Strategic decision makers interpret information and translate it into organizational action through the lens of strategic schemas. How should firms realize high performance with various strategic schemas? Cognitive content and structure have been shown to underlie strategic schemas, but few studies have considered them together. This study employs aggregation analysis to clarify the interaction between cognitive content (technology orientation, market orientation) and structure (complexity, centrality) in affecting the firm performance (FP) of ‘hidden champion’ companies, identified by the Economy and Information Technology Department of Zhejiang Province, China. The empirical method applies fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to generate strategic schema profiles for high FP. This exploratory study fills a gap in the literature on managerial cognition and provides key lessons from ‘hidden champion’ companies in China and their paths for small- and medium-sized enterprises to grow.

Henrich R. Greve, joined here by Sheen S. Levine, calls for presenting empirical data in more graphical forms than currently is the standard in management journals. This would benefit the advancement of science in many ways: showing the potential importance of the phenomenon under study to allowing a visual understanding of its relationships, thus connecting the reader to the evidence beyond the statistics shown. Do we have here a beast or a star? Without following the recommendations to start graphing as put forward by Greve and Levine, the reader would never know.

Firms in a nascent industry need to search across various technological trajectories and market opportunities with limited prior knowledge. While inter-firm learning (e.g., imitation) helps the focal firm adapt in the process of conformity, intra-firm learning (e.g., independent experimentation) helps a firm stand out from rivals in the process of differentiation, both of which can gain competitive advantages. This study investigates how the conformity-differentiation balance can be achieved from the cross-level learning perspective. Adopting a mixed-method design, we first conduct a case study on the Chinese photovoltaic industry. The case suggests that firms are inclined to conform in upstream and bottleneck technological domains but differentiate in the downstream market applications. We then extend the case findings through a computational simulation based on March's learning model. When experimentation and imitation are possible, the balance between conformity and differentiation can be reframed as the classical balance between exploitation and exploration across the firm and industry levels: while experimentation is often exploitative at the firm level but exploratory at the industry level, imitation is often exploratory at the firm level but exploitative at the industry level. The study makes a new attempt to bridge the optimal distinctiveness literature with the organizational learning literature.

Building on the co-opetition perspective, this study takes a unified approach to examine relationship benefits and transaction costs in buyer–supplier relationships. We argue that buyer–supplier vertical dyads fall into one of four distinct co-opetition types based on their respective degrees of cooperation and competition. Each co-opetition situation then corresponds to unique levels of relationship benefits and transaction costs. A sample of 225 supplier–buyer dyads from the Chinese home appliance industry confirms that competition has a positive effect on transaction costs and a negative effect on relationship benefits, while cooperation stimulates greater relationship benefits but affects transaction costs mainly at low competition levels. The results advance prior research on buyer–supplier relationships and co-opetition and offer valuable avenues for future research.

Research on the mechanisms of organizing and managing via interpersonal relations has a rich history in the management and organization-oriented literature. So far, however, the informal dimension of managing and organizing by drawing on informal networks in an international context has received comparably less attention. Recent research has pointed out that social capital and network theories have largely been developed by Western scholars based on circumstances and social structures that are typical of Western societies. Thus, current theory takes into account to a lesser extent their character and nature and the way in which informal ties and networks are formed in other parts of the world (Ledeneva, 2018; Li, 2007b; Qi, 2013; Sato, 2010). Besides the growing body of literature concerned with informal ties and networks in emerging and transitioning countries, for example guanxi (China), blat/svyazi (Russia), and wasta (Arab World), a trend for analyzing pervasive informal networks in advanced and industrialized economies, such as yongo (Korea), has arisen. While insights from the latter research stream indicate that informal networks persist, the results generated in both research streams will help in developing the extant informal network theories further.

This article addresses the question of how the emergence of a cluster in a global innovation system is influenced by early entrants. It does so by presenting an explorative study of the emerging digital creative industries cluster in Bangalore. I find that MNE entrants develop production and technological capabilities comparatively fast within a narrow range of value chain activities with limited spillovers to the cluster. In comparison, local entrants develop such capabilities more slowly, but within a broader range of value chain activities and with higher spillovers of skills and knowledge, as well as higher participation to building a local entrepreneurial ecosystem. I propose that these effects are moderated by the size of national consumer markets as well as industry context in the guise of project lengths and technological modularity. I also point to the role of global connectivity, proposing that local entrants, in particular, leverage international personal relationships for development of not only relational, but also production capabilities.

