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This study investigated a new attributional phenomenon in a brand scandal setting in which consumers tend to blame the top management of a brand, even though it was the frontline parties that caused the scandal. The authors termed this phenomenon upward blame attribution (UBA), shedding light on whether consumers in a host country indicate a higher UBA for a multinational (vs domestic) brand scandal, which in turn reinforces their revenge and impairs their reconciliation reactions, and whether these effects are contingent on consumer animosity.

Two experimental studies were conducted with real and fictitious brand/product and country stimuli with 1,399 Chinese participants.

Both studies verified UBA and found that Chinese consumers' UBA is higher for multinational (vs domestic) brand scandals, which drives their stronger desire for revenge and weaker desire for reconciliation. Moreover, consumers with high (vs low) animosity toward a multinational brand's home country reported a higher UBA for the multinational (vs domestic) brand scandal, which in turn reinforces their desire for revenge and impairs their desire for reconciliation.

The study provides new insights into host-country consumers' more severe UBA and responses toward multinational versus domestic brand scandals and the amplifying role of consumer animosity in these processes. It also has implications for mitigating host-country consumers' UBA and negative responses to multinational brand scandals.

This study contributes to the blame attribution literature by verifying consumers' UBA and the country-of-origin (COO) literature by revealing host-country consumers' higher UBA, stronger revenge desire and weaker reconcile desire toward multinational (vs domestic) brand scandals. It extends the knowledge regarding consumers' blame attributions toward the top management of a multinational (vs domestic) brand in scandals and the impact of such attributions.

Although the impact of environmental, social and governance (ESG) on firms' innovation has attracted attention, the existing research findings diverge. The authors believe that failure to consider both innovation input and output is an important reason for the divergence of conclusions in the extant literature when discussing the impact of ESG and firm innovation. Thus, based on signaling theory, this study aims to reconcile these divergent findings by examining the impact of ESG performance on firms' innovation efficiency.

To seek empirical evidence to support the authors’ theoretical view, the authors conduct an empirical test based on the Tobit model using 8 years of data from Chinese listed companies.

Although ESG performance effectively improves firms' innovation efficiency, the institutional-level signaling environment (including state-owned firms and regional market development) weakens the positive effect of ESG performance on firms' innovation efficiency. Further tests suggest that financing constraints partially mediate the relationship between ESG performance and firms' innovation efficiency.

By systematically revealing whether, how and under what circumstances ESG performance improves firms' innovation advantages, this study bridges the gap in the existing literature and highlights important implications to suggest how firms can better capture the value associated with ESG.

This paper aims to offer insight into how strategies within the accounting profession, which has been becoming more global, might be changed by the recent outbreak of the Second Cold War between the West and the Rest of the World.

We explore the strategies of those who called themselves “Confucian accountants” in China, a country which has recently discouraged its state-owned enterprises from using the services of the Big 4. We do this by employing qualitative research methods, including reflexive photo interviews, in which Big-4 accountants, recognised as the most Westernised accounting actors in China, and Confucian accountants are asked to take and explain photographs representing their professional lives. Bourdieu’s notions of “economy of practices” and “vision-of-division strategy” are drawn upon to understand who the Confucian accountants are and what they do strategically in their pursuit of a higher revenue stream and improved social standing in the Chinese social space.

The homegrown Confucian accountants share cultural-cognitive characteristics with neighbouring social actors, such as their clients and government officials, who have been inculcated with Confucianism and the state’s cultural confidence policy in pursuit of a “socialist market economy with Chinese characteristics”. Those accountants try to enhance their social standing and revenue stream by strategically demonstrating their difference from Big-4 accountants. For this purpose, they wear Confucian clothes, have Confucian props in their office, employ Confucian phrases in their everyday conversations, use Confucian business cards and construct and maintain guanxi with government officials and clients.

This paper is the first attempt to explore Confucian accountants’ strategies for increasing their revenue and social standing at the start of the Second Cold War.

This study aims to investigate the bright and dark sides of environmental, social and governance (ESG) during the COVID-19 pandemic, including both the outbreak and recovery periods, for the Chinese hospitality industry.

