This issue leads off with a perspective paper, ‘Chinese Entrepreneurs, Social Networks, and Guanxi’, by Ronald S. Burt and Katarzyna Burzynska. The paper is followed by three commentaries from Yanjie Bian, Nan Lin, and Olav Sorenson, which collectively advance social network analyses in China, and contribute to a much more nuanced understanding of the significance of guanxi and entrepreneurs’ social capital in China. This paper was presented by Ron Burt as the keynote address at the Second Management and Organization Review Research Frontiers Conference hosted by Guanghua School of Management, Peking University (October 6–8, 2016). It is my hope that this study could be replicated in other transforming economies such as India, and Russia, Ex-Soviet Republics, and Eastern Europe. In the case of Africa, the legacy of colonial powers may have influenced entrepreneurial social capital and guanxi in surprising ways.

This capstone issue of volume 13 of Management and Organization Review is a poignant moment for me, and at the same time inspiring, as we remember, celebrate, and honor our colleague, friend, and intellectual giant Kwok Leung. He was my friend, mentor, and teacher, who introduced me to the literature and controversies crisscrossing the landscape of cross-cultural research as I learned the ropes of leading the Journal of International Business Studies. He was eloquent and persistent in persuading me to accept the challenge of following Anne Tsui as Editor-in-Chief of Management and Organization Review, which at age eighty opened up for me exciting new intellectual horizons for which I am profoundly grateful. Kwok has been a prolific scholar with over two hundred peer-reviewed publications that collectively have received over 20,000 citations. I know that we will always miss Kwok, but his legacy will continue to shine and remind us of him.

Effective immediately, Management and Organization Review encourages authors to submit proposals for preregistered and preapproved studies. After peer review, such proposals can receive a conditional acceptance in Management and Organization Review – all before data are collected and results are obtained.

With volume 13 MOR enters a new stage in its evolution to building its reputation as ‘The leading voice on management and organization research in China and other transforming economies’.

Let me invite you to travel in your mind to the year 2030. Imagine that you are one of the Senior Editors of MOR and have been asked by the Editor-in-Chief to write a short retrospective on the previous 15 years.

Africa is an increasingly important business context, yet we still know little about it. We review the challenges and opportunities that firms in Africa face and propose that these can serve as the basis for extending current theories and models of the firm. We do so by challenging some of the implicit assumptions and stereotypes on firms in Africa and by proposing three avenues for extending theories. One is taking the extreme conditions of some Africa countries and using them as a laboratory for modifying current theories and models of the firm, as we illustrate in the case of institutional theory and the resource-based view. A second one is identifying new themes that arise from analyzing firms in Africa and their contexts of operation, and we discuss four themes: migrating multinationals and the meaning of home country, diaspora networks within and across countries, a recasting of cultural and institutional distance, and new hybrid organizational forms. A third one is developing new theories based on alternative paradigms of social relationships that have emerged in Africa that differ from those underpinning existing theories of the firm, such as kgotla and its view of community-based relationships or ubuntu and its humanizing view of relationships.

Intending to clear space for rigorous integrative research bridging theory and research across East and West, we highlight four conclusions from exceptional data on the networks around Chinese entrepreneurs: (1) The broker networks associated with business success in the West are also associated with success in China; (2) The trust correlates of closed networks in the West are similarly correlated in China; (3) History and trust proven in events emerge as especially important to the Chinese entrepreneurs; (4) High-quality network data on Chinese business leaders are a practical reality. We use the results to define a network perspective on guanxi ties that can be common ground for integrating results across East and West, and guide future research on the role networks play in Chinese business.

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 responds to recent calls for organizational research to address larger, more globally relevant questions and to pay attention to history, by analyzing the crucial debate over intellectual property rights (IPR) between the United States and China. Despite the recent US position, the United States has not always been a leading IPR advocate. Rather, it was a leading IPR violator during the nineteenth century. An institution-based view of IPR history suggests that both the US refusal to protect foreign IPR in the nineteenth century and the current Chinese lack of enthusiasm to meet US IPR demands represent rational choices. However, as cost-benefit considerations change institutional transitions are possible. We predict that to the same extent the United States voluntarily agreed to strengthen IPR protection when its economy became sufficiently innovation-driven, China will similarly improve its IPR protection.

