I am honored to be asked to write an essay on my involvement with Management and Organization Review (MOR) and the Chinese management research community. I was one of the founding senior editors of MOR at its inception in March 2005. I still have Volume 1, Issue 1 on my bookshelf in my office. From the start, it was a team effort with six senior editors, four consulting editors, a host of scholars on the editorial review board and the editorial advisory board, as well as ad hoc reviewers. The IACMR was an important partner and supporter of the journal. Anne Tsui was our editor-in-chief, but she knew how to involve the entire ‘village’ in the production of MOR, even those of us who were not bona fide Chinese management scholars but who would do everything they could to make the journal a success. We are indeed grateful to Anne, and everyone involved. It was an initiative at a grand scale.

My involvement with the journal benefited me immensely. I got to travel to several cities in China, I met numerous scholars and learned about their research, I learned a great deal about China, I worked with a world-class team, and I introduced some prominent American sociologists to the Chinese management research community.

In its early years, there was considerable discussion about whether the agenda should be to use Chinese management research to build and test general theories of management. That is, to use Chinese companies as a laboratory to test out theories developed in the West. However, it was clear that China's own cultural history, political system, and stage of economic development meant that this was inappropriate and that we needed to study China as it is. Understanding Chinese management and organizations would benefit not only Chinese firms but also others in Europe, the Americas, the Middle East, and elsewhere who were doing business with Chinese companies. However, the concern was that the result would be a collection of interesting case studies or perhaps a theory of Chinese management without contributing to management theory more generally.

An important contribution to this debate was Tsui's (Reference Tsui2006) article published in MOR. There she distinguished between outside-in theory (testing general theories formulated outside the Chinese context) and inside-out theory (generating theory by studying firms within a particular national/cultural milieu). The issue was how to think about context. Should researchers ignore local context and just focus on topics which management scholars prioritized, or do they need to gain a deep understanding of the local context and patterns? Tsui argued that from analyzing these local patterns, the researcher could gain new insights into organizations and management that, perhaps, could contribute to a more general theory. That is, one studies the ‘local’ to find something which is important more generally. Whetten (Reference Whetten2009) in another MOR article suggested that researchers make the theory more context-sensitive (contextualizing theory) and/or identify the effects of context on outcomes (theorizing about context). This approach has considerable appeal to those who are immersed in Chinese management research as well as curious minds who are looking for something new and different. I thought these issues were so interesting and important that I co-authored a paper in Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly (Zhao, Galaskiewicz, & Yoon, Reference Zhao, Galaskiewicz and Yoon2022) that presented a family of multi-level models that scholars can use to build general theories of social and organizational behavior that are sensitive to variations in context.

While the inside-out approach sounds very attractive, it is not an easy lift. It is much easier to do rich descriptive case studies or take a theory which already has validated measures, translate questionnaires into Chinese, and administer it to a sample of executives and/or employees. The problem with contextualizing theory or theorizing about context is that context can refer to so many different things. As Tsui, Nifadkar, and Ou (Reference Tsui, Nifadkar and Ou2007) noted context typically refers to culture, material conditions, geography, and societies’ political, social, and economic institutions. Those things are hard to measure and quantify.

Context can also refer to events. This is something I find very attractive given that many events today have global ramifications. In Zhao et al. (Reference Zhao, Galaskiewicz and Yoon2022: 7), we drew from Larry Griffin's article in Sociological Methods & Research (Reference Griffin1992).

Context then poses a real challenge to organizational and management theories, but there are studies that illustrate how to incorporate context into the analysis and use it to build general theory. To illustrate, let me draw on two articles on rhetorical nationalism in a recent issue of MOR (Hung & Chen, Reference Hung and Chen2024; Yue, Zheng, & Mao, Reference Yue, Zheng and Mao2024). Rhetorical nationalism may seem like a uniquely Chinese phenomenon. However, if we take an ‘inside-out’ approach, we can use this research to predict how and when the political context in other countries might prompt companies to tout their patriotism. As Hung and Chen (Reference Hung and Chen2024) argue, firms, especially those which are marginally legitimate, need to be sensitive to their various audiences and reframe themselves so that they can cultivate an identity which ensures their legitimacy.

