This issue features three papers related to family businesses, as part of Management and Organization Review’s effort to address research on family businesses in China and other transforming economies. The papers were all accepted by Senior Editor Xiaowei Rose Luo at INSEAD and her ERB team, who shepherded these papers to publication in MOR.

In the age of disruption, affecting the restructuring of industries, social organizations, the organization of work, globalization, international trade, and technological innovations, this issue showcases two disruptions. The Perspective Essay ‘Opportunities and Challenges of Engaged Indigenous Scholarship’, by Andrew H. Van de Ven, Alan D. Meyer, and Runtian T. Jing, followed by the commentary of Anne Tsui, confronts management scholars with the imperative to break out of the straitjacket of testing hypotheses derived from the dominant Western economic, management, and psychological theories with indigenous data. Tsui and Van de Ven, Meyer, and Jing challenge us to rediscover scholarship, which starts with observing actual indigenous phenomena, and employ eye-opening insights and abductive reasoning to arrive at new or different explanatory mechanisms. Data on indigenous phenomena can come from observations of actual phenomena relating to individuals, families, and organizations addressing the limitations of bounded rationality, finding the way, preserving harmony, and so forth, and moderated by indigenous institutional envelopes, history, cultural roots, and national aspirations. Indigenous scholarship welcomes applications of diverse approaches, including qualitative and quantitative data from actual case studies, field surveys, experiments, and ethnographies. This call for indigenous engaged scholarship dovetails with MOR's initiative in favor of the preapproval of research ideas and empirical plans (https://doi.org/10.1017/mor.2017.37), and we hope it will provide scientific legitimacy for indigenous research, which observes actual phenomena and eschews predetermined lenses of Western theories.

China is now poised to achieve its national aspiration of becoming an innovation economy. As it seeks to greatly increase equality in wealth creation, it also aims to assert global leadership in the development of all transforming economies, lead an expansion of international trade, and contribute to global environmental security policies. President Xi Jinping gave voice to these aspirations in his opening speech to the nineteenth national congress of the Chinese Communist Party in October 2017.

This study provides an overview, categorization, and integration of what has been achieved in the niche of cross-culture experimental economics (CCEE) so far, aiming to inspire indigenous management researchers to extend their methodological toolbox by including experimental methods. As a result of the review, I find that most of the early studies lack depth and contextualization as well as detailed explanation about why human behavior differs. Hence, a better understanding about the influence of culture on economic decision-making is rather limited if it cannot be explained in more detail. In contrast, deep contextualization is a principle in indigenous management research (IMR). Both have so far not benefited from each other in the study of how culture affects human behavior, as both currently develop in parallel. Following the call for high-quality IMR (Tsui, 2004), this paper argues that an experimental methodology can make a contribution to IMR in the future by drawing on the strengths of both IMR (i.e., contextualization) and CCEE (i.e., methodology).

Despite the major cultural and political differences between the United States and China, in both countries access to jobs is supposed to be guided by fair and equitable procedures. In the US, there is a presumption of an open labor market in which potential employees compete on the basis of their qualifications, where the fairness of decisions is guided by anti-discrimination laws and normative organizational policies. In China, although there is a history of close relationships that guide the exchange of favors, following the 1949 revolution, Communist Party leaders were given the authority to allocate positions in ways that were supposed to eliminate special privileges of class and background. Yet recent research has suggested that social connections are an important part of getting a job in both the US and China for two-thirds to three-quarters of job seekers. In the US context, such connections are described as social capital. In the Chinese context, connections are defined as guanxi. In this article, we review research on labor market processes in both the US and China to address three important questions: (a) How can we understand the similar functioning of labor markets in such distinct cultural and political systems as the US and China? (b) What are the mechanisms or processes by which people find jobs in the US and China, and how are people able to access these mechanisms or processes in the context of constraining social structures and legal environments? and (c) What are the theoretical implications of the ‘generalized particularism’ that seems to shape labor markets in both the US and China.

Management and Organization Review (MOR) is announcing a renewed initiative that seeks to encourage and publish research reporting engaged indigenous scholarship in China. MOR invites empirical as well as conceptual studies of indigenous phenomena related to management and organizations. MOR welcomes exploratory studies of new, emerging, and/or poorly understood indigenous research questions that employ abductive reasoning and creative hunches, as opposed to testing hypotheses deduced from non-indigenous Western theories. Data on indigenous phenomena can come from any source, including qualitative and quantitative data from case studies, field surveys, experiments, and ethnographies.

