Time has long been recognized as a foundational lens in management research, yet most theories draw on Western linear assumptions that overlook alternative temporal logics. This introduction to the special issue on Advancing Temporal Research in Chinese Management situates China as a unique context where rapid economic transformation intersects with enduring cultural traditions. We develop a 3C framework, compressing, cyclic, and continuing, that captures an understudied Chinese temporal lens. Compressing reflects the urgency of accelerated growth and time scarcity; cyclic emphasizes recurring rhythms rooted in agrarian heritage, cultural practices, and institutional cycles; continuing highlights persistence and long-term orientation embedded in Confucian values and historical endurance. By applying this framework, we synthesize insights from the eight accepted articles and demonstrate how temporal dynamics shape organizational identity, entrepreneurial reentry, innovation, ESG strategies, and performance persistence. The 3C framework not only enriches the two dominant streams of temporal research, activity mapping and actors’ temporal orientations, but also broadens their global relevance by integrating culturally infused perspectives. In doing so, this special issue advances comparative temporal research and positions time as a central construct for understanding Chinese management and its wider implications.

As emerging markets rise, some incumbent firms that once occupied follower positions are now striving for industry leadership, surpassing competitors to become new frontrunners. These firms must overcome both competitive barriers and organizational identity (OI) challenges, constructing a leading organizational identity (LOI) that aligns with their new roles. This study delves into these transformations through the temporality lens of OI, using a comparative analysis of two Chinese firms, and identifies two distinct modes: progressive evolution and radical change. The progressive evolution mode adopts a more gradual, layer-by-layer iterative transition, whereas the radical change mode follows a ‘break and (re)build’ logic to identity structure. Both modes demonstrate a ripple effect of OI’s three structural layers, radiating outward from the core. Temporal dynamics play a pivotal role: the progressive evolution mode aligns with a more stable environment and a future-oriented, long-term temporal perspective, while the radical change mode is linked to a dynamic, unstable environment and a past-oriented, short- and long- term interactive temporal pattern. This study highlights how temporal orientation and temporal horizon shape the construction of an LOI, advancing research on OI construction and its temporal dynamics while providing insights into high-position leaps in emerging markets.

Women entrepreneurs face distinct gender-specific challenges, including restricted access to venture capital, work–life conflicts driven by stereotypes, and competing demands from their roles as business owners, caregivers, and community leaders. These pressures often foster polychronicity – a temporal orientation favoring simultaneous task management. Grounded in role accumulation theory, we conduct a two-stage survey of 129 Chinese women entrepreneurs to investigate the relationship between polychronicity and resilience. We further examine three moderators – frequent interruptions, entrepreneurial experience, and emotional intelligence – that amplify polychronicity’ s resilience-building effects. This study highlights the positive association between polychronicity and women entrepreneurs’ resilience, offering new insights into temporal dynamics in entrepreneurship. It also provides women entrepreneurs with practical strategies to help them navigate multiple role challenges and thrive amid adversity by leveraging their preference for multitasking.

Evaluators, tasked with making funding decisions under conditions of incomplete information and uncertainty, are particularly susceptible to the influence of temporality and gender expectations. Drawing on the literature on signaling theory and gender expectations, this research examines the importance of past temporal focus in determining innovation funding decisions. Our empirical evidence suggests that innovation projects that focus on past events are more likely to receive favorable evaluations as past temporal focus signals better learning capacity among innovators. Moreover, we build on the signal credibility and visibility literature to support the notion that female-dominated presenting teams that emphasize past actions receive higher evaluations because the learning capacity signal is deemed more credible for women and female evaluators are more reactive to past-related signals, leading to higher evaluations for innovations with a past-focused narrative. Our study contributes to the literature on temporal focus and signal effectiveness and provides implications for mitigating the gender gap in accessing funding through temporal rhetoric.

