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A key challenge for exporters and international marketing/purchasing managers is formulating strategic responses to deal with geopolitical disruptions during a trade war between superpowers. While past studies provide insightful analysis of the influence of changes in the institutional environment (regulatory pressures) on national and firm-level trade activities, they tend to ignore the association between inward (sourcing) or outward (export) international activities of firms during a trade war. In this study, we aim to explore various strategic options employed by third-party SME exporters in response to geopolitical disruptions, institutional pressures and constraints during a trade war.

We adopted a qualitative methodology and applied a hermeneutical approach in collecting, analysing and theorising interview findings. We conducted interviews with 15 owners or senior managers from 12 Australian and New Zealand exporters that exported or sourced significantly from at least one party of the trade war, the USA or China, between 2018 and 2020.

Our study developed a typology of fencing vs. balancing for explaining third-party SME exporters’ response strategies in terms of export market and international sourcing locations during a trade war. Fencing strategy centres on location choice decisions based on a fence or a secure buffer zone. Balancing strategy focuses on leveraging opportunities outside the conflict zone, i.e. third-party countries. Our study finds that exporters’ location choice decisions are influenced by a number of institutional factors during the trade war.

Firstly, our study examined only the early phase of the trade war under the “Trump” era. Future research may consider a longitudinal study design that examines exporters’ responses to global political uncertainty over a longer term. Secondly, we chose Australia and New Zealand as the focal context of this study. Future research could investigate exporters from other third-party countries that have different institutional conditions during the US-China trade war.

Firstly, an exporting firm should monitor and assess closely the wider changes in international relations between their home country’s major security partner and major trading partner, and the impact of these changes on the political risks of operating in international locations. Secondly, as the trade war intensifies, the fencing option needs to be given a greater weight than the balancing option in the strategic decision making of an exporter from a third-party country. Lastly, we encourage marketers and managers to reflect on and differentiate short-term and long-term benefits in strategic market-sourcing location decisions.

Our study makes a pioneering effort to theorise the linkages between institutional factors and the combined evaluation of export market selection and sourcing location selection choices under global political uncertainty based on the institution-based view. We present a conceptual framework highlighting the importance of institutional avoidance, embeddedness, comparative institutional advantages and multiple institutional logics for SME exporters’ international location selections during the trade war. Furthermore, we combine these institutional factors into two overarching constructs namely institutional buffer and institutional pluralism.

Industry-wide crises involving consumer products place consumers at risk. Consumers rely on institutions that constrain corporate practice and control product quality to reduce risk. As institutions vary by country, country-of-origin (COO) acts as a salient cue for consumers to identify institutional quality and thus evaluate risk when making purchase decisions. However, in the era of globalisation, identification of institutional quality becomes complex as global value chains involve different countries such as brand origin (BO) and country-of-manufacture (COM). Therefore, this research investigates how BO and COM individually and jointly affect consumers' institutional perceptions and subsequent purchase decision-making in the presence of systemic risk.

This research includes three studies (n = 764) employing surveys and choice modelling experiments with samples from China and the USA.

The results show that BO and COM relate to different institutional perceptions. BO evokes perceptions of legitimacy and the regulatory environment, while COM evokes perceptions of the normative and the regulatory environment. The combination of BO and COM determines how institutional quality is communicated and further affects consumers' legitimacy perceptions, preferences and willingness to pay a price premium.

This research contributes to understanding the effect of BO and COM in the context of complex value chains from an institutional perspective. It also provides implications for leveraging complex COO cues with BO and COM information to improve consumers' institutional perceptions.

Small and medium-sized exporters (SMEs) are driven to develop a network entry strategy to tap into a new foreign market. The purpose of this paper is to draw on the network perspective to evaluate how a network gatekeeper facilitates a foreign SME exporter’s entry into local business networks in China.

The single case study method was adopted. The Ule New Zealand Mall, an online shopping platform that sells New Zealand products in China, was selected in this case study. The authors applied the critical incident technique to evaluate the position of New Zealand Post (as a home country-based network gatekeeper), the roles within the position, and the key outcome of the network gatekeeping.

The study discovers two key roles of network gatekeepers: bridging the gap in trust between outsider networks and insider networks; and reducing the costs of experiential learning for SME exporters. Finally, this study concludes that the “brokered insidership” position acquired by SME exporters is the key outcome of network gatekeeping in foreign market entry.

This study advances the understanding of theories of structural holes, business network and gatekeeping. The authors articulate the critical position assumed by a network gatekeeper in bridging two otherwise disconnected business networks, and their key roles in networking. The study also proposes a new network concept – “brokered insidership”.

This article aims to identify critical aspects of Chinese‐Western intercultural guanxi relationships that have largely been ignored as a domain for study in international business and industrial marketing, and to suggest a way forward.

A theme analysis across a range of academic and business journal articles is undertaken to capture major themes involving China‐focused research that relates to international business and industrial marketing, and also to locate critical themes that may have been overlooked.

