A memorial to celebrate the life and legacy of Kwok Leung is planned at the 2015 Academy of Management Meeting in Vancouver. It will be held at the convention center on Sunday 9 August from 4pm–5pm. Kwok's wife, Yumi, is planning to attend. As Kwok's close colleague Ray Friedman has said, ‘Having [Yumi] there will help us feel closer to Kwok. And we want [her] to hear firsthand how much he meant to all of us’. To share your memories of Kwok, please also visit the IACMR website message board (www.iacmr.org/2015KwokLeung/ENMessageBoard/).

As many readers of MOR and IACMR members know, Kwok Leung, Deputy Editor in Chief of MOR, passed away on May 25th, 2015. He was hospitalized at the Prince of Wales Hospital in Hong Kong for more than two and half months, battling a very rare case of autoimmune disease. He celebrated his 57th birthday in the hospital. Kwok was one of the few mainstream social psychology scholars who made important scholarly contributions to cross-cultural management research, including the AIB community, where I first worked with him, the IACMR, and MOR. I have lost a friend, a partner, and a mentor. On behalf of MOR I extend my condolences to his family.

I feel very fortunate to be able to open the MOR Dialogue, Debate, and Discussion editorial section with a striking perspective advanced by Shawn Pope and John W. Meyer of Stanford University. They point to the rise of a global corporate organization that is shedding its national distinctiveness and any remaining local rooting. Instead, they envision global standardization as no longer related to national origins and as managed according to abstract, universalistic principles. The global standard is furthermore run by managers who graduated from the same homogenous business programs, who gain advice from like-minded consultants, and who, of course, go to the same Davos meetings. The new standard, the universal corporation, seeks to convey its socially responsible character by confirming, sometimes voluntarily, to the standards of excellence as decreed by other organizations perhaps increasingly like itself. This provocative perspective invites debate – refutations and support alike – in future MOR issues and blogs. Where does your research lead you to take a stand?

With this perspective paper, we seek to help open up an additional and, we believe, especially promising avenue for indigenous management research. We explore the potential for progress through the investigation of executive rationale, an institutional logic guiding managerial action and enabling strategies, structures, and formal integration mechanisms. Drawing on interviews with an elite group of executives including some of the world's most powerful managers, we illustrate variance in executive rationale across five major economies – Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, and the United States – and suggest that action and structures in these economies are broadly aligned with the respective expressions of executive rationale. We consequently hold that indigenous management research may benefit from a focus on executive rationale in particular, and we propose a concrete research agenda.

Through examining executive rationale on why firms exist, Redding and Witt's (2015) paper serves as a window through which we can view varieties of capitalism and management models in several societies. However, though rationales are the socially constructed, historical patterns of material practices, they are after all ideational factors. The economic action and organizational practices, as Redding and Witt acknowledge, are often the result of the interplay of the material and ideational forces in society. Meanwhile, as the studied five economies are all relatively mature economies, executive rationales are rather stable, which is not the case for China. This commentary thus examines the evolution of Chinese management along with the shift of political economic parameters.

I truly enjoyed reading the perspective article entitled ‘Advancing indigenous management theory: Executive rationale as an institutional logic’ by Gordon Redding and Michael Witt (2015), especially its implications for a ‘promising avenue for indigenous management research’ (179). I agree with the authors in general terms that the research on the impact of culture as an informal institution, and also the effect of formal institutions, on business practices must come down from a highly abstract level to a more pragmatic ground, especially their interaction and integration as embodied by various specific mechanisms to guide practices. For that purpose, Redding and Witt introduce an interesting notion of ‘executive rationale’ to guide action. Applying the abstract notion of institutional logic to specific business practices, executive rationale refers to the ‘socially constructed, historical patterns of material practices, assumptions, values, beliefs, and rules by which individuals produce and reproduce their material subsistence, organize time and space, and provide meaning to their social reality’ (Thornton & Ocasio, 2008: 101) in the specific context of business practices. In other words, executive rationale provides a mental blueprint for practical actions in a business context. In addition, the authors have empirically generated a tentative model with multiple dimensions to compare the dominant executive rationales as institutionally-embedded across five key economies.

