trust decreases the approval of using negative emotional deception. We discuss theoretical and practical implications on the need for culturally specific strategies in managing deceptions in negotiations.

Based on longitudinal case studies of manufacturing strategy and implementation at two Chinese manufacturing firms, this paper investigates how these firms develop, manage, and deploy dynamic capabilities to renew their resource bases in order to respond to the operational challenges associated with radical technological development. Our analysis suggests that dynamic capability development is not simply about renewing one specific type of capability, but rather, it is a meta-capability to learn how to repeatedly renew the firm's overall capability set as a fully integrated package. We further highlight the importance of looking beyond the property of the firm to understand the network level of capability development, including the capabilities of the firm's partners. This is particularly salient in the context of smart manufacturing where a high level of connectivity among a broader network of partners is required to reap the benefits generated by new technological advances. Our findings provide an important contribution to our knowledge of dynamic capability development in emerging economies in the era of digitalized manufacturing.

We examine how evolving FDI legitimacy in China influences two strategic choices (entry mode and expatriate staffing) of Japanese subsidiaries there over the period 1993–2000, based on data aggregated from Toyo Keizai and the National Bureau of Statistics of China (various years). As FDI legitimacy improves over time, we find that smaller subsidiaries tend to choose the wholly owned subsidiary mode and deploy a higher percentage of expatriates, whereas larger subsidiaries tend to choose the joint venture mode and use a lower percentage of expatriates; and that Japanese subsidiaries are more likely to have a local manager, and this tendency may be stronger for larger subsidiaries. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed from a density dependence theory perspective.

The resource-based view of the firm has previously been expanded by including relational rents and rent from network and alliance participation. This paper extends the Dyer-Singh-Lavie synthesis by considering the special circumstances arising from the relationships, alliances, and networks of a mega-event, using the Beijing Olympics as a case for our analyses. The mega-event that is organized as a cartel increases the pricing power of the participants, produces relational rent, and is an ideal venue to introduce innovations. We discuss six factors that can influence the rent creation and capture from a mega-event and offer related propositions: periodicity (Proposition 1), event location (Proposition 2), governance structure (Proposition 3), media coverage (Proposition 4), network connectivity (Proposition 5), and membership rules (Proposition 6). We identify four innovation types associated with such mega-events and contend that the same factors can affect the entrepreneurial rent creation and capture within these innovation types (Proposition 7).

Management researchers are being encouraged to collect multilevel, multisource, and longitudinal (MML) data. In this essay, I identify the barriers that researchers might encounter in gaining university ethics committee approval for MML designs and the challenges researchers face when conducting MML research in organizations. I offer suggestions to overcome these challenges. I further discuss some long-term consequences of MML designs for researchers' relationships with organizations and the progress of the management field as a whole.

The ownership structure of Chinese firms has experienced significant changes over the last three decades, including the development of a fast growing stock market through which a large number of domestic firms have become publicly traded corporations. These changes have drawn increasing attention from researchers of corporate governance. In this article, we review the empirical research on corporate governance in China, with a focus on the internal and external governance mechanisms that have been investigated and the findings about the effectiveness of these mechanisms. On the basis of our review of 132 studies, we summarize the major findings and discuss the limitation of agency theory in understanding the governance issue in Chinese firms. We offer several ideas (e.g., the importance of the social context, new conceptualization of governance, different outcomes of governance, and data/method issues) for a new agenda to guide future research in the corporate governance of firms operating in the Chinese and other emerging economy contexts.

While the contract manufacturers in Taiwan take orders from their brand-name buyers, some of them have started to move up to own brand management (OBM). This study examined three factors contributing to the performance of OBM: learning from the key buyer, learning from the key subsidiary and the focal firm's own cultural heritage identity. We found learning from the key subsidiary and one's own cultural heritage identity related positively to OBM performance. Further, there is a counterintuitive negative moderating effect of identity on the relationship between learning from the key buyer and OBM performance. Although preliminary, our results suggest that partners with asymmetric power relationships are prime candidates for future studies to explore the role of identity and pride.

Drawing upon two independent samples from mainland China, we propose and investigate the deterrence function of leadership behavior focused on control. We suggest that controlling leadership, specifically, authoritarian leadership, deters employees’ deviance under certain conditions. That is, authoritarian leadership thwarts employees’ interpersonal deviance behavior when leaders send clear signals of potential punishments of non-compliance by showing low leader benevolence, and when employees are highly dependent on the leaders for important work resources. Results from two independent studies largely support our key propositions. Overall, these results add to the range of possible impacts that a leader can play in decreasing employee deviance. Theoretical implications and directions for follow-up research are discussed.

The first five merger waves were US-led events. In this article we show that the largely over-looked sixth wave (2003–2008) emerged in all regions simultaneously. Because of this, and building upon interconnected literatures – which: (1) suggests that agency is a big predictor of merger performance; (2) distinguishes between three distinct governance traditions; and (3) argues that the Anglo-Saxon system puts the most effort into protecting investors and aligning interests, and the Confucian system the least – we predicted that Anglo-Saxon acquirers would create value in the sixth wave, and Confucian acquirers would destroy it. We find the opposite to be true and show that Chinese acquirers, in particular, created the most value in the sixth wave. In attempting to explain why, we find that China outperformed its Asian neighbors while doing the same thing, and outperformed its Western peers while doing what the literature suggests that they shouldn't do. This not only points to the limits of the generalizability of the existing literature, but supports the suggestion that Chinese acquirers are ‘different’. We call, therefore, for additional research into understanding Chinese and Confucian acquirers using the standard comparative merger data.

Although transforming economies offer many examples of business model innovation, they have been largely overlooked in academic research, with most studies focusing on what happens in developed countries. However, in their push to become innovation economies, transforming economies have become experimentation arenas for new ways of doing business. This special issue addresses the gap in business model innovation research in several ways. First, we develop a co-evolutionary framework in which we consider what type of business model innovation occurs in transforming economies (adoption, adaptation, or creation) and who the central players are (indigenous firms or MNEs). We show how, through business model innovation, indigenous firms have begun to challenge global industry leaders – despite not having the same resource advantages, proprietary technology, or market power – and we highlight the consequences of this for the domestic and global environment. Second, we discuss how the articles in this special issue advance research by contributing to a co-evolutionary perspective on business model innovation for a global and digital world. Third, to guide future research on business model innovation in the fascinating context of transforming economies we outline various directions that could build on our framework and the articles presented here.

Managerial networking with political actors has long been recognized as a crucial co-option strategy to navigate the challenging institutional environment in emerging economies. However, we know much less about what drives the variation of political networking investment by private ventures. Drawing on resource dependence theory, we unpack the dyadic business-government relations and identify the key organizational and environmental factors that shape the power dependence relationships between private ventures and the government. By examining power imbalance and mutual dependence in this dyadic relationship and considering both the necessity and the capability of political networking, we develop hypotheses regarding the ways in which size-, connection-, and location-based dependencies affect firms’ political networking intensity. These hypotheses are tested through a unique survey of Chinese private ventures. Our study finds that political networking intensity (1) has an inverted U-shaped relationship with firm size, (2) is negatively associated with the presence of embedded political ties while positively associated with that of achieved political connections, and (3) is smaller when the focal firm is located in business development zones. This research bears rich implications for our understanding of corporate political activity in emerging economies from a resource dependence lens.