This is a special issue in honor of Kwok Leung, whose path-breaking career in social psychology, cross-cultural psychology, organizational behavior, and international management was cut short by his untimely death in 2015. Newton said, ‘If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants’. In cultural research, it's Kwok's shoulders that enable us to see further.

We trace the social networks around Chinese entrepreneurs back to their firm's founding to learn about the role early events play in the later success of a business. We use name generator questions paired with career history questions to identify ‘event contacts’ missed by the usual focus on current business. We draw four conclusions from interviews with a large, stratified random sample of entrepreneurs: (1) Relations with event contacts stand out for guanxi qualities of high trust relatively independent of the surrounding network structure, and are critical to distinguishing more successful entrepreneurs from the less successful. (2) The substance of a significant event matters less than the fact that the entrepreneur deems it significant. (3) When family is turned to for support it is most likely at founding, but family is not the usual source of support at founding. Rather, entrepreneurs turn to people they have known for many years, typically people beyond the entrepreneur's family. (4) The transition from founding to first significant event stands out as distinctly consequential for later success. Entrepreneurs who turn for help on their first significant event to a person separate from, but especially close to, the founding contact are more successful in their business development. That early move is not visible in the later network around the entrepreneur.

Burt and Burzynska (2017) deliver a great piece of timely and innovative research on Chinese entrepreneurs, social networks, and guanxi. Among other merits, I am most impressed and inspired by two scholarly contributions this work has made to the comparative significance of social network analysis (SNA) and that of guanxi studies in organizational research.

In this work we develop and validate a model measuring norms that distinguish three types of culture: dignity, face, and honor (Leung & Cohen, 2011). Our motivation is to produce empirical evidence for this new cultural framework and use the framework to explain cultural differences in interdependent social interactions such as negotiation. In two studies, we establish the content validity, construct validity, predictive validity, and measurement invariance of this measurement model. In Study 1, we present the model's three-factor structure and situate the constructs of dignity, face, and honor in a nomological network of cultural constructs. In Study 2, which uses a sample of participants from 26 cultures, we show that the measurement model discriminates among people from the three cultural regions corresponding to the dignity, face, and honor framework. In particular, we report differences between face and honor cultures, which are not distinguished in other cultural frameworks (e.g., Hofstede, 1980). We also show that the measurement model accounts for cultural differences in norms for use of negotiation strategy.

Burt and Burzynska (2017) have produced a very significant and innovative study on social networks among Chinese entrepreneurs. As the authors claim, this may be an exceptional dataset with certain unique features. It is a comparative study between Chinese and American entrepreneurs. While the American data is rather limited in scope, it does provide valuable theoretical and measurement information by which to examine possible similarities and differences of the private enterprises and entrepreneurs in these two societies. Second, it examines two general network principles, namely the association between brokerage and success, and between closure and trust. In general, the study affirms comparable results in the two societies, though somewhat different measurements require cautious interpretation. Third, the authors explore two innovative notions worthy of our attention. They employ events as the frames on which social ties (contacts) were generated (Table A1). This turns out to be very fruitful. For example, the founding event provided interesting social network information, more so than current and other events. The event-name generators reveal the time-related dynamics of network stability and changes, and alert us to possible underestimation of network effects if only the current event or the present time is examined. Finally, the authors attempt possible network measures for the notion of guanxi. This exploration sets the initial stage for more rigorous measures of guanxi in future studies of entrepreneurs in China and other societies.

As Peng, Ahlstrom, Carraher, and Shi (2017) rightly noted, Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) protection in a country is not static. It evolves over time. Peng et al. (this issue) revealed through their historical analysis that during the 19th century, the US was not a leading IPR advocate but a leading IPR violator. It was only when indigenous inventors, authors, and organizations of the US emerged and demanded protection of their IPR in foreign countries in the late 19th century that the US passed the International Copyright Act (the Chace Act) in 1891 to extend IPR protection to foreign works. The US case illustrated that a country's IPR system as an institution evolves as its economy and society develop. If we examine this evolution over a relatively long time span, the change can be quite dramatic. Therefore, when reviewing a country's IPR system, an important question to be asked is in which direction the country's IPR system evolves.

