While prior research has suggested that justice matters for multinational enterprises (MNEs), whether distributive justice affects a subsidiary's tendency to show initiative remains unclear. In this study, we postulate that the extent to which a subsidiary manager regards the sharing of profit and rewards from the headquarters as fair has a curvilinear relationship with the subsidiary's inclination to take initiative. Specifically, although a low to moderate level of distributive justice can motivate subsidiaries to show initiative, this stimulating effect will diminish when distributive justice goes beyond a certain threshold. We furthermore contend that this non-monotonic effect will differ between low internally embedded subsidiaries and high embedded subsidiaries. Results based on a sample of subsidiaries owned by MNEs in Taiwan support our arguments. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

Parental mentoring plays a pivotal role in fostering intrafamily succession and entrepreneurial endeavors. Taking an identity-based perspective, we conducted an exploratory multiple case study involving nine Chinese family firms to investigate how successors perceive the influence of mentoring from their entrepreneurial parents on the development of their entrepreneurial identities. Our findings reveal that successors' entrepreneurial identity changes from ambiguous to clarified through four perceived parental mentoring strategies, namely laying foundations, painting bright futures, relating experiences, and leading by examples. In particular, we show how the unique Chinese family dynamics resulted in some paradoxical tensions influencing the successors' entrepreneurial identity. By taking a holistic view, we conceptualize parental mentoring as a crucial nurturing strategy for successors and connect it to the process of successor identity transformation. This research sheds light on the nexus of entrepreneurial identity, family dynamics, and the Chinese cultural context within the realm of family business research and practice.

This study investigates how institutional origin affects the dot tax haven (DTH) internationalization of Chinese family firms (FFs). Drawing on institutional theory and the mixed gamble perspective, we propose that restructured FFs (RFFs), originating from state-owned enterprises (SOEs), are more likely to engage in DTH internationalization than entrepreneurial FFs directly established by family founders. This propensity is attributed to the institutional legacies inherited from their SOE predecessors, which create a distinct potential gain-loss calculus. Our empirical analysis of publicly listed Chinese FFs from 2012 to 2021 demonstrates that restructured FFs are 30% more likely to use DTH and establish 43% more DTH subsidiaries than entrepreneurial FFs. This tendency, however, is mitigated by the firms’ economic ties to financial institutions. Our study enhances understanding of FFs’ global entrepreneurial decision-making, contributing to FF heterogeneity research. A novel aspect of our study is examining the impact of institutional legacies on FFs – a topic less explored in family business literature. Furthermore, our findings provide insights for policymakers and regulators, emphasizing the importance of tailored policies that consider the intricate interplay between institutional origin and contemporary entrepreneurial goals in FFs.

The literature shows that social media enhances individual stakeholders’ ability to directly influence firm behaviors, paying less attention to how it enables different stakeholder groups to influence firms collectively. Drawing on the stakeholder multiplicity perspective in stakeholder theory, this study theorizes and empirically demonstrates that social media can empower lower-salience stakeholders to drive the actions of higher-salience stakeholders to influence firm behaviors. By analyzing 506 consumer crises involving foreign and local companies in China from 2000 to 2020, we find that firms take more substantial responsibility when confronted with consumers’ social-media-based collective actions than when confronted with conventional channels of consumer complaints. This heightened responsibility stems mainly from collective actions’ tendency to spur law-enforcing agencies into addressing alleged firm misdeeds, demonstrating a stakeholder multiplicity effect of social media empowerment. We also identify the institutional contingency of this effect, showing that local governments’ bureaucratic capacity positively moderates collective actions’ effect on law-enforcing actions, whereas their intervention in firms’ operational decisions negatively moderates law-enforcing actions’ effect on firms’ responsibility assumption. This study extends the understanding of social media's relationship with stakeholder influence and consolidates the stakeholder multiplicity perspective in stakeholder theory.

Failure to attract external financing is a common puzzle for start-up firms and often leads to the use of entrepreneurs' personal funding, typically with the help of their family. With little entrepreneurial experience, nascent entrepreneurs will have no factual signals to show external investors, except their characteristics or those of their family. The literature mainly focuses on the net effects of entrepreneurs' personal capital endowments in isolation on start-up capital structure despite emerging appreciation of the importance of family-related factors. However, little is known about which combinations of capital endowments across capital dimensions (i.e., human, social, and financial capital) or generations (i.e., parent and child) will likely affect the level of external funding. Drawing on signaling theory, we adopt a configurational approach to examine the compositions of intergenerational capital endowments that are sufficient to shape external funding. Conducting a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis of Chinese privately owned enterprises of nascent entrepreneurs, we identify four typical family prototypes that feature intergenerational capital endowments for low external funding. Findings highlight the significance of family dynamics in China and their role in shaping new venture financing by displaying intergenerational signals.

In the digital era, short videos have become a significant form of digital copyright, yet the debate over whether stronger copyright protection enhances their creation continues. To contribute to this discourse, we conducted an analysis based on a representative sample of short videos on a prominent Chinese short video platform, Douyin. Capitalizing on an external regulatory intervention, specifically the Campaign against Online Infringement and Piracy (COIP) implemented by the Chinese government, we employed the difference-in-differences (DID) method to assess the impact of reinforced copyright protection on the originality of short videos. Our findings reveal that strengthened copyright protection leads to a significant increase in the originality of short videos. Further research on creator heterogeneity shows that influencers exhibit a significantly more positive response to strengthened copyright protection than amateur creators. Finally, we present evidence explaining how external regulation works by enhancing intra-platform regulation. These results have rich implications for intellectual property protection, digital innovation management, and platform regulation.

Previous studies have found that media coverage of a firm's corporate social irresponsibility (CSiR) often delays or blocks the completion of a cross-border acquisition when the acquiror is a multinational enterprise (MNE) from an emerging market. Drawing from the attention-based view, we argue that the effects of Chinese MNEs’ CSiR on deal completion vary depending on several contextual factors, as these factors garner more attention by making the deals more salient to stakeholders. Using a sample of cross-border acquisitions by Chinese MNEs from 2013 to 2020, we find that CSiR media coverage per se does not decrease the likelihood of a deal's completion. However, consistent with attention-based arguments, we find that CSiR media coverage negatively affects the deal's completion when the acquirors are state-owned enterprises and when the target country has high institutional quality. Our findings enhance our understanding of the effects of CSiR on cross-border acquisitions by highlighting the moderating roles of contextual factors related to stakeholder attention. Thus, it is important for MNEs to recognize the boundary conditions that may influence the potential sanctions from local stakeholders. Based on these findings, this study contributes to the literature on CSiR, cross-border acquisitions, and stakeholder attention.

This article investigates the internationalization process of incubating, parenting, and eventually spinning-off overseas entrepreneurial ventures originating from emerging markets. In a comparative case study of Chinese high-tech firms, we leveraged multiple sources of data to reveal (1) how the exploitation of parent firms’ technological and platform resources enables them to initiate, support, and eventually profit from the international growth of foreign ventures that autonomously engage in the exploration of product and market innovations, and (2) how ambidextrous synergy was created through the continuous exchange, combination, and reconfiguration of knowledge and resources between parent firms and foreign ventures. These findings extend our understanding of how Chinese high-tech firms manage the learning process in overseas venturing. We draw implications of these findings for research and practice.