Using panel data of 564 firm-quarter observations from 2018 to 2020, the authors adopt fixed-effects regression estimation with standard errors clustered at the firm level. To address potential endogeneity concerns, the authors also use the two-stage least squares estimator with instrumental variables.

The results suggest that ESG plays different roles in market- and accounting-based performance during the COVID-19 outbreak and recovery periods. Specifically, ESG practices show a bright side as a reputation builder to mitigate the negative pandemic impact on market-based performance, whereas the dark side of ESG practices consumes firm resources to aggravate the negative pandemic impact on accounting-based performance during the coronavirus outbreak. These results also suggest hospitality companies benefit bountifully from ESG practices during the COVID-19 recovery.

ESG plays a vital role for hospitality firms by providing insurance-like protection during and after the COVID-19 outbreak. Additionally, hospitality firms should evaluate their capability to adapt resource-consuming ESG practices.

Existing hospitality COVID-19 studies have investigated the effect of ESG on firm performance within a short period with mixed results. This study extends the literature by showing the different effects of ESG practices on market- and accounting-based performance during the COVID-19 outbreak and recovery periods.

This policy review paper is an analysis of the Double Reduction Policy (DRP) of China that was promulgated in July 2021. It looks into its rationale as well as different stakeholders' early reactions to the policy.

Critical policy analysis (CPA) method was used to identify (1) the artefacts, such as language, objects and acts, that were significant carriers of the DRP; (2) communities of meaning, interpretation, speech and practice that are relevant to the DRP and its implementation; (3) the local discourses relevant to the DRP; and (4) the tension points and their conceptual sources (affective, cognitive and/or moral) by different DRP stakeholders. As per the comparative education field, this paper compares the pre-DRP and post-DRP periods to tease out how the policy affects different stakeholders of education.

The DRP in China could be attributed to diverse factors such as demography, socialist economic and developmental visions and manpower structure. The implementation of the DRP has generated uneven reactions among different stakeholders and geographical regions both in speed and scale. While education stakeholders have no choice but to adopt the policy, they face challenges derived from a sudden halt of private educational resources and subsequent increased duties of parents and schools.

The significance of this early policy analysis lies in offering an insight into education development in China by analysing and deliberating the DRP from different perspectives.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the development and evolution of industrial innovation ecosystems of Around-Tongji Knowledge Economy Circle from the three levels mentioned above, focusing on knowledge-producing populations, core populations and service-supporting populations, and to further develop this research framework by combining with the latest developments.

Based on the five-helix theory and economic census statistical data, this paper adopts geographic information system technology and examines the characteristics of the industrial innovation ecosystem and the synergistic evolution process in Around-Tongji knowledge economy circle.

The knowledge product populations lead the development of industries in Around-Tongji Knowledge Economy Circle. It contributes political capital output for the government. It innovates community cooperation and governance mode, and it improves the natural ecological environment. In the face of the changes and challenges in the development environment, the future development must be recognised from the height of the iterative development of the interaction mode between university knowledge production and economic and social development.

Based on the five-helix theory and economic census statistical data, this paper examines the characteristics of the industrial innovation ecosystem and the synergistic evolution process in Around-Tongji Knowledge Economy Circle. It further expands the research framework used to develop a synergistic evolution model, which reveals the interactive and synergistic relationship among the populations and the evolution characteristics of the entire industrial innovation ecosystem. This paper also provides useful perspectives for the study of the industrial innovation ecosystem.

This study aims to examine how business executives' political connections are associated with government subsidies and strategic change, and how they, in turn, influence firm performance, measured by return on assets (ROA) and market share.

Hypotheses were tested using the large firm-level dataset provided by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) of China for the period 2003–2013. This is one of the most comprehensive datasets of Chinese manufacturing companies and includes 321,722 firms on average per year, which spans over 37 industries.

The authors found that political connections, measured by senior executives' membership in the National People's Congress of China (NPC), were positively associated with government subsidies but were not associated with strategic change. Also, government subsidies, as the underlying mechanism, mediated the relationships between NPC membership and firm performance but strategic change did not.

