This essay reflects the journey of two business scholars, Stephen X. Zhang and Jiyao Chen, who ventured into mental health research during the COVID-19 pandemic. We experienced first-hand how health sciences have operated their publication systems in ways that uphold scientific standing while addressing real-world problems. In doing so, we found the publishing expectations and norms in health and medical sciences to be vastly different from those in management. This essay further discusses aspects such as the preference for evidence over theory, the relationship with basic sciences, diverse evaluation criteria, encouragement of exploration and replication, timeliness, and democratization and inclusivity of scholarship as concrete steps of responsible research.

State-owned enterprises (SOEs) in China play a critical role in national economic development and the country's positioning on the global stage. Chinese SOEs have undergone substantial transformations from traditional government-run entities to a variety of corporate forms exhibiting different levels of state involvement. Despite their substantial influence, the internal diversity of SOEs – from wholly state-owned to mixed-ownership – has not been thoroughly examined. This paper provides an overview of SOEs' critical roles in the Chinese economy, the relationship between SOEs and privately owned enterprises (POEs), and the challenges of SOEs in different stages of Chinese economic development. It then introduces five research papers that explore the institutional, strategic, and organizational perspectives on how SOEs manage the dual pressures of state and market logic, respond to policy adjustments, tackle leadership challenges, and navigate current global trends such as digital transformation, technological innovation, and environmental sustainability. In this paper, we provide important implications for policy and managerial practices and highlight a future research agenda for the heterogeneity of Chinese SOEs, and how SOEs respond to these challenges in the evolving geopolitical landscape, adapt their strategies, and manage relationships with foreign governments and enterprises under such conditions.

Despite increased interest in corporate social irresponsibility (CSI) among business scholars, the current research is still fragmented, its findings lacking a nuanced understanding. We conduct a systematic literature review of 173 journal articles on CSI published in the field of business and synthesize insights regarding the antecedents, consequences, and mechanisms of CSI. We begin by providing a clear definition, distinct types, and the measurement methods of CSI. Then, we provide a comprehensive research framework that demonstrates the three key components of CSI research: antecedent, consequence, and moderating. Building on this, we identify additional specific research methods for each component and apply them to assess and analyze the existing research findings and research gaps concerning CSI. We suggest that scholars pay more attention to (a) the impact of stakeholders on CSI behavior, (b) the different impacts of CSI on firm performance, (c) the relationship among CSI, corporate social responsibility, and firm performance, (d) CSI in the context of emerging economies, and (e) measuring CSI.

Prior research on status has focused primarily on the cognitive perspective, exploring the effects of status and offering a limited understanding of the impact of positive status change and its emotional mechanisms. This study draws upon the two-facet model of pride to examine how positive status change influences the behaviors of new status holders. Specifically, we propose that when status differentiation is low, positive status change enhances new status holders' prosocial behavior through their authentic pride, while in cases of high status differentiation, it increases their self-interested behavior through their hubristic pride. To test our hypotheses, we conducted a series of studies, including a laboratory experiment, a scenario experiment, and a time-lagged multilevel and multisource field study. Our multilevel analyses of the data provided strong support for our hypotheses. Our findings shed light on when and why positive status change triggers different behaviors among new status holders, offering important insights into the emotional mechanisms that underlie the effects of status change.

In this article, we develop a computational measure of firm-level rhetorical nationalism. We first review the literature and develop a four-dimensional theoretical framework of nationalism relevant to firms: national pride, anti-foreign, dominant agenda (national revival), and corporate role. We then use machine-learning-based text analysis of over 41,000 annual reports of Chinese public firms from 2000 to 2020 and identify a dictionary of words for each dimension. Using a weighted ratio of nationalism-related words, we describe the overall picture of Chinese public firms’ rhetorical nationalism and provide the first empirical evidence regarding rising rhetorical nationalism among Chinese firms. Firms’ demonstration of rhetorical nationalism is related to both strategic and socialization factors; firms that are state-owned enterprises, older, larger, more profitable, consumer-facing, with more individual investors, and lower sales from overseas demonstrate a higher level of nationalism. Firms that demonstrate more rhetorical nationalism also have a better future financial return. Our study provides a theoretical framework for the organizational study of nationalism and a new measure for firms’ rhetorical nationalism, and demonstrates that rising rhetorical nationalism among Chinese firms is more strongly driven by firms’ motivations to appeal to domestic investors and consumers than to obtain government subsidies. Our dataset is publicly available at: https://sites.google.com/view/firms-rhetorical-nationalism

We replicate and extend Jia, You, and Du's (2012) study. We added samples from the last 13 years (from 2011 to 2023) and analyzed these new samples using the same methodology as the 2012 article. Our replication found that in the last 13 years, 4 articles in the six leading journals and 16 articles in Management and Organization Review (MOR) have the highest degree of Chinese contextualization in concepts (what), their relationships (how), and the logics underlying the relationships (why). The Chinese context continues to contribute novel knowledge. The extension study fully demonstrates that in the 20 years since its birth, MOR has been on the path of pursuing its original aspiration and realizing its mission. On the what, why, and joint contextualization dimensions, the proportion of articles published in MOR with high contextualized theoretical contributions is higher than the proportion in the six leading journals. On the theory-building dimension, the overall degree of the articles published in MOR is higher than that of those published in the six leading journals. This indicates that MOR publishes articles that are not only of high quality and make general theoretical contributions, but also are highly relevant to the Chinese context.

