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.

This article provides background information on public and non-profit sector innovation in the past thirty years in the West as well as in China. We summarized and commented on the articles in this issue, which document cases of public and non-profit sector innovation in China and theorize their significance. These cases tell vivid stones about how Chinese organizations innovate and also point out the importance of the role of government in initiating or constraining these innovations. We find, through the review of these studies, that China's public and non-profit sector organization innovation experiences carry some important messages about the unique features of China's public and non-profit organizations that should not be ignored while studying changes in China.

We attempt to provide a definition and a typology of indigenous research on Chinese management as well as outline the general methodological approaches for this type of research. We also present an integrative summary of the four articles included in this special issue and show how they illustrate our definition and typology of indigenous research on Chinese management, as well as the various methodological approaches we advocate. Further, we introduce a commentary on the four articles from the perspective of engaged scholarship, and also three additional articles included in this issue. Finally, we conclude with our suggestions for future indigenous research.

An important change in China's urban land management system is the diffusion of land banking systems – official agencies that govern local land conversions, preparation, and transactions. In this article, I draw on neoinstitutional theory in organizational studies to explore the forces that promote this transformation. I propose-besides rational calculations and indigenous impetus for reform, institutional forces that play a crucial role in accelerating the diffusion process. Event history analysis shows that, over time, local economic characteristics have a declining effect on the adoption of land banking systems and gradually yield to pressure from peer cities, provincial governments, policy professionals, and policy-making communities. Moreover, intergovemmental fiscal arrangements and political status moderate the effect of provincial pressure.

In this article I propose a Yin Yang perspective to understand culture. Based on the indigenous Chinese philosophy of Yin Yang, I conceptualize culture as possessing inherently paradoxical value orientations, thereby enabling it to embrace opposite traits of any given cultural dimension. I posit that potential paradoxical values coexist in any culture; they give rise to, exist within, reinforce, and complement each other to shape the holistic, dynamic, and dialectical nature of culture. Seen from the Yin Yang perspective, all cultures share the same potential in value orientations, but at the same time they are also different from each other because each culture is a unique dynamic portfolio of self-selected globally available value orientations as a consequence of that culture's all-dimensional learning over time.

The transformation of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) into efficient entities has been an important approach in transition economies. However, the transition literature reveals little about how control structure affects firm performance of transformed SOEs. Drawing on agency theory, we distinguish three modes of control in transformed SOEs: state-controlled, dispersedly controlled, and privately controlled modes and argue that actual control after transformation plays a critical role in determining performance. Examining the impact of different control modes in China, we find that the key is who controls the transformed firm. Non-state-controlled (dispersedly controlled and privately controlled) firms are more likely to have enhanced post-transformation performance and reduced agency costs than state-controlled firms.

This article seeks to unravel the management model used by China's Yunnan Province in its fight against HIV/AIDS. This government-driven, multi-sector partnership model has led to some capacity building and stabilization of HIV transmission among certain at-risk populations. The organizational strategies employed in this model might be useful for resource-poor countries in containing the spread of HIV/AIDS.

This article addresses three questions concerning authority relations (personal relations with superiors) in transitional China. First, can superiors retain an organizational unit in order to save a protege's job? Second, has instrumental usage of particularistic relations, or guanxi, lost its importance? Third, has ‘principled particularism’, an integration of political loyalty and authority relations, continued to impact careers? Based on first-hand survey data, I find that state-owned enterprises in which managers had closer authority relations were less likely to be sold or discontinued, and close authority relations also reduced the likelihood of career blockage (demotion/lay off). The significant interactive effect of party membership and authority relations revealed the continuation of ‘principled particularism’. The study underlines institutional continuity during rapid social change, renders insights into the processes of organizational restructuring, and depicts the relational base of formal organizations.

Despite the rich set of theories that have developed on international joint ventures (IJVs), little is known about what theoretical criteria senior executives actually incorporate in their judgments of IJV opportunities and partners. Empirical studies have often applied individual theories in a particularistic fashion, rather than recognizing the different theoretical perspectives that boundedly-rational executives may incorporate into their decision models. In this article, we combine decision criteria associated with multiple theories rooted in organizational economics to investigate how top executives process information on IJV opportunities in China. Using an established experimental technique known as policy capturing, we examine how executives cognitively weigh criteria from four prominent theories when making initial assessments of IJVs (i.e., the resource-based view, transaction cost economics, information economics, and real options theory). Our arguments and findings on executives' IJV decision models contribute to decision-making research on alliances and IJVs in China.

Since China's marketization-featured housing reform, homeowner associations have played a greater role in neighbourhood governance. Using the theory of social movements and organizations, this article investigates how homeowner associations strategically reorganize themselves to achieve their goals. Our survey in Beijing suggests that about half of the homeowner associations have adopted bottom-up governance structures, which are not specified in governmental regulations. We find that such innovations are more likely to occur when a neighbourhood needs grassroots participation to deal with external grievances, especially developer-related issues, or to overcome its powerlessness due to little access to the polity. We also find that homeowner associations are more likely to adopt bottom-up structures when their leaders believe strongly in resident participation or actively engage in extra-organizational professional activities as a means to overcome infrastructure deficit.

Five schools of Chinese cultural traditions that implicitly influence current management thought in China are used to create a four-factor Structure of Chinese Cultural Traditions (SCCT) model. A sample of 2658 people in businesses in Beijing was used to develop the dimensions that were then cross-validated in a nation-wide sample of 718 business employees. The four dimensions show plausible patterns of convergent and discriminant validity with generic domains of values represented by the Schwartz Value Survey (SVS). We suggest that the Structure of Chinese Cultural Traditions provides a unique model of Chinese culture that complements other generic measures, thereby allowing a deep understanding of Chinese culture.

This study seeks to resolve a puzzle of the coexistence of follower cooperative voice and cooperative silence (expressing/withholding work-related ideas, information, and opinions based on collective, cooperative motives) in the presence of transformational leadership. A sample of 193 bank employees under 52 managers revealed that in the presence of group-focused transformational leadership, both voice and silence based on cooperative motives increased through the mediation of value congruence between leaders and followers. However, cooperative voice was more likely to be the main response to a high level of value congruence when followers under the same leader perceived individual-focused transformational leadership uniformly. Under a high level of differentiated individual-focused transformational leadership, value congruence was likely to result in more cooperative silence. We discuss implications for future research on both leadership and employee voice.