Intercultural interaction at a personal level is both unavoidable and critical for successfully doing business with China. This study introduces the term guanxi gateway ties to highlight a special class of facilitating relationships that can emerge through interactions between guanxi insiders and guanxi outsiders. Insiders and outsiders can meet and work together in this middle‐cultural territory for the instrumental purpose of obtaining passage through the “gateway”.

Inevitably some journal articles of interest may have been missed in the review due to the chosen scanning boundary. Nevertheless the search method provides a sufficient base to reveal recurrent research themes, and also overlooked themes of potential significance.

Guanxi gateway ties assist companies and individual business actors to find a path through the cumbersome Chinese bureaucracy and hierarchical levels by activating personal relationships.

This study reveals a commonly overlooked perspective of guanxi, that is, as a facilitator of culture‐bridging ties. The conventional business perspective of guanxi can be viewed as evolving from a gated community into an intercultural facilitating mechanism.

The purpose of this study is to investigate perceptions of food distribution gatekeepers in China regarding likely acceptance of genetically modified (GM) foods by Chinese consumers. It also aims to consider policy implications for food exporting countries.

An exploratory approach using in‐depth interviews was adopted. Key informants of a sample of 20 companies in five main commercial centres in the People's Republic of China and in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region were interviewed. In addition, two interviews were conducted with a key government official and a professor at a leading agricultural university in order to provide details of Chinese Government policy.

According to gatekeepers, Chinese consumers currently have ambiguous views of GM food products. It is concluded that Chinese consumers are likely to accept GM foods provided there are consumer benefits, a price advantage, and credible governmental information concerning safety of GM foods.

Chinese Government policy is to take advantage of a window of opportunity provided by markets such as Japan and Europe, which presently prefer to import non‐GM food; at the same time China is developing full potential to grow GM crops just as soon as external market conditions change. Current barriers to export of GM food products to China are likely to be short‐term.

This paper provides an insight into how gatekeepers in the food distribution channel in China view GM foods, and how they believe Chinese consumers will react to the introduction of such foods.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the reliability of flex-on-board (FOB) interconnection connected with an anisotropic conductive paste (ACP), which is prepared by dispersing nickel balls in the epoxy-curing system.

Differential scanning calorimetry was used to evaluate the curing characteristics of the paste. And the contact resistances of bonding joints and 90º peel adhesion were tested before and after high temperature and high humidity test (85°C, 85% humidity), thermal cycling (−45°C∼125°C, 30min/cycle) and pressure cooker test (PCT, 121°C, 100% humidity 2 atm) to evaluate the flex on board (FOB) interconnection reliability.

It is found that FOB test vehicles have been successfully bonded by using ACP for the first time. And the ACP bonding joint of FOB has good reliability and can meet the requirements of FOB interconnection. Compared with conventional anisotropic conductive film (ACF), this ACP interconnection provides higher adhesion strength, higher joint current carrying capability and higher reliability performance and lower cost for FOB interconnection.

ACP is applied in the interconnection of FOB. It has the higher reliability performance and lower cost for than the conventional ACF.

This study aims to reconstruct the frictional vibration signal from noise and characterize the running-in process by frictional vibration.

There is a strong correlation between tangential frictional vibration and normal frictional vibration. On this basis, a new frictional vibration reconstruction method combining cross-correlation analysis with ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) was proposed. Moreover, the concept of information entropy of friction vibration is introduced to characterize the running-in process.

Compared with the wavelet packet method, the tangential friction vibration and the normal friction vibration reconstructed by the method presented in this paper have a stronger correlation. More importantly, during the running-in process, the information entropy of friction vibration gradually decreases until the equilibrium point is reached, which is the same as the changing trend of friction coefficient, indicating that the information entropy of friction vibration can be used to characterize the running-in process.

The study reveals that the application EEMD method is an appropriate approach to reconstruct frictional vibration and the information entropy of friction vibration represents the running-in process. Based on these results, a condition monitoring system can be established to automatically evaluate the running-in state of mechanical parts.

The EEMD method was applied to reconstruct the frictional vibration. Furthermore, the information entropy of friction vibration was used to analysis the running-in process.

This study aims to investigate the microtopography transformation at a low-speed heavy-load interface with the lubrication of powder particles and its nonlinear friction effect on the sliding pair in contact.

Based on the universal mechanical tester (UMT) tribometer and VK shape-measuring laser microscope, comparative friction experiments were conducted with graphite powder lubrication. The friction coefficient with nonlinear fluctuations and the three-dimensional morphology of the boundary layer at the interface were observed and analyzed under different operating conditions. The effects on lubrication mechanisms and frictional nonlinearity at the sliding pair were focused on under different surface roughness and powder layer thickness conditions.

At a certain external load and sliding speed, the initial specimen surface with an appropriate initial roughness and powder thickness can store and bond the powder lubricant to form a boundary film readily. The relatively flat and firm boundary layer of powder at the microscopic interface can reduce the coefficient of friction and suppress its nonlinear fluctuation effectively. Therefore, proper surface roughness and powder layer thickness are beneficial to the graphite lubrication and stability maintenance of a friction pair.

This research is conducive to developing a deep understanding of the microtopography transformation with frictional nonlinearity at a low-speed heavy-load interface with graphite powder lubrication.