Management and Organization Review

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.

The Internet era embraces disruptive dynamics of both organizational and management models. Management scholars and entrepreneurs worldwide are exploring new management theories and business models such as the management model of Rendanheyi (人单合一in Chinese, translated as ‘Maker-Customer Integration’) that has been evolving for 12 years since it was initiated by Haier in 2005. This model has successfully transformed Haier, and has also drawn much attention from the world with its salient implications for a new management paradigm (Cao, 2014; Fischer, Lago, & Liu, 2013).

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.

In this addendum we provide further information on our results and findings as well as explanations and suggestions in relation to the low R2. Table 1 provides additional information i.e., the standard error of all estimates, exact p values instead of asterisks as the significance level on the base of Table 3 in the published manuscript.

Managerial ties (MT) are important for business performance by providing firms access to valuable resources and protecting them from opportunism. Drawing on the resource-based view and the market orientation (MO) literature, we argue that (1) MT can help exporting firms to enhance export performance; and (2) MO will help strengthen the positive effect of MT as MO directs the value of MT for improvement of competitive strategy and customer experience with a market focus on generation, dissemination, and use of market intelligence concerning existing and potential customers and competitors. Using a sample of 230 Chinese exporting firms, we found that MT is linked to superior export performance, and the link is positively moderated by MO. Therefore, this study expands our understanding of how firms can not only improve their export performance through the development of MT, but also use MO to reinforce MT and export performance association.

Based on longitudinal case studies of manufacturing strategy and implementation at two Chinese manufacturing firms, this paper investigates how these firms develop, manage, and deploy dynamic capabilities to renew their resource bases in order to respond to the operational challenges associated with radical technological development. Our analysis suggests that dynamic capability development is not simply about renewing one specific type of capability, but rather, it is a meta-capability to learn how to repeatedly renew the firm's overall capability set as a fully integrated package. We further highlight the importance of looking beyond the property of the firm to understand the network level of capability development, including the capabilities of the firm's partners. This is particularly salient in the context of smart manufacturing where a high level of connectivity among a broader network of partners is required to reap the benefits generated by new technological advances. Our findings provide an important contribution to our knowledge of dynamic capability development in emerging economies in the era of digitalized manufacturing.

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.