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This study examines the transformation of labour non-governmental organisations (NGOs) operating in Mainland China since the enactment of the 2017 Overseas NGO Management Law, which aims to regulate foreign concerns functioning outside the direct control of the state. It focuses on the extent to which these organisations have responded to the rapidly changing political and social environment by altering their goals and strategies in support of migrant workers. It also considers the relevance of Western social movement theories (SMTs) to China's grassroots labour movement in the 2020s. 

The research is based on case studies of ten labour NGOs operating in Beijing, Tianjin and Yunnan. It draws upon fifteen semi-structured interviews with the founders, leaders and activists affiliated with those organisations, as well as records and documented information of each of those organisations.

While the power and influence of labour NGOs markedly diminished, most have been able to adapt their goals and the strategies remain sustainable amidst both China's changing political and social climates and the global pandemic. It suggests that conventional SMTs can still offer valuable insights into understanding the development of labour NGOs in China, although they might not fully interpret the specific conditions and challenges faced by these organisations.

This study stands out as one of very few to offer empirical evidence on the inner workings of China's labour NGOs over the last six years. It also contributes to our understanding of social movements in a non-Western context.

This article aims to examine the role of boundaryless career orientation in influencing Internet professionals' strategies toward workplace problems in China's Internet companies, which feature prominent problems including excessive overwork. It addresses one question: how do Chinese Internet professionals make grievance strategies?

This article draws on qualitative data based on semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 134 employees from 6 representative Chinese Internet companies. The data were collected during 2018-2021 and analyzed with a grounded theory approach.

This article highlights the role of boundaryless career orientation in explaining Chinese Internet professionals' strategies toward workplace grievances. The author develops a comprehensive model to illustrate how boundaryless career orientation influences four grievance strategies namely, strategic compliance, exit, dissent expression and resistance that correspond to four different motives to advance the professionals' boundaryless career: learning, transferring, relieving and resolving. Internet professionals choose different grievance strategies based on how each option can benefit their boundaryless career goals.

This article is one of the first to bring in boundaryless career orientation as a key factor in explaining Chinese Internet professionals' grievance strategies. It provides a fuller picture than previous studies by showing wide varieties of professionals' grievance behaviors. The finding of high-level boundaryless career orientation among Internet professionals offers insights on how companies can improve employment relations by improving career management practices.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a critical historical analysis of the business (mis)behaviors and influencing factors that discourage enduring cooperation between principals and agents, to introduce strategies that embrace the social values, economic motivation and institutional designs historically adopted to curtail dishonest acts in international business and to inform an improved principal–agent theory that reflects principal–agent reciprocity as shaped by social, political, cultural, economic, strategic and ideological forces

The critical historical research method is used to analyze Chinese compradors and the foreign companies they served in pre-1949 China.

Business practitioners can extend orthodox principal–agent theory by scrutinizing the complex interactions between local agents and foreign companies. Instead of agents pursuing their economic interests exclusively, as posited by principal–agent theory, they also may pursue principal-shared interests (as suggested by stewardship theory) because of social norms and cultural values that can affect business-related choices and the social bonds built between principals and agents.

The behaviors of compradors and foreign companies in pre-1949 China suggest international business practices for shaping social bonds between principals and agents and foreign principals’ creative efforts to enhance shared interests with local agents.

Understanding principal–agent theory’s limitations can help international management scholars and practitioners mitigate transaction partners’ dishonest acts.

A critical historical analysis of intermediary businesspeople’s (mis)behavior in pre-1949 (1840–1949) China can inform the generalizability of principal–agent theory and contemporary business strategies for minimizing agents’ dishonest acts.

The aim of this paper is to examine the strategic approach of culturally responsive and communicative teaching (CRCT) through a critical assessment of interracial teachers in their daily school interactions.

The empirical data were obtained through interviews among ten interracial teachers. The analysis was made through a thematic approach to obtain substantial data from interviews.

The findings reveal that attempts to gain sufficient comprehension of CRCT are actualized through routine interaction in the multicultural school environment hence resulting in embedding self-awareness of cultural competence in a multicultural classroom, constructing emotional and social development on cultural awareness and internalizing responsive awareness on social engagement in global learning.

The contribution of this research provides an insightful value on expanding key consideration to support the multicultural classroom environment with an active engagement and enhancement of CRCT as fundamental basis of the multicultural classroom.

This study aims to examine the role of institutional investors (using proxy voting and voice) in influencing the decisions and governance landscape of their investee firms.

The authors use exploratory research design due to the underdevelopment of the problem phenomena, especially in the context of emerging economies. Using asset management companies (AMC) as a proxy for institutional investors, the authors use a multiple case study design. This design was relevant in the setting as it assured triangulation by studying the same phenomenon across firms with distinct characteristics. The authors sourced the data for the multiple cases from primary sources (such as semi-structured interviews) and secondary sources (such as official Webpages and social media pages of AMC and examination of archival documents). Finally, the authors used qualitative content analysis to analyse the data.

The findings suggest that shareholder activism by institutional investors has grown in India over the period, particularly in matters related to corporate governance, related party transactions, remuneration and compensation. These AMC in India use proxy voting services for advising on voting resolutions in their investee companies. However, voting by AMC does not generally affect resolution results. This is particularly true in the presence of a high concentration of promoter holdings in investee companies.

The study is a novel attempt in an emerging market context to explore the role of institutional investors in influencing firm decisions and improving the governance landscape of the company using proxy voting and voice. This is especially important as the institutional framework in emerging markets is not as strong as in developed markets.

