This essay reflects the journey of two business scholars, Stephen X. Zhang and Jiyao Chen, who ventured into mental health research during the COVID-19 pandemic. We experienced first-hand how health sciences have operated their publication systems in ways that uphold scientific standing while addressing real-world problems. In doing so, we found the publishing expectations and norms in health and medical sciences to be vastly different from those in management. This essay further discusses aspects such as the preference for evidence over theory, the relationship with basic sciences, diverse evaluation criteria, encouragement of exploration and replication, timeliness, and democratization and inclusivity of scholarship as concrete steps of responsible research.

Do it right the first time! But, how? Current dialogue on the expansion of emerging market multinational enterprises (EMNEs) is pervasive. Nonetheless, it ought to have examined strategic attributes and the speed of implementing different strategies for their first venture. Drawing on the springboard perspective, this study tests the impact of EMNEs' first cross-border acquisition (CBA) strategy and speed on their consequential expansion frequency and performance. We also examine the boundary conditions of comparative nationalism between countries, in view of the resurgence of nationalism in an era of deglobalization. Findings reveal that EMNEs' rapid adoption of a focused strategy for their first CBA increases their expansion frequency, while the adoption of a conglomerate strategy decreases it. These relationships are affected in reverse by high comparative nationalism, and the performance consequences of expansion vary with firms using different strategies for their first attempt. This study enriches the EMNE literature and highlights the role of national ideologies in international business research.

This study adopts the resource-based view (RBV) to explain the difference in firm profit and growth determinants. We argue that profit is driven more by valuable, rare, inimitable, and non-substitutable (VRIN) resources, and growth is driven more by versatile resources. Since some versatile resources, such as cash, are less firm-specific, the firm effect is more critical in determining profit than growth. We also expect that emerging market firms are more capable of utilizing versatile resources than developed market firms, and developed market firms are more capable of utilizing VRIN resources than emerging market firms. As a result, the determinants of firm performance also differ between emerging and developed markets. The study employs multilevel mixed models to decompose firm performance in US, Chinese, and global samples. The findings confirm that the firm effect is more important in influencing profit than growth, persisting across all three samples. The firm effect is also more important in influencing performance in developed countries than in emerging markets.

Haveman, Joseph-Goteiner, and Li's (2023) perspective article contributes important insights into China's transition away from central planning and redistribution toward greater market coordination of economic exchange. In our commentary on their insightful article, we build on and extend their arguments in three main ways. First, we discuss how future studies might extend the authors’ work by leveraging the ‘messiness’ of institutional change to explore the cross-level dynamics involved in transforming institutional logics. Second, we build on the authors’ call for more historically grounded, contextualized research on institutional logics to argue that the conditions surrounding logic emergence have important implications for inter-logic dynamics and organizational responses. Third, we build on the authors’ suggestions for future research to underscore the broader consequences of institutional logics and their potential to perpetuate or exacerbate social inequalities and other societal challenges.

The institutional logics perspective provides a powerful theory that emphasizes how symbolic beliefs and material practices are intertwined in relatively enduring configurations that can profoundly shape behavior across space and time. In this article, we build upon the arguments and insights of Haveman, Joseph-Goteiner, and Li, suggesting the need for a broader research agenda on the dynamics of institutional logics in China and around the world. Building on some of our recent writings, we argue for the need to go beyond the study of how logics have effects, to understand how logics themselves cohere, endure, and co-evolve in dynamic interrelationships with other logics.

This conceptual paper examines the considerable scope of leadership theories built from literature originating in the West to focus on the ‘process’ of leadership. By opening the door to include traditional Chinese thought, the worldview of Western tradition is challenged using the work of philosopher and sinologist François Jullien. Chinese culture views process as the basis of transformation and renewal in the world. It is explained through ‘the propensity of things’ in relation to European ontology and causality. Recognizing the evolving nature of reality through the generic Chinese notion of shi 勢, which serves as a conceptual tool for Jullien, leadership process is understood as an aspect of organization propensity. Shi 勢 is then recognized as a leading force encompassing human agency that is able to open a new avenue for research nurturing the emerging quantum phase of leadership.

Institutional logics are interrelated sets of cultural elements (norms, values, beliefs, and symbols) that help people and organizations make sense of their everyday activities and order those activities in time and space. In this paper, we describe the rise of a robust literature on institutional logics, which mostly focuses on Western societies. We then describe changes in Chinese society and economy over the past four decades, as it shifted from state-controlled planning and redistribution to market-mediated exchange. We detail how the institutional logics that guide Chinese firms have been transformed in the wake of the economic transition. The state logic, which developed in the Maoist era, valorizes equality, national community, and political stability. Although it is still in evidence, it has been partly supplanted by a market logic that encourages efficiency, competition, and property rights. But this market logic differs from the one that prevails in Western capitalist economies. The Chinese version of the market logic valorizes the central role that the state and the Communist Party continue to play in economic life. Therefore, in the Chinese version of the market logic, efficiency, competition, and property rights are tempered by a continued concern for political stability. We review and summarize the existing literature on institutional logics and Chinese firms, and then identify fruitful lines that future research could take.

