The fact that many Chinese business organizations incorporate social function units into their structures as well as social services into their practice has surprisingly received insufficient attention in organization studies. To theorize an organizational model that resembles community building in many aspects, we conduct case studies on this phenomenon and explain it from a new perspective, focusing on community arrangement within organizations. Our study draws on theoretical insights from institutional logic perspectives and builds a new conceptual schema through which to view organizations as communities. In our case studies of five firms in four cities, we find that, despite changes in the larger society, these Chinese firms built and maintained a model for organizations that communities can be embedded in organizations of various scales and in various industries. This community model of organizations offers new theoretical insights into organizations more broadly and has practical implications for improving the quality of employees’ work life.

This study examines the impact of language diversity on interpersonal relationships in multinational and national/domestic teams in a multilingual country – India. Specifically, it explores whether and how the influence of language diversity differs in the two types of multilingual project teams. To this end, using direct observations and semi-structured interviews, we conducted a thematic analysis and found that native language-based faultlines and groups exist in both kinds of teams. However, such faultlines and language-based groups can disintegrate into smaller, regional dialect-based subgroups due to the emergence of dialect faultlines. Furthermore, evidence suggests that multilingual managers are more effective as boundary spanners in bridging the faultlines in multinational teams; at the same time, they need to be aware of the distinction between language differences and faultlines. This study provides the required distinction between language diversity and the role of multilingual managers in national and multinational teams in an understudied context, thereby contributing to the literature on language diversity.

Although researchers often do it subconsciously, every explanation involves choosing a level of abstraction at which the argument proceeds. The dominant North American style of research in Organization Theory, Strategy, and International Business encourages researchers to frame their explanations at the highest level of abstraction where country-level contextual factors are suppressed or ignored. Yet to provide powerful explanations for recent developments in China, researchers are drawn to a greater level of context specificity. This tension is evident in the Child and Marinova (2014) paper. One way to reduce the tension is to identify general causal mechanisms that combine in different ways to produce different results depending on context. This research strategy is more effective than seeking invariant, general patterns of development across all times and places.

In this commentary, I expand on Fey's (2022) perspective on the future development of Chinese business schools. In particular, I explore some of the nuances related to Chinese business schools that were not covered by Fey with the goal of continuing this important dialogue.

Haveman, Joseph-Goteiner, and Li's (2023) perspective article contributes important insights into China's transition away from central planning and redistribution toward greater market coordination of economic exchange. In our commentary on their insightful article, we build on and extend their arguments in three main ways. First, we discuss how future studies might extend the authors’ work by leveraging the ‘messiness’ of institutional change to explore the cross-level dynamics involved in transforming institutional logics. Second, we build on the authors’ call for more historically grounded, contextualized research on institutional logics to argue that the conditions surrounding logic emergence have important implications for inter-logic dynamics and organizational responses. Third, we build on the authors’ suggestions for future research to underscore the broader consequences of institutional logics and their potential to perpetuate or exacerbate social inequalities and other societal challenges.

Private equity funds implement various management and governance practices in firms they endorse, signaling higher quality of sponsored IPOs (Initial Public Offer). However, the participation of such PE funds comes at a cost for newcomer firms, as they may lose both autonomy and future post-IPO earnings. If they do not choose to signal quality through PE funds, the IPO literature points to the validity of other mechanisms, such as the experience and centrality of the board of directors. We theorize and test the effect of the tradeoff between private equity sponsorship and board centrality and experience on IPO performance. We analyzed the effects of signaling on long-term performance through the one-year cumulative abnormal return in Brazilian IPOs issued between 2004 and 2013. Our results indicate that private equity sponsorship is the most effective signal, completely overtaking the relevance of board centrality and experience to explain IPO performance. However, these latter board characteristics significantly affected the performance of non-private equity-backed IPOs. Between PE-backed companies, there is a reverse effect of the board centrality on the IPO's performance and a substitution effect of the board's previous experience with IPO processes.

When a firm is accused of serious misconduct, its executives, even those who are nonculpable, are stigmatized by the firm's stakeholders, a phenomenon known as courtesy stigma. One research stream explores how executives’ social networks mitigate courtesy stigma, with an emphasis on the positive effect of social networks. From the perspective of a social network as an information pipe, we suggest that social networks are a double-edged sword in the context of courtesy stigma because of their distinctive insulation and exposure mechanisms. Our proposed hypotheses are supported via event history analysis using data collected from a Chinese sample of listed firms that demonstrated financial misconduct in the period 2007–2016. Our study contributes to the literature on social networks and courtesy stigma by revealing their complex links.

While entertainment activities in private business settings (i.e., business entertainment) are widely seen all over the world, issues about their prevalence have remained unresolved in the literature. This study takes an institutional approach to elucidate (1) the governance role of business entertainment in economic exchanges, (2) the mechanism through which business entertainment plays this role, and (3) the conditions under which business entertainment plays a greater role to facilitate economic exchanges. Our starting point is that economic transactions are governed through a combination of market rules, legal restraints, and social norms. We argue that business entertainment plays a governance role by boosting the power of social norms to regulate the behaviors of economic actors. As such, business entertainment should be more prevalent under the conditions where social fabrics are dense but market and legal infrastructures are underdeveloped. This governance approach provides a common ground to accommodate the positive versus negative views on business entertainment advocated by two camps of researchers in management, economics, and sociology. It also offers useful guidelines for policymakers to regulate, and for executives to manage, this prevalent but often misunderstood business practice.