The mission of Management and Organization Review, founded in 2005, is to publish research about Chinese management and organizations, foreign organizations operating in China, or Chinese firms operating globally. The aspiration is to develop knowledge that is unique to China as well as universal knowledge that may transcend China. Articulated in the first editorial published in the inaugural issue of MOR (2005) and further elaborated in a second editorial (Tsui, 2006), the question of contextualization is framed, discussing the role of context in the choices of the research question, theory, measurement, and research design. The idea of ‘engaged indigenous research’ by Van de Ven, Meyer, and Jing (2018) describes the highest level of contextualization, with the local context serving as the primary factor guiding all the decisions of a research project. Tsui (2007: 1353) refers to it as ‘deep contextualization’.

Drawing on a dataset consisting of 344 personal interviews, participant observations, and internal documents collected in 26 privately owned business organizations in Russia, the study aims at complementing existing research on Russian indigenous management in three ways. First, it examines the managerial styles of key individuals (i.e. owners and/or CEOs) in the case organizations. Hence, it taps into the existing heterogeneity of managerial styles, the so-called groupvergence, found in contemporary Russian organizations, and documents their idiosyncratic features, such as the transformational nature of authoritarian leadership. Second, the study explores the antecedents of the identified styles to establish what factors contribute to their emergence and thus sheds light on how the heterogeneous managerial styles in Russian organizations come into existence. Finally, the study investigates how the identified styles manifest themselves in organizations by influencing organizational goals and strategies, organizational structures, supporting mechanisms, relationships between organizational members, and reward systems. It therefore elaborates on the organizational implications of the styles and highlights the mechanisms of their sustainable diffusion to lower organizational levels in Russian organizations.

Family business owners and researchers tend to overwhelmingly focus on the top-level structure of firms but ignore the middle-level practice – involving family members in the middle-management team. Compared to top managers at the strategic apex, middle-level managers are mainly responsible for internal operations and control, and the composition of the middle-management team has an immediate and direct impact on the overall workforce efficiency of family firms. Integrating agency theory and organizational justice perspective, we proposed that family involvement in middle management would have a negative impact on the labor productivity of family firms. We further corroborated this effect by identifying three boundary conditions at the individual (i.e., familial CEO), organizational (i.e., firm size), and regional (i.e., labor mobility) levels. Using a sample of 1,284 privately owned family firms in China, we found that family involvement in middle management, measured as the percentage of familial middle-level managers, was negatively associated with labor productivity. Furthermore, this negative relationship existed only when the CEO is a family member rather than a professional manager, when the size of the firm is large rather than small, or when the firm is located in regions with low rather than high labor mobility. These findings contribute to family business literature and provide practical implications for human resource management in family firms.

This article investigates the relative roles of formal property rights institutions versus deregulated markets in entrepreneurial development, based on China's market transition. Empirically, it is not yet known which set of institutions matters more for entrepreneurship, particularly in the long run, despite the existence of well-established theoretical arguments for each. Using provincial-level panel data from China's transition economy, this study has the following findings: On average, both formal protection of property rights and deregulated markets have positive effects on entrepreneurial development; yet, as market transition progresses, the effect of formal protection of property rights increases, while that of deregulated markets decreases. These results are robust to both multiple model specifications and an endogeneity test using an instrumental variable approach. Overall, therefore, while both sets of institutions indeed play positive roles in entrepreneurial development, property rights institutions may be more fundamental in the long run.

China, the world's largest market for electric vehicles (EV), has put in play a state industrial policy that is seeking to upend global automakers (see Financial Times, October 12, 2017 and May 20, 2018). Exemptions from taxes and subsidy programs have favored the purchasing of an EV, which are also exempt from driving restrictions in large cities such as Beijing and Shanghai. Policies that target manufacturers include meeting production targets for EVs (the so-called dual-credit policy by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology). China may be on the verge of becoming a global disruptor in an industry that has home market advantages of scale, lower fossil fuel imports, and significant reduction of air pollution in cities while exploiting related technologies such as lithium batteries where China has world class industrial competence. It is in China's national interest to be a game changer in the global automotive industry from fossil fuel to electricity. And building infrastructure – supercharging stations included – fits the government-directed approach that aspires to establish the country as an undisputable global leader in a high-tech sector of global significance.

