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Friendships, an important form of people’s everyday relationships with others, have been studied by many scholars from different disciplines. However, there is limited research on friendship in the context of childhood, particularly that of Chinese rural children. This chapter presents findings from an in-depth study on Chinese children’s understandings and experiences of friendships with peers in the context of a rural primary boarding school. Data for this research were collected through an intensive five-month study, using an ethnographic approach, in a rural primary boarding school (given the pseudonym ‘Central Primary School’) in the western area of China in 2016. This chapter discusses parents’ influences on children’s selection of friends, particularly their ‘good’ friends, and their understandings of the functions of making friends in the context of rural China. It unpacks parents’ interventions on children’s friendships by discussing the moralised hierarchical relationship between children and their parents – children are expected to show obedience to parents. Then, it argues that the Confucian-collectivist values construct a relationship between a child’s individual achievement and their family’s collective good, which makes friendship not only an individual issue but also a collective one too.

Purpose — This chapter focuses on trust-building between American and Chinese business negotiators in the U.S.–Chinese collaborative projects through the work of ethnic Chinese employees. These ethnic Chinese employees can be effective trust-builders who can prevent dishonest behaviors in negotiations and implementations of projects in China through adequate corporate policies and training.Design/methodology/approach — The data were collected through semi-structured personal in-depth interviews through years 1994–2004 in the United States and in Hong Kong. The data were further validated by the author’s recent six years of field work in mainland China (2006–2011).Findings — The work explains how 36 Chinese expatriates in the United States and 24 Chinese executives in Hong Kong established trust between the U.S. negotiators coming from an individualistic, goal-oriented, low-context culture with a mature market economy and a well-established legal system and Chinese negotiators coming from a collectivistic, relationship-oriented, power-driven, high-context culture with an emerging market economy and an embryonic legal system. Many Chinese expatriates and executives have learned to entwine affect-based trust (feeling) and cognitive-based trust (information) with the Chinese representatives but cannot convey the affect-based trust to the relationships between American and Chinese representatives. Many Chinese expatriates and executives can use their affect-based trust to ask for reciprocity from the Chinese representatives and discern how to leverage on valid information provided by both sides. The social consequences of breaking affect-based trust relationships in the context of the Chinese culture are well above the norms to facilitate honest relationships between the U.S.–Chinese collaborative projects. The affect-based trust between ethnic Chinese employees and Chinese negotiators is transferred to defer dishonest behaviors in negotiations and projects when these ethnic Chinese employees perceive to have authority to mobilize American corporate resources in the negotiation processes.Social implications — American corporations need to enhance the effectiveness of their ethnic Chinese employees as valuable honesty builders in negotiations and implementations of projects in China, where there are weak institutional policies and structures to punish dishonest organizational practices.Originality/value — It is important for American corporations to develop a shared understanding between American representatives and their ethnic Chinese employees in the context of U.S.–Chinese cooperative project negotiations through corporate policies and training programs before a team of American representatives is formed.

Interpersonal trust is an important element of Chinese guanxi network. In this chapter, we examine Chinese guanxi network from a trust perspective. We adopt the distinction that trust could be built on either a socio-emotional basis (affect-based trust) or an instrumental basis (cognition-based trust) and use this lens to examine cultural differences in Chinese and Western social networks. Specifically, we will discuss (a) how the two dimensions of trust are related in the Chinese versus American context, and (b) how affect-based trust is associated with different forms of social exchange in Chinese versus American social networks. Because dyadic relationships are embedded within larger social networks, trust between two network actors is also likely to be influenced by the social context that surrounds them. Hence, we also examine how dyadic trust is shaped by higher-level network properties such as density.

The industrial buyer-seller relational process models from the Eastern and Western worlds have not been combined. The Western world has dominated the development of the models, while there exist only a very limited amount of guanxi development models from the East. This paper is exploratory in nature, focusing on combining the development of these two worlds into one intercultural model. Four case relationships verify the proposed model.

This paper focuses on only one cultural context outside of the West, that is to say, China. In order to justify the model to be completely an intercultural one, research in other cultural contexts is necessary.

Managing diverse talents has become a necessary part of the human resource management of contemporary organizations. The growing diversity of organizations' workforce makes companies reassess their conventional HRM approaches. State-owned enterprises get the increasing attention of talent management scholars since state firms enthusiastically compete for talents. These companies have some particularities that distinguish them from private firms, and there is a need to analyse the existing research on the HRM in state companies which has the potential to add a missing part to the puzzle of managing diverse talents. We study the major topics in the literature on human resource management and talent management in state-owned enterprises, the key findings researchers provide and the gaps in the literature that need to be covered and the resulting research directions for future studies.

This chapter examines the similarities and differences between the concepts of transformational leadership as developed within North America and the Confucian idea of transformation. It argues that Confucian tradition encompasses the essential elements embedded in the concept of transformational leadership. The former differentiates from the latter in its deeper degree of transformation, emphasis on morality and culture, and its focus on transformation from the inside outwards. The two greatest educators in Chinese history, Confucius and Cai Yuanpei, are evaluated in terms of their transformational leadership qualities in the Western sense. By looking at Confucius and Cai Yuanpei as successful transformational leaders, the chapter identifies four important factors from Chinese cases that may contribute to the success of this type of leadership. Implications of this comparison are discussed as they may inform the knowledge, research and practices of transformational leadership.

This chapter provides research results from a study of contemporary leadership approaches (i.e., paternalistic, charismatic, transformational, aesthetic, authentic, and pragmatic leadership) in eight Chinese organizations. Data were collected from case studies in four private-owned enterprises (POEs) and four state-owned enterprises (SOEs) through both interviews and questionnaires. The main purpose of this chapter is to provide contextual analysis of these findings by applying the concept of field from Bourdieu's sociology. This research contributes to the leadership literature by generalizing Western leadership theories to the Chinese context as well as by giving an insight into contemporary leadership approaches in modern Chinese business by deeply contextualizing these leadership behaviors.

Most offender narrative being studied has been in oral forms, produced in the reciprocal process of researcher-(ex) offender interviews. This chapter offers an introduction to a variation of offender narrative study within the prison and rehabilitation context: the narrative of written autobiography. Since the early 1940s, Chinese reform institutions have required written autobiographies from new admitters, provided with clear presubscripted guidelines of instructions as well as postcensorship. For this chapter, we trace back and analyse this model based on 28 prisoners' autobiographies in mainland China between 2007 and 2009, as well as archive documents in different historical periods. We have found that the mandatory offender autobiographies are highly functional writings with clear requirements that embody the existing power structure. We have also found considerable commonality with findings in Western contexts on the presence and problems of narrative compliance in rehabilitation. We argue that narrative criminology should further engage in understanding the practice of narrative censorship and co-authorship in criminal justice processes, as it takes on different forms in different historical–social contexts.