By examining the possible mediators between corporate political strategies and firm performance, the authors confirmed the thought that the impact of political connections on firm performance is a complex phenomenon and goes beyond a simple direct effect. However, future research could explore other mediators in this relationship.

While the direct relationship between political connections and firm performance has been examined in management literature, the results are mixed. For the first time, the authors addressed the gap and opened the “black box” – the underlying mechanisms of this relationship. This study's findings contribute to the literature on corporate political activity, strategic change, and their influences on firm performance.

The objectives of this study are to examine the impacts of CSR on purchase intentions either directly or indirectly and to investigate the moderating effects of consumer ethnocentrism on the relationship between CSR and purchase intentions.

This study utilized an online self-administered survey for data collection. All the measurement items were adopted or adapted from prior research concerning international marketing (Churchill, 1979). Concerning rating scales, the items of CSR, brand attitudes, and consumer ethnocentrism were measured from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree), and the items of purchase intentions were measured from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree).

The empirical findings suggest that CSR significantly influences purchase intentions directly and indirectly via brand attitudes. Besides, consumer ethnocentrism strengthens the positive effects of CSR on brand attitudes and purchase intentions.

This research sheds light on young Chinese consumers' purchase behaviors, which could facilitate Western brands implementing effective and efficient marketing strategies in the Chinese market.

With the growing concern of various sectors of society regarding environmental issues and the promotion of sustainable development, green technology innovation is generally considered to be conducive to the long-term development of enterprises. However, because of the existence of agency problems, managers may have shortsighted behaviors. Then how will managers' shortsighted behaviors affect enterprises' green technology innovation?

This paper uses machine learning-based text analysis methods to construct a manager myopia index based on the data from A-share listed companies on the Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges from 2015 to 2020. We examine the impact of manager myopia on green technology innovation in companies.

Our study finds that manager myopia significantly inhibits green technology innovation in companies. However, when multiple large shareholders coexist and the proportion of institutional investors' holdings is high, it can alleviate the inhibitory effect of manager myopia on green innovation. Heterogeneity tests show that the impact of manager myopia on green technology innovation is relatively significant in non-state-owned and manufacturing companies, as well as in the electricity industry. Robustness tests demonstrate that our conclusions remain valid after using propensity score matching to eliminate endogeneity problems.

From the perspective of corporate governance, this paper incorporates managers' shortsightedness, multiple large shareholders and institutional investors' shareholding ratios into the same logical framework, analyzes their internal mechanisms, helps improve corporate governance, enhances green innovation capabilities and has strong implications for the implementation of national innovation-driven development strategies and the achievement of “carbon peak” and “carbon neutrality” targets.

Nested within institutional theory and the political economy perspective, this study aims to examine Chinese outward foreign direct investments (OFDI)-supporting organizations and fostering mechanisms for its SMEs in Europe’s largest economy, Germany.

The authors conduct a multiple-case study to present rich insights from elite interviews with representatives of Chinese and German governmental organizations, intermediary parties and specialized OFDI consultants. In addition, the authors analyze secondary data such as presentations, websites, brochures, social media and recent Chinese OFDI policies for SMEs. The findings are triangulated by interviewing business owners and senior executives of seven Chinese SMEs that have invested in Germany.

Cooperating with Germany’s federal government, China’s ministries implemented an effective OFDI support network in Germany, which connects and benefits both economies. This includes Chinese governmental organizations, privately-held national champions, German–Chinese business associations and linked intermediary parties. These organizations support SMEs through four main mechanisms: networking and information, mutually beneficial knowledge transfer between innovation partners, lobbying for potential cooperation and an objective picture of Chinese OFDI and facilitating investment services.

This study advances OFDI theory and contributes to the growing discussion on the internationalization of Chinese SMEs by shedding light on China’s OFDI support organizations and mechanisms in the German market. The study also offers practical contributions. Understanding better how governments can spur internationalization is vital, as it determines the effectiveness of policymaking and fosters international mutual understanding, cultural exchange and firm growth and innovation (Ahlstrom, 2010), and hence ultimately contributes positively to society. Moreover, knowing the specific OFDI support organizations and measures China is currently adopting can serve as a helpful orientation for Chinese entrepreneurs who plan to invest in Germany.