State-owned enterprises (SOEs) in China play a critical role in national economic development and the country's positioning on the global stage. Chinese SOEs have undergone substantial transformations from traditional government-run entities to a variety of corporate forms exhibiting different levels of state involvement. Despite their substantial influence, the internal diversity of SOEs – from wholly state-owned to mixed-ownership – has not been thoroughly examined. This paper provides an overview of SOEs' critical roles in the Chinese economy, the relationship between SOEs and privately owned enterprises (POEs), and the challenges of SOEs in different stages of Chinese economic development. It then introduces five research papers that explore the institutional, strategic, and organizational perspectives on how SOEs manage the dual pressures of state and market logic, respond to policy adjustments, tackle leadership challenges, and navigate current global trends such as digital transformation, technological innovation, and environmental sustainability. In this paper, we provide important implications for policy and managerial practices and highlight a future research agenda for the heterogeneity of Chinese SOEs, and how SOEs respond to these challenges in the evolving geopolitical landscape, adapt their strategies, and manage relationships with foreign governments and enterprises under such conditions.

This study examines corporate philanthropy in the context of corporate wrongdoing punishment in emerging markets. Building on institutional theory, we propose that in emerging markets, after being punished for fraudulent behavior by the government, which is collectively the largest institution, convicted firms tend to use corporate philanthropy as an institutional strategy to regain legitimacy. Using data of Chinese-listed firms that were punished for financial fraud in the ten years from 2004 to 2013, our findings show the subsequent growth of corporate philanthropy to be positively related to punishment severity. Furthermore, convicted firms’ media visibility, dominant state ownership, and national political appointment strengthen the effect of punishment severity on corporate philanthropy increase. Our institutional perspective offers new insights into why firms engage in corporate philanthropy after fraud punishment.

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.

We appreciate this invitation to comment on the paper on Western perceptions of Chinese culture, to provide an insider perspective. Because of its unique perspective on Chinese historical teachings, the study reminds us about the challenges in learning and applying indigenous knowledge. For example, it compares the lens of war and business in many dimensions, such as a focus on an enemy (war) or on customers (business), a matter of life and death (war) or not (business), one competitor (war) or a number of competitors (business), deception (war) or secrecy (business), or a one-time relationship (war) or a long-term relationship (business). The paper offers us a striking warning about the risk of overdrawing historical analogies in management research.

Chance serves as the gate to organizational change. Based on a relational view of chance, we propose that in an organizational context, the chance to change is affected by the perceptions of change agents and the affordance of situational momentum, and that different time points of change are associated with different degrees of chance favorability. We develop a theoretical model to represent how change agents can assess the favorability of current and future momentum and how they can benefit from identifying a perceived chance by employing chance grasping, entraining, creating, or riding strategy to promote organizational change. We generate theoretical propositions to illustrate the four timing strategies of chance management. The overall contribution of this study is a chance management view of organizational change that considers change agents and situational momentum as two interdependent factors in the process of managing the chance to change.

An increasing body of research has applied an institutional perspective to understand actors’ responses to conflicting institutional logics and the creation process of new organizational forms. Although China provides a natural, real-time laboratory to study this topic, scant empirical research has been done. Moreover, we find it is insufficient to apply current frameworks, which have been mainly driven by studies conducted in Western contexts, to study actors’ responses to institutional multiplicity in China, especially in its emerging non-profit sector. This article fills research gaps by providing an in-depth case analysis of the creation and legitimation process of the One Foundation – the first independent charity foundation established by civic individuals in China. Our study shows that the coexisting and competing relationship among state, civil society, social mission, and market logics provides impetus for organizational change and innovation. This article theorizes a temporal model by showing that actors seek provisional solutions in different organizational stages and gradually develop capabilities to progress institutional work from individual to organizational and to societal level to achieve their goals. By showing how a charity foundation plays a role as a change agent, this article also sheds light on the condition and process that drive innovation in China's non-profit sector.

In this article, we propose that types of CEO paternalistic leadership will affect the effectiveness of top management team (TMT) decisions, and that team conflict will play a mediating role in the relationship between CEO paternalistic leadership and decision effectiveness in the Chinese context. Data collected from 108 TMTs in China suggest that dimensions of paternalistic leadership significantly affect decision effectiveness: benevolent and moral leadership positively affect TMT decision effectiveness, but authoritarian leadership has negative effects on TMT decision effectiveness. In addition, cognitive and affective team conflicts partially mediate the links between paternalistic leadership types and decision effectiveness. The results suggest that CEO paternalistic leadership approaches and conflict modes significantly determine TMT decision effectiveness.

Transformation is a vital challenge for Chinese state-owned enterprises(SOEs) and their top managers. To explore this increasingly important topic,we first summarize the institutional context of SOE transformation and theconflicting interests and interdependent relationships of six major actorsas inside/outside stakeholders. Based on the strategic action view ofinstitutional analysis, we emphasize the role of the change agent's level ofaspiration and political skills in transforming an SOE. Then, throughinductive case studies on the transformation of three SOEs, we address howtop managers, acting as change agents, can initiate and engage ininstitutional change through strategic actions such as negotiation,manipulation, and coercion; we also illustrate how they adopt differentactions to influence different actors. Based on the inductive results, wedevelop a theoretical model, which we refer to as the ‘strategic actionmodel’ that shows how the aspiration level, political skills, strategicactions, and change outcomes interrelate and offer insights into thestrategic action of top managers as change agents. Our most importantcontribution is revealing the interplay between the proactive role of insideactors as change agents and the enabling condition of institutionalcontext.

This commentary discusses the four articles in this special MOR issue on indigenous management research in China. It begins by recognizing the importance of indigenous research not only for understanding the specific knowledge of local phenomena, but also for advancing general theoretical knowledge across cultural boundaries. Challenging to undertake, we propose a method of engaged scholarship for conducting indigenous research. The four articles in this special issue provide good examples of applying principles of engaged scholarship in their indigenous Chinese management studies.

The Chinese cultural logics of change offer a rich understanding of organizational change. We address three key aspects of the Chinese yin-yang view of change: context, process, and actions. A case study of Chengdu Bus Group CBG enables us to develop a conceptual model that examines organizational change in a Chinese indigenous context. The model reflects the key functions of shi (situational momentum, 势), the action strategies of ying-shi (leveraging momentum, 应势)and zao-shi (building momentum, 造势), and the dialectics of nonaction (无为). Our findings will help researchers and practitioners better understand organizational change from a unique yin-yang perspective, and will also contribute general knowledge to process theories of organizational change.