Drawing on bargaining power and the inequality aversion perspective, this study aims to probe employees’ influence on addressing income inequality between top executives and nonexecutive employees. Meanwhile, it examines the moderating role of employee-related factors and plan attributes.

This study uses a staggered difference-in-differences design with a propensity scoring match approach and verification of the parallel trend assumption to test the hypotheses.

The results support the hypothesis that employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) significantly reduce within-firm income inequality. The negative effect is amplified by both the presence of trade unions and the unemployment rate at the regional level, as well as the duration of the lock-in period and the scale of participants within the stock ownership plan.

This study has implications for income inequality research and ESOP design and provides theoretical support for policymakers and corporate governance.

This study contributes to the literature on income inequality by examining the implementation of ESOPs from the employee perspective. Furthermore, it extends the current literature by investigating the strengthening effects of regional factors and ESOP attributes on the relationship between ESOPs and income inequality. The conclusions provide new empirical evidence to promote the effective implementation of ESOPs by combining internal and external factors.

This study aims to fill the gap on proenvironmental behavior studies among consumers in bottom of the pyramid (BOP) market by examining the relationship between values, beliefs and norms among Ghanaian consumers.

A sample of 324 Ghanaian consumers (responses rate of 64%) was used to estimate the model. The data was analyzed using maximum likelihood robust approach of Lavaan package for structural equation modeling in R.

The findings show that there is no significant relationship between values and the new ecological worldview, which also does not affect awareness of environmental consequences. However, awareness of consequences, likely based on personal experiences, significantly impacts perceived ability to reduce threats to the environment. Ghanaian consumers are mainly influenced by personal experiences with local environmental consequences that affect their perceived ability to reduce threats to their environment and their willingness to engage in proenvironmental behavior. The study supports the argument that proenvironmental behavior is the result of complex decision-making that might be influenced by a country’s economic situation, infrastructure, culture and institutions.

This study focuses on a single country in Africa. More studies are needed among other base of the pyramid countries, and in comparison to developed countries’ consumers.

The study adds to the limited knowledge regarding sustainable consumption in the neglected context of the bottom of the pyramid market.

Given the regional diversity in China, this study aims to provide an empirical evaluation of how organizational stakeholders (i.e. customers, employees, suppliers and shareholders) affect corporate environmental sustainability investment (ESI).

To empirically investigate the influence of organizational stakeholders on ESI, this study used regional-level data consists of Chinese A-share stocks for the years 2009–2019.

This study’s findings show that pressure from customers, employees and suppliers has a significant effect on corporate ESI, with customers being the most important stakeholder group. Shareholders, by contrast, have no significant influence on ESI. The influence of these pressures is more pronounced in developed regions (the east) than in less developed (the west) localities of China.

This study complements the stakeholder–institutional perspective by implying to consider the differentiated logics of the contesting stakeholders in the nonmarket operations.

Practically, this study poses that managers must realize the heterogeneity of pressures from stakeholders and the differentiated impact of these pressures keeping in view the institutional differences in different regions.

Our study reports initial empirical evidence that shows how regional differences influence the role of stakeholders in determining corporate environmental strategy.

The mounting focus on environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors in business has sparked substantial curiosity in understanding the nexus between ESG and the companies’ strategic decisions. This study aims to investigate the influence of firms’ ESG disclosure scores on their dividend payout. Furthermore, it examines the nuanced dynamics of this relationship by exploring the moderating role of the country’s investor protection regulations and regulatory enforcement.

This study uses pooled ordinary least square regression with year, industry and country effects. It analyzes a balanced panel data set of 192 non-financial firms drawn from the primary equity indices of BRICS nations. This study examined the data of six years spanning 2015–2020.

The findings discover a significantly positive relationship between ESG scores and dividend payout ratio, conveying that firms with higher ESG scores allocate more of their profits as dividends. Furthermore, the finding reveals that country-level robust investor protection and effective regulatory enforcement mechanisms undermine the positive association between ESG ratings and payouts of dividends, suggesting that the ESG disclosure of firms operating in a setting characterized by enhanced investor safeguards and stricter regulatory oversight will exert less influence on their dividend decisions.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to concentrate on the ESG–dividend nexus in the BRICS countries. Furthermore, this study used each country’s investor protection index and regulatory enforcement scores to comprehend the influence of country-level legal frameworks in shaping the relationship between ESG and dividend decisions, thus adding value to the existing literature on corporate sustainability.

While spontaneous and voluntary knowledge contribution in online communities promotes value co-creation, dysfunctional knowledge behaviors hamper the effectiveness and development of such communities. The study conceptualizes physicians' proactive knowledge sharing and knowledge withholding behaviors in physician-driven online health communities (OHCs) and integrates the theories of role identity as well as communal and exchange relationships to understand the root causes and motivations behind these two types of knowledge behaviors.

The authors collected survey data from 166 users from one of the largest physician-driven OHCs in China and applied the covariance-based structural equation modeling approach to test the hypotheses.

The findings suggest that (1) physicians' professional role identity had a positive indirect effect on proactive knowledge sharing behaviors through communal motivation, and work pressure weakened this indirect effect; and (2) professional role identity had a negative indirect impact on knowledge withholding behaviors through exchange motivation.

This study extends proactive knowledge sharing and knowledge withholding behaviors from the organizational management domain to the online environment, exploring the underlying causes and motivations behind both behaviors in the unique context of physician-driven OHCs. The findings offer practical suggestions for the effective management of OHC platforms, as well as policy implications that respond to the workforce shortage of healthcare providers, a crisis that is unfolding globally.