In this commentary we reflect on Shaalan, Eid, and Tourky's (2022) article in which they investigated the Chinese concept and practice of guanxi in the Middle East,1 a region in which wasta represents the common way of informal networking.2 While we encourage and welcome research into informal networks, we have serious concerns about the conceptual and methodological approaches taken by Shaalan et al. (2022) in investigating informal networks in the Middle East and explain herein why we do not believe guanxi should have been used in place of wasta.

This rejoinder responds to a commentary (Horak et al., 2023) on our article ‘De-Linking from Western Epistemologies: Using Guanxi-Type Relationships to Attract and Retain Hotel Guests in the Middle East' (2022). We thank the authors for engaging with our work and are grateful to the editor for the chance to respond. Firstly, we do not accept the central assertion that we imposed the Chinese concept of guanxi on a Middle Eastern context. Some aspects of guanxi extend beyond China, and we consider it part of our role as researchers to explore universal behavioral aspects that transcend specific cultural settings. While we described guanxi to introduce the variables, we drew a clear distinction between guanxi itself and guanxi-type relationships, and provided on page 859 an explicit statement about what we meant by the term ‘guanxi-type relationships’, i.e. the networks of interpersonal ties found in the Middle East. While this distinction could have been more clearly emphasized in places, we consider that the article as a whole made it abundantly clear.

Despite the influx of Chinese FDI at the dawn of the 21st century and decades of neo-liberal, market-oriented economic policies in Africa, the pervasive nature of institutional voids (particularly in the labor market) has been constantly flagged as an impediment to socio-economic development in the continent. This has prompted calls for more research into the ability of independent African states to pursue viable labor market policy options, from a business system perspective. While institutional theory (specifically the notion of institutional voids) suggests the use of market-supporting and contract-enforcement structures and processes to enable the efficient functioning of the economy, it does not address the effect of strong external ‘powers’ on weak local institutions in developing countries. This study qualitatively explores how the shifting geopolitical landscape (power) from Western to Chinese sources of FDI shaped the nature and evolution of labor market institutions in Cameroon. The findings show that an entrenched parochial and crony Cameroonian institutional context was at the mercy of transnational forces playing a pivotal role, rather than coherent national socio-economic policy options, in shaping labor market institutions in the country. In an act of political complicity, the dynamics that flowed from Chinese FDI have engendered a regressive turn toward the failed nationalistic labor market policies pursued by Cameroon after independence. This article contributes to revealing the debilitating role of Chinese and Western FDI, and the ensuing dynamics, in the creation and sustenance of labor market institutions in a parochial developing economic context characterized by regulative institutional voids.

Although research in cultural psychology has established that virtually all human behaviors and cognitions are in some ways shaped by culture, culture has been surprisingly absent from the emerging literature on the psychology of technology. In this perspective article, we first review recent findings on machine aversion versus appreciation. We then offer a cross-cultural perspective in understanding how people might react differently to machines. We propose three frameworks – historical, religious, and exposure – to explain how Asians might be more accepting of machines than their Western counterparts. We end the article by discussing three exciting human–machine applications found primarily in Asia and provide future research directions.

This study examines the impact of language diversity on interpersonal relationships in multinational and national/domestic teams in a multilingual country – India. Specifically, it explores whether and how the influence of language diversity differs in the two types of multilingual project teams. To this end, using direct observations and semi-structured interviews, we conducted a thematic analysis and found that native language-based faultlines and groups exist in both kinds of teams. However, such faultlines and language-based groups can disintegrate into smaller, regional dialect-based subgroups due to the emergence of dialect faultlines. Furthermore, evidence suggests that multilingual managers are more effective as boundary spanners in bridging the faultlines in multinational teams; at the same time, they need to be aware of the distinction between language differences and faultlines. This study provides the required distinction between language diversity and the role of multilingual managers in national and multinational teams in an understudied context, thereby contributing to the literature on language diversity.

Existing research examining the curvilinear relationship between network centrality and performance tends to focus on the information recipients’ perspective. Focusing on the information providers’ perspective, our study draws upon social exchange theory to demonstrate that the advice-giving centrality-performance relationship for information providers has an inverse U-shape due to decreasing benefits and increasing costs of maintaining more advice-giving ties. We further show that increasing advice-giving centrality increases the likelihood that individuals would become a hindrance to coworkers, as they become bottlenecks impeding efficient workflow. However, our study demonstrates that political skill enables them to overcome the interpersonal challenges associated with high advice-giving centrality. Specifically, individuals with high political skills can better convert advice-giving ties to resources that could assist their cooperation with coworkers, reducing the hindrance they impose. Overall, we provide insights into the trade-off between the benefits and costs of advice-giving ties from a social exchange perspective and examine political skill as an important mitigator of the downsides of large advice-giving networks – a key area that has been hitherto largely unexplored.

