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An increased globalisation pushes forward the study of international entrepreneurship that however has been mainly analysed at a macro-environmental and an individual level. The authors want instead identify the determinants of international entrepreneurship from a firm-level perspective, specifically in relation to the key decision-making entity – the board of directors. The authors focused on the overall composition of the board of directors in terms of gender diversity and how this affects multi-subject decision-making when it comes to international entrepreneurship.

Based on entrepreneurial decision-making and the neo-institutional theory, the authors analyse the relationship between gender diversity in boards of directors and firms' international entrepreneurship, assessing how state ownership and ownership concentration moderate this relationship. Using a sample made up of China's listed companies from 2009 to 2018, the authors empirically test the main effect and the moderating effects.

International entrepreneurship is less prevalent in firms with more female directors, but in terms of quality of the decisions, these boards perform better. State ownership and ownership concentration can strengthen and weaken the relationship between the presence of female directors and the intensity of international entrepreneurship, respectively.

Firstly, the authors draw attention to the implications of gender diversity in boards of directors, calling for further studies on communication and collaboration patterns within multi-subject decision-making. Secondly, the authors’ conclusions enrich academic literature on female directors by exploring the roles they play in firms' decision-making when it comes to international entrepreneurship.

Following industry-based view’s (IBV) isomorphic trend among firms in the same industries, the purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to investigate whether industry capital intensity encourages or inhibits firm’s utilization of strategic HRM systems, particularly, high-commitment work systems (HCWS); and second, to examine the quadratic moderating role of firm size on the relationship between industry capital intensity and firms’ utilization of HCWS, drawing on the interactionist view of IBV and the resource-based view, as well as the interactive perspective in the contextualized HRM field.

The research design was time lagged. Firm-level subjectively rated data were collected from 168 large firms with more than 200 employees in Beijing. Industry-level objectively rated data were collected from the statistics yearbooks of Beijing city.

The industry capital intensity was positively related to firms’ utilization of HCWS, all else being equal. For large firms in this research, the relationship between industry capital intensity and firms’ utilization of HCWS was moderated by firm size in a quadratic way.

This research contributes to contextualized HRM literature by empirically examining the complex interactive effects of industry capital intensity and firm’s utilization of HCWS. First, it established the direct cross-level relationship between industry capital intensity and firms’ utilization of strategic HRM systems. Moreover, it explored the boundary conditions of such relationship by investigating the quadratic moderating role of firm size.