With volume 13 MOR enters a new stage in its evolution to building its reputation as ‘The leading voice on management and organization research in China and other transforming economies’.

Let me invite you to travel in your mind to the year 2030. Imagine that you are one of the Senior Editors of MOR and have been asked by the Editor-in-Chief to write a short retrospective on the previous 15 years.

This article responds to recent calls for organizational research to address larger, more globally relevant questions and to pay attention to history, by analyzing the crucial debate over intellectual property rights (IPR) between the United States and China. Despite the recent US position, the United States has not always been a leading IPR advocate. Rather, it was a leading IPR violator during the nineteenth century. An institution-based view of IPR history suggests that both the US refusal to protect foreign IPR in the nineteenth century and the current Chinese lack of enthusiasm to meet US IPR demands represent rational choices. However, as cost-benefit considerations change institutional transitions are possible. We predict that to the same extent the United States voluntarily agreed to strengthen IPR protection when its economy became sufficiently innovation-driven, China will similarly improve its IPR protection.

As Peng, Ahlstrom, Carraher, and Shi (2017) rightly noted, Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) protection in a country is not static. It evolves over time. Peng et al. (this issue) revealed through their historical analysis that during the 19th century, the US was not a leading IPR advocate but a leading IPR violator. It was only when indigenous inventors, authors, and organizations of the US emerged and demanded protection of their IPR in foreign countries in the late 19th century that the US passed the International Copyright Act (the Chace Act) in 1891 to extend IPR protection to foreign works. The US case illustrated that a country's IPR system as an institution evolves as its economy and society develop. If we examine this evolution over a relatively long time span, the change can be quite dramatic. Therefore, when reviewing a country's IPR system, an important question to be asked is in which direction the country's IPR system evolves.

The long historical view in Peng, Ahlstrom, Carraher, and Shi (2017), which discusses the issues regarding intellectual property rights (IPR) in China, is a welcome antidote to the overheated rhetoric in the public debate that characterizes China as a ‘pirate’ and slavish imitator. So, I thought that by engaging the paper obliquely, it might be possible to extend Peng et al.’s (2017) observations and conclusions. I will do this by contextualizing their observations about the history of IPR and then turn to the contemporary discussions of IPR and innovation in China.

Integrating the strategic choice and the institutional perspectives, we provide a contextualized analysis of human resource (HR) development investment in Chinese private firms. Based on a nation-wide survey of domestic private firms, we found that strategic choice variables (i.e., private entrepreneurs’ education and governance team completeness) are positively related to HR development investment. Perceived government support for private business strengthened the positive relationships between strategic choice variables and HR development investment. Furthermore, institutional variables (i.e., owners’ political affiliation and firms’ former state ownership) explained additional variance in HR development investment above and beyond strategic choice variables. Perceived government support negatively moderated the relationship between former state ownership and HR development investment. Theoretical and policy implications were discussed at the end.

This study addresses why multinational enterprises (MNEs) in emerging economies establish regional headquarters outside their home countries but within their home regions – an important question that previous studies have largely ignored. We extend Rugman and Verbeke's firm-specific assets (FSAs) framework in contemporary internalization theory and differentiate two firm-specific regional strategies (i.e., foreign direct investment (FDI) and export regionalization) to examine their effects on MNEs’ establishment of regional headquarters in the context of emerging economies. Using survey data from 226 Chinese MNEs, we find that intraregional FDI and interregional exports encourage MNEs to build Asian regional headquarters (ARHQ). Furthermore, we find that home-city regional integration moderates the relationship between interregional exports and ARHQ establishment and that MNEs’ international management capability moderates the relationship between intraregional FDI and ARHQ establishment. This study contributes to the regional strategy literature by clarifying the regional strategies, structures, and management of latecomer Chinese MNEs.

While entertainment activities in private business settings (i.e., business entertainment) are widely seen all over the world, issues about their prevalence have remained unresolved in the literature. This study takes an institutional approach to elucidate (1) the governance role of business entertainment in economic exchanges, (2) the mechanism through which business entertainment plays this role, and (3) the conditions under which business entertainment plays a greater role to facilitate economic exchanges. Our starting point is that economic transactions are governed through a combination of market rules, legal restraints, and social norms. We argue that business entertainment plays a governance role by boosting the power of social norms to regulate the behaviors of economic actors. As such, business entertainment should be more prevalent under the conditions where social fabrics are dense but market and legal infrastructures are underdeveloped. This governance approach provides a common ground to accommodate the positive versus negative views on business entertainment advocated by two camps of researchers in management, economics, and sociology. It also offers useful guidelines for policymakers to regulate, and for executives to manage, this prevalent but often misunderstood business practice.

Authoritarian leaders make unilateral decisions and prevail over subordinates. Such leadership, as a style of exercising formal authority and position power, may inhibit employees’ extra-role behaviors in the hierarchical role structure. We explore employees’ role perceptions to better understand how supervisors’ authoritarian leadership decreases extra-role behaviors (OCBs). Authoritarian behavior is expected to generate subordinate perceptions of role conflict, role ambiguity, and role overload, with consequent negative effects on OCB. Hypotheses are tested using data from 613 subordinate – supervisor dyads. Empirical results indicate that authoritarian leadership increases subordinate role conflict and overload which then decreases OCB. Authoritarian behavior also increases role ambiguity, but role ambiguity is not associated with OCB. The article concludes with research suggestions and practical implications.