In this research, we explore how supply networks and board interlocks – as distinct, yet parallel interorganizational networks – jointly influence firms’ entry into new technology domains and exit from old technology domains. Drawing from the perspectives of social networks and organizational learning we highlight the relevance of the interdependency between these networks for a firm's technological entry and exit decisions. We argue that a firm that maintains a large number of supplier ties is more likely to enter new technology domains and exit from old technology domains instead. We further find empirical evidence that the degree centrality of a firm in its board interlock network strengthens these effects. Our theoretical arguments are supported through stochastic actor-based modeling analysis for the longitudinal and multilevel networks of 86 firms active in the Chinese automotive during 2011–2015. These findings inform the literature on interorganizational network dynamics as we insert relational pluralism to examine the complexities of organizational relationships as antecedents to a firms’ technological entry and exit. Finally, we imagine the implications of our analysis for management as they shed light on how multiple interorganizational relationships affect firms’ decisions on new technology entry and old technology exit.

Organizational interactions in fields, including their antecedents and consequences, remain under-researched, in particular with regard to relational distance and transformative skills. Through a comparative study of the German and Japanese wind power sectors, we explore the importance of distance among organizational actors and the development of skills. While in the case of Germany a radical increase in wind energy generation can be witnessed, the situation in the field of Japanese wind power remains largely unchanged. We show how different degrees of distance among organizational actors in these two countries result in the different development of skills that stimulate transformation in the field of energy generation. More precisely, we illustrate the pivotal role of distant challengers with their transformative skills for the successful conversion of already established field structures. Our study contributes to field theory by elaborating on the understanding of the evolution of relational distance, thereby grasping the dynamic interplay between the diversity of actors and their skill formation within a certain strategic action field.

Murmann and Vogt's (2022) analysis of the automobile industry using a capabilities framework that integrates both dynamic and ordinary capabilities supports an informative table which sets out the major relevant capabilities that incumbents, start-ups, and diversifying entrants would need to develop or access via contract or other arrangement (see Murmann and Vogt, 2022, Table 3). Jiang and Lu (2022) have further discussed new industry paradigms which they suggest will greatly challenge – and perhaps overwhelm – automotive industry incumbents. We believe that their insights can be taken a step further by focusing on two areas: first, the greatly increased availability of outsourced manufacturing driven by the shift to electric vehicle (‘EV’) powertrains; and second, the ongoing transformation of the driver and passenger experience that is driven by software–user experience software integrated with networked consumer service ecosystems.

This essay argues that to assess the likelihood that incumbent firms will successfully make the required transformations to their strategy and operations in the face of technological transformations, it is not sufficient to investigate their dynamic capabilities. Whether an incumbent is likely to succeed in its effort to change itself via dynamic capabilities depends also on how quickly start-ups or diversifying entrants can build ordinary capabilities to offer the new technology at scale. We offer a framework to assess dynamic competition that integrates both ordinary and dynamic capabilities into the analysis by systematically comparing incumbents, start-ups, and diversifying entrants. We illustrate the framework with a case study of electric vehicles and aim to show how crucial such comparative analyses are for making well-founded predictions about the likelihood that incumbents will be able to maintain their leadership positions in the future.

Through two in-depth case studies, we compare the approaches of a state-owned enterprise (SOE), Beijing Automotive Industries Holding Co., and a privately owned enterprise (POE), Geely, to acquire and absorb advanced technological knowledge to enhance their innovation capabilities. Each company acquired advanced knowledge from troubled famous Swedish automakers and upgraded their products technologically. Analyzing data mainly collected from secondary sources identifies major differences in approaches and actions at each acquisition step rooted in the type of ownership. We juxtapose these differences with insights from the literature on knowledge acquisition and research on firm ownership. Our findings show that the POE seeks the strategic goal of synergistic technology integration for better innovation and economic performance. In contrast, the SOE pursues national objectives with less regard for market success. This SOE focuses on an independent approach to knowledge absorption and development during their acquisition, whereas the POE emphasizes collaboration in innovation capacity development. This study provides insights into Chinese firms’ positioning on innovation development on the global stage, comparative capitalism, and the particular case of state capitalism in China.

To stimulate a debate about the rise of China's digital economy, this essay compares China and the US in one key area of the digital economy – e-commerce and internet-based services. China still lags behind the US in internet penetration, but it distinguishes itself by building a mobile-first, fiber-intensive, and inclusive digital infrastructure. A favorable infrastructure, innovations tailored to the large Chinese market, and local firms’ rapid commercialization of products and services turned the world's largest domestic population into active online consumers, helping China overtake the US by a large margin in retail e-commerce and digital payment. While China translated digital technologies into leading business-to-customer and customer-to-customer businesses, it has not been so successful in business-to-business services. The US is still ahead in the general-purpose technologies underlying the digital economy.