The liability of foreignness increases firm risk of doing business abroad. However, it appears not to deter Chinese firms as evidenced by their risky internationalization pattern. This study is concerned with explaining this phenomenon. Drawing on organizational learning and institutional theories, I argue that institutional heterogeneity in China gives firms an opportunity to develop routines to overcome the liability of foreignness through acquisition experience gained outside of their home provinces. Further, I propose that coastal and inland firms draw different routines from their acquisition experiences. I test these arguments on panel data of listed Chinese firms, tracing their acquisition behavior from 2006 to 2015. My analyses suggest that acquisition experience outside of home province matters and that, in the case of inland firms, coastal acquisition experience facilitates subsequent internationalization. The present study contributes to the literature on the internationalization of Chinese firms. It highlights the value of context-specific measures for Chinese management research, sheds light on the functionality of institutional heterogeneity in China, and provides evidence to re-evaluate the riskiness of Chinese firms’ internationalization pattern.

Moral obligation, reciprocity, and affection contribute to the development of strong interpersonal relationships. An indigenous notion in Chinese culture, jiangyiqi, captures these three component principles of strong relationship development in one concept. Jiangyiqi has been held anecdotally as a common code of conduct for building strong, trustworthy relationships in China. We explore the possible integration of these three components of interpersonal relationships in Chinese society in our introduction of the construct of jiangyiqi, based upon Confucian ethics and the circles of relationships delineated in past literature on Chinese societies. Drawing from social exchange theory as well as the perspective of reciprocal altruism in evolutionary biology, we propose that jiangyiqi makes an individual a good candidate for developing strong non-kin relationships. We discuss the managerial implications of jiangyiqi for relationship building in a Chinese cultural context.

Drawing from self-concept and implicit leadership theories, we propose a multilevel model to examine whether, why, and when self-sacrificial leadership motivates followers’ affiliative and challenging citizenship behaviors in China. Data from 329 full-time employees in 83 work groups provide support for the hypothesized model. Specifically, we demonstrated that self-sacrificial leadership was positively related to followers’ relational self-concept constructs of leader identification and leader-based self-esteem, which had differential, downstream implications for followers’ two types of citizenship behavior. Whereas leader identification was found to mediate the positive relationship between self-sacrificial leadership and affiliative citizenship behavior only, leader-based self-esteem mediated the positive relationships of self-sacrificial leadership with both affiliative and challenging citizenship behaviors. We further demonstrated individual power distance orientation as a significant cultural contingency in the above mediation relationships, which were found to exist among followers with low rather than high power distance orientations. We conclude by discussing the theoretical and practical implications of these findings.

After reading Jacobides, MacDuffie, and Tae (2016), the success of Tesla in launching a new automobile company in a crowded sector puzzled us. Jacobides, MacDuffie, and Tae (2016) had convinced us that developing the capabilities to become the manufacturer of a complete, safe automobile system would be quite difficult. Since the establishment of the dominant design for the auto in the 1920s, the industry has operated on the premise of massive economies of scale. Original equipment manufacturers’ (OEMs) role in taking responsibility for the legal liability of the whole automobile, combined with their extensive supply and marketing chains, has ensured they remained dominant in the sector despite some missteps with modularisation and outsourcing efforts (Jacobides, MacDuffie, & Tae, 2016; Schulze, MacDuffie, & Taube, 2015). No major component supplier has succeeded in forward integrating into becoming an OEM and no new entrants have challenged the dominance of the incumbent OEMs since the earliest days of the auto industry (Jacobides & MacDuffie, 2013).

This article investigates the impact of cross-level interplay between team members’ and their leaders’ goal orientations (learning, performance approach, and performance avoidance) on knowledge sharing using samples from design teams in two companies in China. Our results show that team leaders’ learning goal orientation plays a critical moderating role. Specifically, team leaders’ learning goal orientation strengthens the positive relationship between team members’ learning orientation and knowledge sharing; positively moderates the relationship between team members’ performance approach orientation and knowledge sharing; and weakens the negative relationship between team members’ performance avoidance orientation and knowledge sharing. Team leaders’ performance approach orientation demonstrates a positive moderating effect when there is congruence between the performance approach orientation of leaders and members. Finally, team leaders’ performance avoidance orientation negatively moderates the relationship between team members’ learning and performance approach orientation on knowledge sharing. This research enhances our understanding of the conditions under which knowledge sharing occurs among team members, using the lens of Trait Activation Theory.