This Management and Organization Review (MOR) special issue on ‘Coopetition and Innovation in Transforming Economies’ aims to explore key features of the strategic relationship between coopetition and innovation in transforming economies. It is generally accepted that innovation can be a fundamental driver for economic growth, new sources of employment, and dwindling economic disparity. However, increasingly activities of innovation no longer take place primarily within the firm but are often the outcome of the overall set of relationships of the firm. The two phenomena of competition and cooperation have become more and more inter-related, thus creating new opportunities, affecting innovation and change. This reality is of special interest in the context of transforming economies’ transition to higher value adding economic growth and development due to, for example, the specific moderating or mediating role of national cultures and philosophical inspiration (e.g., Taoism, Confucianism, Hinduism, and Buddhism) in shaping the coopetitive mindset (Dagnino, Di Guardo, & Padula, 2012) and the potential differentiation between countries and regional ecologies.

Recently, we attended the Second MOR Research Frontiers Conference hosted by Indian Institute of Management Bangalore in India. The theme of the conference was ‘The SME Ecology of Transforming Economies: Knowledge Creation, Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Economic Growth’. As Professor Peter Murmann stressed, the purpose of this frontier conference was about collectively exploring and extending the frontier of research, and therefore, a number of emerging topics were discussed. The conference highlighted for us the great potential of research about India or comparative studies across transitional economies, especially between India and China. Below we highlight a few thoughts or reflections.

Decision makers inevitably face a variety of tensions when managing strategic change. Research from organization and strategy perspectives, such as paradox and organizational learning, has offered useful but limited insight into the systematic mindset and thinking processes involved in decision making. We draw on theoretical and philosophical foundations of the transparadox perspective and related theories to build a dynamic process cycle of transparadoxical decision making. Three interrelated dimensions make up our model: (1) Transparadox Information Navigation, which includes embracing oppositional tendencies, syncretic focus, and creative transcendence; (2) Transparadox Contextual Consideration, characterized by prudent precision and recognizing the flux of temporality and spatiality; and (3) Transparadox Integration, which comprises design-type integration and exploration-type integration. We then present propositions on the interdependent and reinforcing mechanism among the three dimensions. Our work expands the paradox literature with specific mindset dimensions and constituent elements, connecting paradox research with the cognitive perspective by adding dynamic, cyclical processes to paradox cognition study.

The institutional logics perspective provides a powerful theory that emphasizes how symbolic beliefs and material practices are intertwined in relatively enduring configurations that can profoundly shape behavior across space and time. In this article, we build upon the arguments and insights of Haveman, Joseph-Goteiner, and Li, suggesting the need for a broader research agenda on the dynamics of institutional logics in China and around the world. Building on some of our recent writings, we argue for the need to go beyond the study of how logics have effects, to understand how logics themselves cohere, endure, and co-evolve in dynamic interrelationships with other logics.

Despite the influx of Chinese FDI at the dawn of the 21st century and decades of neo-liberal, market-oriented economic policies in Africa, the pervasive nature of institutional voids (particularly in the labor market) has been constantly flagged as an impediment to socio-economic development in the continent. This has prompted calls for more research into the ability of independent African states to pursue viable labor market policy options, from a business system perspective. While institutional theory (specifically the notion of institutional voids) suggests the use of market-supporting and contract-enforcement structures and processes to enable the efficient functioning of the economy, it does not address the effect of strong external ‘powers’ on weak local institutions in developing countries. This study qualitatively explores how the shifting geopolitical landscape (power) from Western to Chinese sources of FDI shaped the nature and evolution of labor market institutions in Cameroon. The findings show that an entrenched parochial and crony Cameroonian institutional context was at the mercy of transnational forces playing a pivotal role, rather than coherent national socio-economic policy options, in shaping labor market institutions in the country. In an act of political complicity, the dynamics that flowed from Chinese FDI have engendered a regressive turn toward the failed nationalistic labor market policies pursued by Cameroon after independence. This article contributes to revealing the debilitating role of Chinese and Western FDI, and the ensuing dynamics, in the creation and sustenance of labor market institutions in a parochial developing economic context characterized by regulative institutional voids.

The question of whether narcissists are more creative than peers has attracted much scholarly attention in both psychology and organizational management sciences. Drawing from social cognitive theory, we theorized that the relationship between narcissism and creativity could be explained by individual creative self-efficacy, which depends on one's direct and vicarious experiences of creativity. Drawing from trait activation theory, we further proposed organizational valuing of creativity as a key contextual moderator that determines whether narcissism facilitates or inhibits creative self-efficacy and, in turn, creativity. We suggest that high organizational valuing of creativity will energize narcissists to put their attention and effort into both direct and vicarious experiences of creativity, enhancing their creative self-efficacy and creativity. We tested our conceptual model through a field study with data collected from 269 full-time employees working in 86 work teams. The empirical results provided support for the social cognitive explanation for the positive relationship between narcissism and creativity in the context of high organizational valuing of creativity. Our study not only resolved prior debates on the relationship between narcissism and creativity but also provided direct empirical support for social cognitive theory and the person-in-context interactionist perspective of creativity research.

This article examines whether firms engaged in high levels of voluntary CSR (corporate social responsibility) alter their strategic choices in response to detrimental public policy – specifically India's Companies Act (2013) that mandates qualifying firms to spend 2% of their three-year average net profits on CSR. Drawing on the concept of organizational dormancy, we argue that firm capabilities, political awareness, exposure to political pluralism, and ownership identity may explain choice heterogeneity among these firms. Our key and non-intuitive finding is that even in the absence of discretionary choice in determining optimal CSR expenditure, firms are less likely to choose dormancy and instead embrace and even surpass the stipulations of the law in their CSR contributions. Also, politically aware firms are more likely to opt for dormancy over compliance. Managerial and policy implications are discussed.