This issue includes five articles and four perspective/commentary papers that offer several key insights. The first is about the importance of community building in running a business, the second is related to the international performance and innovation of Chinese multinational firms, and the third addresses the future development of Chinese business schools.
A community is a social group whose members have something in common, such as a shared government, geographic location, culture, or heritage. Within an organization, building communities means that there are special units providing social services for employees and their family members (e.g., dining halls, hospitals, elementary schools), which creates job embeddedness that significantly improves the quality of employees’ work life and reduces turnover. Based on case studies of five Chinese private firms, Han and Yao (2022) find that organizations of various scales in various industries are able to build and maintain communities. A community model of organizations is thus developed in their paper.
Similarly, we can glean a sense of community and its positive impact from the paper on Chinese diasporas and how they connect the host country (Russia) with home country (China) and bring benefits to both – increasing the organizational capacity for Russian firms in Russia and improving organizational legitimacy for Russian firms in China (Kostova, Panibratov, & Rysakova, 2022). Moreover, the meaning of community comes through the description of a guanxi-type relationship, a network of interpersonal connections in the Middle East, based on family and tribal ties, guided by Islamic values and ethics (Shaalan, Eid, & Tourky, 2022). It is fascinating to see how guanxi-type relationships helped attract customers and increased their satisfaction and retention outside China.
On the second insight, Li, Cui, Meyer, and Fan (2022) adopted a strategic configuration approach to study Chinese multinational companies, and identified the configuration of environment, strategy, and managerial resources for superior international performance (e.g., growth and profitability). Meanwhile, Wu, Du, Xu, Xu, and Zhu (2022) found that the speed and rhythm of outward foreign direct investment had differentiated effects on Chinese multinational companies’ innovation performance, inverted U for speed, and negative for uneven rhythm. These findings shed new light on the effective strategies that can foster growth/profitability or innovation.
Finally, the set of papers that discusses the future direction of Chinese business schools (Fey, 2022; Wei & Zhang, 2022; Lu, 2022; Tan, 2022) is super exciting because they not only provide a historical review of Chinese business schools over the past 35 years, but also point out the critical problems in their current state, and more importantly, offer theoretical perspectives and practical solutions to address these problems. I believe that you have your own observations and unique thoughts that can facilitate our discussion on this topic. I strongly encourage you to offer your perspectives by contributing your paper to MOR!