In the movement of Chinese indigenous management research, a sort of ‘Chinese exceptionalism’ (as critiqued by Peng, 2005: 133) seems to have been emerging, namely, some Chinese scholars see Chinese culture, philosophy, and way of thinking are unique and cannot be accounted for by some of the established, often West-based, theories.

State ownership is an important phenomenon in the world economy, especially in transition economies. Previous research has focused on how state ownership influences organizational performance, but few studies have been conducted on how state ownership influences employees. I propose that different ownership structures trigger different relational models among employees who pay attention to organizational justice consistent with their model to guide their extra-role behavior. Specifically, state-owned organizations reinforce employees’ relational concern and direct employees’ attention to procedural justice, whereas privatized organizations highlight employees' instrumental concern and direct their attention to distributive justice. I leverage a sample of organizations in China to explore how different ownership structures activate different relational models among employees and alter the relationship between organizational justice and employees’ extra-role behaviors. I find that state ownership attenuates and even reverses the positive relationship between distributive justice and extra-role behaviors. Conversely, state ownership exaggerates the positive relationship between a critical procedural justice dimension (participation in decision making) and employee extra-role behaviors. Implications for the micro-foundations of corporate governance and institutional change, organizational justice literature, and cross-cultural research are developed. This study also generates new insights for transition economies such as China.

Pursuing ambidextrous foreign direct investment (FDI) has been suggested as a desirable strategic choice of emerging economy (EE) firms in their internationalization. Yet, reconciling explorative and exploitative activities overseas is complicated due to their conflicting and tensional nature. This study explores why some EE firms can achieve high levels of ambidextrous FDI while others cannot. Drawing on upper echelons theory, we propose a micro-foundation perspective of ambidextrous FDI by studying top management teams’ (TMTs) attributes. Applying a configurational approach to a sample of 294 EE firms’ FDI observations (of which 43 are ambidextrous FDI in nature) from 2011 to 2015, we not only confirm the equal importance of both TMT incentive and cognitive factors as causal conditions to achieve a high degree of ambidextrous FDI, but also provide original evidence on the interactive configurations of those factors that lead to ambidextrous FDI.

This special issue is devoted to celebrating and extending the scholarship of Kwok Leung, who passed away on May 25, 2015. Management and Organization Review is grateful to Michael W. Morris, Zhen Xiong (George) Chen, Lorna Doucet, and Yaping Gong for their thoughtful, instrumental effort in the publication of this special issue.

This article aims to understand how Eastern and Western philosophies shape the perspectives of scholars and practitioners in framing co-opetition (i.e., the coexistence of competition and cooperation) in distinctive manners and, in turn, how such distinctions shape the behavioral patterns of co-opetition. We disentangle the constructs of competition and cooperation and their coexistence as proposed by three Chinese schools of thought (i.e., Taoism, Confucianism, and Legalism) and three Western philosophers (i.e., Immanuel Kant, Georg W. F. Hegel, and Adam Smith). Based on this groundwork, we unveil four comparative philosophical logics used to address the essence of co-opetition (i.e., either/or, both/and, both/or, and either/and). In addition, we apply such East-meeting-West linkages to a typology of co-opetition strategies.

We develop a stakeholder framework that examines how firms respond to the conflicting demands that arise from governments and investors in the context of corporate philanthropic giving. We argue that firms that experience such conflict exhibit a decoupling response in philanthropic giving. Furthermore, we identify the boundary conditions of the relationship between the conflicting pressures and the decoupling response. Drawing on stakeholder salience literature, we argue that this relationship will be weakened when CEOs perceive government demands as more salient (such as those with a communist ideology) and when CEOs are less sensitive to investor claims (such as those with fewer career concerns). We find empirical support for our arguments using a sample of 8,857 Chinese listed firms from 2006 to 2015. Our study contributes to the literature on stakeholder theory, decoupling, and corporate philanthropy.