Although development in China is quite heterogeneous across regions, little research has explored how the value of Chinese firms’ political ties is contingent on the institutional and economic development of firms’ regional environment. This article explores some of the factors that moderate the benefit of political ties, differentiating between ties to central and local government. The study investigates how benefits of ties to central and local government are moderated by regional market and economic development, respectively. The study is based on a quantitative analysis of 858 listed Chinese firms. The results suggest that firms enjoy a positive effect of political ties but mainly ties to central government. The analysis, furthermore, finds these ties to be less valuable in economically well-developed regions. Market development, on the other hand, does not moderate the effects of local or central government ties.

We conducted two studies to investigate the contingent role of regional human capital quality (i.e., the knowledge, skills, and abilities of the collective workforce in a region) in the relationship between firm-level human resource (HR) practices (i.e., practices focusing on employees’ human capital development) and firm performance in China. Drawing upon human capital theory, we hypothesized that the human capital–enhancing HR practices and regional human capital quality have a substitutive effect on firm performance. Study 1 uses a World Bank survey of 9,125 firms in 30 provinces. We found that the human capital–enhancing HR practices relate more strongly to firm performance when regional human capital quality was lower than when it was higher. Study 2 used a sample of 203 firms across seven provinces. We found similar results. We further hypothesized and found that the substitutive effect of regional human capital quality was stronger when a firm adopted an innovation strategy. Our findings provide new evidence for the contingency perspective of strategic HR management and highlight the importance of matching HR practices with local labor quality conditions and the business strategy of the firm.

This study provides new insight into guanxi practice and quality differences between business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-government (B2G) ties in China. The results, based on data obtained through structured interviews with 108 Chinese managers across eight cities in China, reveal stark differences between the practices used in developing B2B ties and those used in developing B2G ties. More specifically, these two tie types differ in a variety of guanxi initiation, building, and utilization practices. This study also builds upon the process model of guanxi development by highlighting the dissimilar role of gift giving practices in B2B and B2G ties. Furthermore, this study measures guanxi quality as a separate concept from guanxi process and demonstrates that guanxi quality is a multidimensional concept that is composed of affective attachment and felt obligation, both of which vary across B2B and B2G ties. Implications of these results for theory development and managerial practice in China are also discussed.

We propose an integrative model on how contextual distance influences the learning process and performance of international strategic alliances (ISAs). We argue that contextual distance increases knowledge diversity but decreases knowledge exchange between the alliance partners, which has implications for the alliance's knowledge creation and performance. A meta-analysis of 46 empirical studies published between 1990 and 2013 dealing with Sino-foreign collaborations in China revealed that contextual distance showed an inverted U-shaped relationship with alliance performance. Proxies for partners’ contextual experience, for example, the length of an alliance's operation in China, the foreign partners’ in-country experiences, and ISAs’ location in a more developed Chinese region, moderate the learning processes. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.

The management paradigms in the West mainly rely on legal contracts and explicit rules (formality), while the management traditions in the East emphasize social relationships and implicit norms (informality). In an era of ‘West-meets-East’, balancing formality and informality is becoming critical for firms, especially those facing institutional differences in transnational contexts and institutional transitions. In this research, we conducted a comparative multicase study on returnee entrepreneurs and local entrepreneurs in China. We found that at the early stage of venturing, returnee entrepreneurs emphasized formality more than informality, while local entrepreneurs stressed informality more than formality. However, the formality-informality balance among both returnee and local entrepreneurs converged over time in line with the institutional transition in China. Returnee entrepreneurs increased the emphasis on informality (but kept the dominant position of formality), whereas local entrepreneurs gradually shifted from informality to formality. The spatial pattern of asymmetrical balancing and the temporal pattern of transitional balancing are both rooted in the Chinese philosophy of Yin-Yang balancing.

To examine the bribing behavior of firms, we developed a cross-level moderation model using agency theory at the firm level and anomie theory at the societal level to investigate the relationship between manager control of firms and firm bribery activity. The results of this cross-cultural analysis using a sample of 1,799 firms from 38 nations showed that at the firm level, manager-controlled firms (MCFs) have a higher propensity to bribe than shareholder-controlled firms. At the country level, bribery is higher in MCFs (relative to shareholder-controlled firms) in societies with a low level of institutional collectivism, a high level of uncertainty avoidance, economic change, and income inequality. Contrary to the hypothesis, the relationship between bribery and manager control is stronger rather than weaker in societies with press freedom. Implications for future research and practices are discussed.