To deepen our understanding of organizations’ heterogeneous responses to institutional demand, we develop a ‘relational complexity’ argument to highlight organizations’ diverse institutional linkages as another important source of practice variation. We argue that diverse relations between organizations and the institutional authority can filter distinct institutional pressures and expectations, shape organizational interpretations of environmental demands, and thus trigger heterogeneous organizational practices. We adopt this theoretical framework and distinguish two types of institutional linkages with the state to understand different adoption patterns in corporate social responsibility (CSR) in its early stage of diffusion in China. Based on a national survey dataset consisting of 1,268 firms, our analyses show that firms having a stronger bureaucratic linkage with the state tend to focus on more visible external-oriented CSR practices. In contrast, those firms forming a closer partnership with the state through political or semi-political associations are more likely to take more extensive adoptions by further developing internal CSR structures. This study enriches the institutional analyses by shifting our attention to the relational dynamics between organizations and institutional authority as a key source of practice variation. It also has important implications to the research and practices of CSR in emerging economies.

The long historical view in Peng, Ahlstrom, Carraher, and Shi (2017), which discusses the issues regarding intellectual property rights (IPR) in China, is a welcome antidote to the overheated rhetoric in the public debate that characterizes China as a ‘pirate’ and slavish imitator. So, I thought that by engaging the paper obliquely, it might be possible to extend Peng et al.’s (2017) observations and conclusions. I will do this by contextualizing their observations about the history of IPR and then turn to the contemporary discussions of IPR and innovation in China.

Leung and Morris (2015) propose conditions under which values, norms, and schemata drive cultural differences in behavior. They build on past theories about dimensions of situational strength to propose that personal values drive behavior more in weak situations and perceived norms drive behavior more in strong situations. Drawing on this analysis as well as two recent models of cultural tightness-looseness, country-level effects are predicted on the assumption that tighter cultures more frequently create strong situations and looser cultures more frequently create weak situations. Using secondary data, I examine values as well as perceived descriptive norms and injunctive norms relevant to collectivism in relation to two key dependent measures: helping strangers and emotion regulation. The relation of embeddedness values to helping strangers is moderated negatively by tightness (in that high embeddedness reduces helping less in the context of tightness), and its relation to emotion regulation is moderated positively (in that embeddedness increases emotion regulation more in the context of tightness). Furthermore, descriptive norms show main effects for both dependent variables that are predominantly unmoderated by tightness. Finally, the link of injunctive norms with emotion regulation is moderated positively by tightness (in that injunctiveness heightens emotion regulation more in the context of tightness). Results support the relevance of nation-level tightness to reliance on values and norms, but the strength of effects depends on how it is operationalized.

This study examines the mediating effect of growth strategy (including market and product expansion strategies) on the linkage of market orientation (MO) to firm performance and the moderating effects of a firm's external connections (including political and business ties) on the relationship between MO and growth strategy. It finds that both market and product expansion strategies are key conduits through which MO improves firm performance. In addition, the relationship between MO and market expansion strategy is positively moderated by political ties but negatively moderated by business ties, while the linkage of MO to product expansion strategy is moderated negatively by political ties but positively by business ties. By combining mediating and moderating effects in a framework that integrates MO, growth strategy, external connections, and firm performance, this study enriches our knowledge on the implications of MO and provides insight into factors that facilitate firm growth.

Does social capital operate differently in China? A long and vibrant literature on the concept of guanxi suggests not only that social capital might have a different character in China but also that it might prove more valuable there to employees and entrepreneurs alike. Drawing on unusually high quality data on Chinese executives, Burt and Burzynska (2017) explore the question of whether the same structural configurations of relationships appear associated with success in China as have been found in the West. Their short answer is yes. As in the West, the founders and managers of larger companies have relationships characterized by a larger proportion of ‘structural holes’ – where the focal individual represents the only connection between his or her contacts (in other words, a brokering relationship). Closure – having multiple ties in common with another individual – meanwhile appears to foster trust, just as it does elsewhere. One could therefore view the results as strong evidence for the universality of a structural approach to social capital, one based on the patterns of relationships between individuals (e.g., Burt, 1992; Coleman, 1988; Podolny, 1993).