Yet understanding why Chinese companies embrace rhetorical nationalism requires a deep dive into the Chinese context. Hung and Chen (Reference Hung and Chen2024) give a detailed account about how shan-zhai cellular phone companies went through various identity transformations, but to understand why they embraced nationalistic reframing between 2004 and 2008 required a deep understanding of the Chinese context and not just the firms’ relationship to the central government. Understanding the growing rhetorical nationalism in 41,000 Chinese companies’ annual reports from 2000 to 2020 (Yue et al., Reference Yue, Zheng and Mao2024) also required a deep understanding of context. Indeed, the Chinese Communist Party grew more powerful between 2013 and 2020, yet their in-depth analysis suggests ‘Chinese public firms’ rhetorical nationalism may be tailored by the genuine nationalistic sentiments of the public rather than the demands of government’ (Yue et al., Reference Yue, Zheng and Mao2024: 163). Without their knowledge of the context, it would be easy to mistakenly interpret their findings as the direct result of governmental pressure. Thus, only by understanding the Chinese context can we know how to interpret the findings of both studies. This, in turn, informs us how to use their findings to refine general theories of organizational identity.

Another example of the ‘inside-out' approach was an article by Wang (Reference Wang2012). I was particularly interested in the role of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the development of modern China. I was fortunate enough to co-edit with G. Zhiyong Lan a special issue on this topic for MOR (‘Innovations in Public and Non-profit Sector Organizations in China,’ MOR, volume 8, issue 3, 2012). In many respects, my interest in NGOs coincided with my curiosity about outside-in and inside-out research. One example of ‘inside-out’ research in our issue was Wang's (Reference Wang2012) account of how China responded to the outbreak of HIV. Clearly, there is a well-developed network of INGOs that operate globally (Keck & Sikkink, Reference Keck and Sikkink1998). While they may or may not be in cahoots with western governments, they clearly are vehicles that seed western values around the world. As China faced various challenges, e.g., the outbreak of HIV, these organizations had resources and solutions. However, as Wang (Reference Wang2012) showed in her paper, the government took the lead in addressing the HIV problem by working closely with local governments, community-based organizations, GONGOs, INGOS, and residents. They indeed addressed the problem in a Chinese way. Again, context was important and only with a deep dive into how China addressed the HIV outbreak could we understand how the problem was solved. But, more importantly, this study extended the theory on multi-sector partnerships and collective governance more generally.

China has also been a site to test ‘outside-in’ theories and help build theories that way. It is well known that the Chinese government outsources numerous public and social service functions to NGOs (Song, Reference Song2024), but the outsourcing of government functions to NGOs is a model long familiar to the West (Provan & Milward, Reference Provan and Brinton1995; Smith & Lipsky, Reference Smith and Lipsky1993) and has continued to expand (Salamon, Reference Salamon and Salamon2012). Granted, the way it is done in China – with NGOs sometimes formed by the government and former government officials in positions of control in some organizations, is different (Kojima, Choe, Ohtomo, & Tsujinaka, Reference Kojima, Choe, Ohtomo and Tsujinaka2012). However, on the one hand, Kojima et al. (Reference Kojima, Choe, Ohtomo and Tsujinaka2012) found that they are vehicles through which different interests and disadvantaged populations can advocate for their cause just like in the West (see Lan & Galaskiewicz, Reference Lan and Galaskiewicz2012). On the other hand, outsourcing can be a way that the central government can bolster political support from the citizenry (Song, Reference Song2024), something which Milward and Provan (Reference Milward and Provan2000) theorized would be unlikely in the hollow state. Thus, research on China's NGOs can also test and refine outside-in theories of third-party governance in meaningful ways.

While the discussions we had about theory and context happened 20 years ago, I think the issues are still of interest and relevant to scholars today. I see the IACMR and MOR as vehicles for research on these topics, and I trust the editors will make these issues a priority in the years to come.

I enjoyed immensely my excursion into the Chinese management research community, and it benefited me greatly as a scholar, citizen, and person. I continue to read about China and lecture on China. More importantly, my association with MOR helped me now provide my students with a more meaningful and accurate understanding of modern China. For this they and I are grateful.