Drawing on the threat-rigidity hypothesis, we examine how managerial opportunity and threat interpretations of external environments affect a technology venture's choice of external knowledge search strategies in an emerging market. Results from a sample of 141 technology ventures in China reveal that opportunity interpretation directly and positively influences both the breadth and depth of external search, whereas threat interpretation directly and negatively influences only external search depth. Furthermore, managerial ties strengthen the positive relationship between opportunity interpretation and external search breadth but weaken the positive relationship on external search depth. Managerial ties weaken the negative relationship between threat interpretation and external search breadth but strengthen the negative relationship on external search depth. Implications for both research and practice are offered.

Adopting a dynamic view of guanxi, we investigated how the closeness in Chinese coworker relationship changes as a function of interpersonal incidents, exploring factors such as the prior closeness level as well as the valence and job relevance of the incident. Two studies of PRC managers probed the content and dynamics of their coworker relationships. Results indicate that such relationships mix affective and instrumental ties. A key finding about changes is that the increase in closeness created by positive incidents was greater when the prior relationship was distant, and the decrease created by negative incidents was greater when the prior relationship was close. The implications of these findings for theory development and future guanxi research are discussed.

Based on an entirely unexplored source of data, this paper analyses the evolution of Tibetan representation and preferentiality within public employment recruitment across all Tibetan areas from 2007 to 2015. While recruitment collapsed after the end of the job placement system (fenpei) in the early to mid-2000s, there was a strong increase in public employment recruitment from 2011 onwards. Tibetans were underrepresented within this increase, although not severely, and various implicit practices of preferentiality bolstered such representation, with distinct variations across regions and time. The combination reasserted the predominant role of the state as employer of educated millennials in Tibetan areas to the extent of re-introducing employment guarantees. We refer to this as the innovation of a neo-fenpei system. This new system is most clearly observed in the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) from 2011 to 2016, although it appears to have been abandoned in 2017. One effect of neo-fenpei, in contrast to its predecessor, is that it accentuates university education as a driver of differentiation within emerging urban employment. The evolution of these recruitment practices reflects the complex tensions in Tibetan areas regarding the overarching goal of security and social stability (weiwen) emphasized by the Xi–Li administration, which has maintained systems of minority preferentiality but in a manner that enhances assimilationist trends rather than minority group empowerment.

Firms in a nascent industry need to search across various technological trajectories and market opportunities with limited prior knowledge. While inter-firm learning (e.g., imitation) helps the focal firm adapt in the process of conformity, intra-firm learning (e.g., independent experimentation) helps a firm stand out from rivals in the process of differentiation, both of which can gain competitive advantages. This study investigates how the conformity-differentiation balance can be achieved from the cross-level learning perspective. Adopting a mixed-method design, we first conduct a case study on the Chinese photovoltaic industry. The case suggests that firms are inclined to conform in upstream and bottleneck technological domains but differentiate in the downstream market applications. We then extend the case findings through a computational simulation based on March's learning model. When experimentation and imitation are possible, the balance between conformity and differentiation can be reframed as the classical balance between exploitation and exploration across the firm and industry levels: while experimentation is often exploitative at the firm level but exploratory at the industry level, imitation is often exploratory at the firm level but exploitative at the industry level. The study makes a new attempt to bridge the optimal distinctiveness literature with the organizational learning literature.

This article presents a qualitative empirical study of elite collusion and its influence on village elections and rural land development in China. Drawing on ethnographic data collected from two Chinese villages, it investigates how village cadres collude with other rural elites, using bribery, gift-giving and lavish banquets, to establish reciprocal ties with township officials and other public officials. Meanwhile, the officials make use of formal organizations to corruptly obtain profits and form alliances with village elites. The article examines how rural elites, especially village cadres, use this collusion to profit from the misuse of villagers’ collectively owned assets, the manipulation of village elections and the suppression of anti-corruption protests. It also offers new descriptive evidence of how recent reforms designed to strengthen the Party's overall leadership in rural governance may have actually facilitated elite capture and grassroots corruption.

Grid governance has been developed by the Chinese party-state to collect intelligence at the grassroots level for the early pre-emption of what it defines as social instability. Using data collected from four months’ participant observation and extensive interviews with personnel who work in the grid governance system in what we call W Street, a location in a second-tier city in southern China, this paper examines how China's grid governance is used for stability maintenance and how in practice the system has become alienated from its original purpose of social control. We find that grid governance is achieved mainly through three mechanisms: intelligence gathering, case coordination and real-time reporting for stability maintenance. We further reveal that while grid governance provides an important infrastructural power for intelligence gathering, the realization of this power could be hindered by contradictory logics among different levels of government. This research not only provides empirical data on how China's grid governance works in practice but also calls for a rethinking of the capacity of China's stability maintenance regime.

Social exchange theory has provided the dominant basis for understanding exchange relationships in organizational settings. Despite its predominance within the management field, there are a number of unaddressed issues. This special issue seeks to further social exchange research in work settings. We differentiate social from economic exchange and highlight the moderating role of cultural and individual differences in explaining the outcomes associated with social exchange relationships. We introduce the ideas of content, process, and mixed models of exchange to reflect the different emphases given to the amount and type of resources exchanged, the quality of the relationship, and a combination of both. The five papers in this special issue illustrate these models. We discuss the applicability of social exchange theory across cultural contexts and present suggestions for future research.

This study delves into the intricate relationship between chief executive officers' (CEOs') experiences of poverty and the digital transformation of their firms. Employing comprehensive data collection on CEOs' birthplaces and leveraging advanced text analytics to quantify digitalization, our analysis encompasses a wide array of listed companies in China. The findings reveal that CEOs' impoverished experiences exert a detrimental influence on their firms' digital transformation efforts, primarily due to a lack of motivation and social resources necessary for such initiatives. However, this adverse effect can be ameliorated when CEOs gain access to substantial social resources in later life. Our conclusions are robust, supported by rigorous testing, and underscore not only the impact of CEOs' early-life poverty on corporate digitalization but also the potential for overcoming these challenges through the acquisition of external social resources and connections in adulthood. This study contributes significantly to existing literature and offers practical implications for enhancing corporate digital transformation strategies.

Do authoritarian governments’ responses towards different civil society organizations (CSOs) reflect policy differentiations? Building on the existing literature of graduated control, diversification of civil society, and consultative authoritarianism, this paper utilizes an online field experiment,1 and interviews with government officials and CSO leaders to demonstrate that local governments have the tendencies to intentionally treat different CSOs with different policy responses, referred to as “deliberate differentiation” in this paper. However, contrary to what the existing literature would suggest, this study reveals that at the local level, such differentiation is driven more by the state's interest in extracting productivity and outsourcing responsibility for the provision of public goods and less by the state's need to acquire information from CSOs, including politically sensitive advocacy groups.