Entrepreneurial reentry after business failure is an important area of research in the field of entrepreneurship. However, previous studies have largely overlooked the crucial role of time factors – both objective and subjective – in the context of failure and subsequent entrepreneurial endeavors. This study aims to fill this gap by examining the impact of firm lifespan on entrepreneurial reentry and the moderating effect of entrepreneurs’ temporal focus. Through manual matching across multiple databases, we obtain a sample of 368 entrepreneurs. The results show that a longer firm lifespan negatively influences entrepreneurial reentry and that a past focus further amplifies this negative relationship. This study contributes to research on the determinants of entrepreneurial reentry and provides theoretical insights into the role of time in entrepreneurial reentry.

This study adopts a temporal lens to integrate opportunity logic with institutional theory, examining how varying and unpredictably evolving institutions across countries shape firm innovation. Focusing on nascent industries – where institutional environments are not only diverse but also characterized by irregular and rapid change over time – we theorize a U-shaped relationship between institutional uncertainty and digital product innovation. We further explore how design iteration, as a form of temporally distributed adaptive action, enables firms to navigate uncertainty and capture innovation opportunities in dynamic institutional contexts. Drawing on a sample of 4,619 firms from 50 countries in the global mobile app industry, our empirical findings support these propositions. This research advances a dynamic, time-sensitive perspective on institutions and innovation, offering key insights for emerging markets, like China, where firms operate amid rapid and unpredictable institutional transitions.

As CEOs play pivotal roles in shaping environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investment strategies, existing studies have explored the influence of CEOs’ demographic and professional traits while acknowledging the impact of their cognitive characteristics. However, an overlooked aspect in these investigations is the role of CEOs’ time perspective. To address these gaps, this study investigates the relationship between CEOs’ temporal focus, a key executive perception in strategic contexts, and three dimensions across ESG investments. Utilizing data of Chinese listed firms between 2009 and 2021, we find that CEOs with past-oriented or present-oriented temporal focus exert suppressive effects on environmental and social investments, whereas CEOs with future-oriented temporal focus significantly enhance such sustainability initiatives. Present-focused CEOs are more likely to champion governance investments while both past-focused and future-focused tend to restrict them. Notably, these relationships are further moderated by CEO wealth sensitivity. Our findings illuminate the considerable influence of executive temporal perceptions on ESG investment heterogeneity, offering valuable implications for both research and practice.

In the behavioral theory of the firm, decision-makers' interpretation of performance feedback information is the fundamental intermediate step between the evaluation of performance and the consequent strategic decision-making. However, such interpretations can be shaped or even distorted by the cognitive lens taken by decision-makers, such as their time concept in terms of biased cognitions of the importance and imminence of the future over the present. This study focuses on the role of a specific temporal bias (the time concept expressed in languages) in shaping the response to performance feedback. On the basis of the baseline proposition of a positive relationship between the underperformance duration (a temporal dimension of performance feedback) and acquisition behavior, we theorize and empirically examine how the future-time reference (FTR) of languages under different conditions shapes the way firms respond to repeated performance shortfalls. Using a sample of 12,309 firms from 12 countries between 2007 and 2019, we find that the FTR weakens the connection between the underperformance duration and subsequent acquisitions. Moreover, slack resources strengthen, whereas political stability weakens, this moderating effect of FTR on the underperformance duration–firm acquisition relationship.

Strategy research has long linked sustained competitive advantage to barriers to imitation. We highlight network effects as an alternative mechanism and adopt a geotemporal perspective to theorize how firms sustain advantage as it unfolds over time in international markets. Our study examines this question through the performance persistence of social platforms, focusing on how institutional and demand-side conditions shape the sustainability of platforms’ competitive advantages. We propose that intellectual property rights protection may restrict the degree of freedom in information dissemination, dampening the role of network effects in sustaining superior performance, whilst demand heterogeneity may enhance the value of sizable network membership for information consumption. Evidence from a cross-country dataset of platforms supports these predictions. These findings enrich our understanding of how geographic variations shape the endurance of a platform’s competitive advantage over time, offering implications for both global strategy and platform governance.