Do it right the first time! But, how? Current dialogue on the expansion of emerging market multinational enterprises (EMNEs) is pervasive. Nonetheless, it ought to have examined strategic attributes and the speed of implementing different strategies for their first venture. Drawing on the springboard perspective, this study tests the impact of EMNEs' first cross-border acquisition (CBA) strategy and speed on their consequential expansion frequency and performance. We also examine the boundary conditions of comparative nationalism between countries, in view of the resurgence of nationalism in an era of deglobalization. Findings reveal that EMNEs' rapid adoption of a focused strategy for their first CBA increases their expansion frequency, while the adoption of a conglomerate strategy decreases it. These relationships are affected in reverse by high comparative nationalism, and the performance consequences of expansion vary with firms using different strategies for their first attempt. This study enriches the EMNE literature and highlights the role of national ideologies in international business research.

In reflecting on the history of Management and Organization Review (MOR), it is not cliché to say that ‘time flies’. It is amazing that MOR has been in existence for 20 years. The memories of the excitement, challenges, and anxiety in the founding years are still vivid, like yesterday. Most organizations die within 5 years of their birth (Daepp, Hamilton, West, & Bettencourt, 2015; Gürtler & Miller, 2022; SAIC, 2013). We can assume that MOR has passed its survival threat. What accounts for its survival success? Is it luck, as would be the case of some entrepreneurial ventures that came to be at the right time in the right place? Survival was not on the minds of the founders of MOR; making an impact on advancing Chinese management research was. What were the founders' aspirations for creating a new journal in an already highly competitive and mature field of journal publishing in business and management? How well has MOR reached its aspirations? Twenty years is a good occasion to take stock of the achievements of MOR, its challenges and opportunities, and what future does it desire in serving the global community of Chinese management and organization scholars?

Responsible leadership (RL) has become a buzz word in the current lexicon of business and politics, but there is still limited agreement on the components, scope, and characteristics. The confusion is rooted, in part, in the dominance of normative perspectives that take RL as a universal phenomenon. However, embedded in a specific culture, RL cannot be understood fully without understanding the moral traditions of that culture. In this article, we used a case study method to explore how RL is understood and practiced in China. Taking the role theory perspective, we conducted in-depth interviews with 9 highly regarded responsible executive leaders and 92 stakeholders in and outside of their companies who were well acquainted with the leaders. Our findings reveal that in China, the moral character of leaders guides them to define and take responsibility for themselves, their employees, companies, and external stakeholders. The five dimensions of RL we identified and the relationships among the dimensions include characteristics that reflect Chinese culture, such as strong sentiment for the nation, self-discipline, developing employees philosophically, and ‘jun zi wu ben’ (a gentleman should focus on fundamental matters). We conclude by discussing the implications of our study for RL research and practice.

Although some organizations encourage employees to generate radical ideas by implementing stretch goals, the relationship between stretch goals and radical creativity is complicated. Unfortunately, existing research has not adequately addressed this issue. Therefore, we integrate signaling theory with creativity-related research and propose that the interaction between stretch goals and cognitive flexibility predicts employees' willingness to take risks, thereby influencing their engagement in radical creative activities and ultimately affecting their radical creativity. To test our hypotheses, we conduct two empirical studies. The results suggest that, for employees with high cognitive flexibility, stretch goals increase their willingness to assume risks, thus leading to improved engagement in radical creative activities and enhancing their radical creativity. Conversely, for employees with low cognitive flexibility, stretch goals decrease their willingness to take risks, which hampers their engagement in radical creative activities and their radical creativity. The theoretical contributions and practical implications of this study are also discussed.

While environmental concerns are increasingly driving firms’ strategic decisions, insights into why firms make heterogeneous environmental investments are limited. Taking an institutional view, we explore the effect of institutional complexity resulting from multiple but incongruent institutional logics within an organization on firms’ environmental investments. Using China's mixed-ownership reform as a research context, we identify a unique condition in which institutional complexity arises as the privatization process results in two coexisting but incongruent institutional logics – namely, state and financial logic. We further propose that privatization plays both enabling and constraining roles in state-owned enterprises’ (SOEs’) strategic decisions about environmental investments, depending on the relative dominance of each institutional logic, resulting in an inverted U-shaped relationship between privatization and environmental investments. Moreover, we examine the moderating effects of CEO background characteristics and firms’ external environmental context to uncover how these factors influence the relative dominance of state or financial logic in privatized SOEs, thereby reshaping SOEs’ environmental investments. Analyses of multisource panel data from Chinese listed SOEs from 2013 to 2020 support our theoretical propositions. The findings contribute to the literature on how institutional factors affect firm environmental practices and provide new insights to better understand the influence of institutional complexity on firm strategic actions.

Following the literature on entrepreneurial framing and identity change, we examined how Chinese shan-zhai phone entrepreneurs have drawn on their cultural resources to reframe their businesses to claim new identities and gain legitimacy over time. Through qualitative procedures, we found that a staged process of collective identity development underlies this entrepreneurial process, consisting of building (a) niche-market identity via pragmatic reframing, (b) socio-political identity via nationalistic reframing, and finally (c) professional identity via comprehensive reframing. There has also been a clear change in the sources of legitimacy from the indigenous market through the wider Chinese society to the more globally defined industry. Our central contribution is a processual model of identity change through cultural reframing specifically focused on how informal entrepreneurs grow into formalization and global competition.

CEOs who develop strong clan values as a result of exposure to clan culture in early life wish to bring honor to their clan, motivating them to engage in increased CSR activities. We propose that the influence of CEOs' clan values on CSR is subject to contextual boundaries. Specifically, we predict that the positive relationship between CEOs' clan values and CSR results primarily in an improved level of institutional CSR and varies with CEOs' personal attributes such as overseas experience and hometown identity. An analysis of a longitudinal sample of Chinese publicly listed firms for 2010–2019 provides strong support for our predictions. The implications for upper echelons theory and CSR research are discussed.

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.