Despite the prevalence of global diffusion, little is known about the processes by which international practices are adopted and adapted within organizations around the world. Through our qualitative research on the introduction of corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting at two leading Chinese companies, we identify a unique set of political mechanisms that we label state-mediated globalization, whereby powerful nation-state actors influence the ways in which corporations adopt and adapt global norms and practices. We find that businesses’ needs for political legitimacy from a key stakeholder, in this case the government, leads them to deviate systematically from the global practice in both form and content. These intentional practice adaptations are then legitimized by the government to create internationalization tools and localized standards to aid adoption by other organizations. Our findings illustrate previously unidentified mechanisms by which powerful stakeholders such as the Chinese government may mediate, and thereby direct, the ways in which corporations adopt and adapt global CSR practices. Contributions to understanding the political processes of institutional translation in the context of globalization are discussed.

I wish to congratulate the editorial team on their forthright lead article in MOR12.4 regarding the state of empirical research in our field. I strongly endorse the aspiration of making the field more scientific. I understand the need to regain confidence in published empirical social science. But I would not wish readers to come away with the idea that such concerns define the heart of the discipline. The paper was quite properly concerned with bringing empirical research up to the highest standards. But let us not forget that there is another endeavor running in partnership, and in any review, it should not be taken for granted. I refer to theory-building.

This Management and Organization Review (MOR) special issue on ‘Coopetition and Innovation in Transforming Economies’ aims to explore key features of the strategic relationship between coopetition and innovation in transforming economies. It is generally accepted that innovation can be a fundamental driver for economic growth, new sources of employment, and dwindling economic disparity. However, increasingly activities of innovation no longer take place primarily within the firm but are often the outcome of the overall set of relationships of the firm. The two phenomena of competition and cooperation have become more and more inter-related, thus creating new opportunities, affecting innovation and change. This reality is of special interest in the context of transforming economies’ transition to higher value adding economic growth and development due to, for example, the specific moderating or mediating role of national cultures and philosophical inspiration (e.g., Taoism, Confucianism, Hinduism, and Buddhism) in shaping the coopetitive mindset (Dagnino, Di Guardo, & Padula, 2012) and the potential differentiation between countries and regional ecologies.

The Management and Organization Review (MOR) special issue on ‘Doing Qualitative Research in Emerging Markets’ aims to advance the quality, diversity, and understanding of qualitative research methods in management in the context of emerging markets. The value of qualitative research is increasingly embraced by management scholars thanks to its merits for building new theories and testing existing ones, as well as exemplifying new phenomena by surfacing contextual idiosyncrasies (Bansal & Corley, 2011; Birkinshaw, Brannen, & Tang, 2011; Eisenhardt & Graebner, 2007; Rynes, 2007; Welch, Piekkari, Plakoyiannaki, & Paavilainen-Mantymaki, 2011). As Bansal and Corley (2011: 234) suggest ‘The beauty of qualitative research is that it accommodates different paradigms and different styles of research and research reporting. Although there are merits to having norms emerge for the style of qualitative research manuscripts, we do not want to stifle creativity’.

This Management of Organization Review (MOR) special issue aims to explore the key features of the innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem in India. There is recent evidence that innovation and entrepreneurship dynamics in transforming economies differ from like processes in advanced market economies in significant ways (e.g., Maimone, Mudambi, Navarra, & Baglieri, 2016). Therefore, applying the dominant theoretical lens developed to study innovation and entrepreneurship in advanced market economies may be inappropriate. For instance, the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) surveys clearly demonstrate the composition of total entrepreneurial activity (TEA) for advanced and transforming economies is substantially different, with a significantly higher level of ‘need-based’ entrepreneurship in the latter. Hence the typical advanced economy transition from wage employment to a larger share for entrepreneurship may be reversed in transforming economies. Transforming economies also witness a significant role of the transnational diaspora in their entrepreneurial and innovation processes (Riddle, Hrivnak, & Nielsen, 2010). Further, at the level of corporate entrepreneurship, London and Hart (2004) argue that results of studies of subsidiary entrepreneurship undertaken in advanced market economies may not generalize to transforming market economies. In summary, a fundamental question is whether entrepreneurship and innovation in transforming economies are diverging from the norms of advanced economies as these countries get wealthier and develop entirely new trajectories (Hill & Mudambi, 2010).

Management and Organization Review (MOR) aims to be the premier journal for advancing our knowledge of management and organizations in China and other transforming economies. It is a multidisciplinary journal rooted in the behavioral and social sciences underlying management research, broadly defined. MOR seeks to publish research from diverse social science disciplines, such as organization behavior, organization theory, strategic management, economics, economic geography, development studies, innovation theories, anthropology, political science, public administration, urban planning, cross-cultural and social psychology, international business, sociology, cognitive science, and institutional theory.