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This paper aims to understand the characteristics, factors and contingencies of social partnerships between multinational corporations (MNCs) and nonprofits in the context of sustainability that enable or impede the value creation outcome of the collaboration.

A multi-case study with 12 social partnerships operating in China was investigated considering their relative representativeness and different value creation outcomes.

The author presents a snapshot of the current state and unique differences of social partnerships in China, whereas the existing literature has mostly addressed the topic from a Western context. Moreover, the author highlights the key determinants and contextual features that influence the value creation outcome of social partnerships in China.

This study concentrates on the social partnerships in the largest emerging country context of China, and the representativeness of data collected from a small sample may be challenged. Likewise, the 12 social partnerships studied are similar in design but vary in sustainability focus. To test the validity of the theorizing, the study calls for future research to apply the proposed theoretical framework across various contexts across both developing and developed world.

The paper provides guidance to corporate managers and nonprofit decision-makers on how to improve their social partner initiation, operations and governance so as to generate greater collaborative value out of social partnerships in the Chinese market.

This study contributes to the social partnership literature, which has been dominant in the Western context, by offering case evidences from China.

The study shows that social partnerships are increasingly initiated and sustained in the context of sustainability and corporate social responsibility, with the majority oriented toward “satisficing” instead of “optimizing” and represented mostly with a “philanthropic” and “transactional” approach. The author particularly notes the salience of social exchange, with social partnerships serving as an indirect relational instrument for MNCs to navigate stakeholder relationships in the Chinese market, especially with the dominant resource holder such as the government.

Taking China as a research context, the purpose of this paper is to delineate how social and business tensions manifest in Chinese nascent social enterprises and to disentangle the strategies that they adopt to manage the business-social dual goals to achieve organizational viability.

A qualitative multiple-case study is used to collect and analyze data. Empirical data are drawn from in-depth semi-structured interviews with Chinese social entrepreneurs, ethnographic observation of social enterprises as well as secondary sources.

Depending on personal motivations and resource availability, social entrepreneurs’ perceptions toward pursuit of dual goals range from integration to differentiation in the short term, despite consensus on the concurrent development in the long term. The leverage of resources, image management, continuous innovation and need-based services are viable approaches that Chinese social enterprises adopt to manage the dual goals in order to create both social and economic value.

This paper reveals understanding of the concrete tensions experienced among Chinese nascent social enterprises in pursuing business and social goals and how they manage to integrate the synergistic aspects of social and business goals to achieve survival and growth. Based primarily on qualitative case study method, the research findings are context specific and may not be ideal for generalization.

The authors reveal strategies by which synergistic benefits between dual goals may be achieved. Innovation (e.g. in resource utilization, in service format and content) and differentiation (e.g. in organization positioning) would be beneficial in enhancing the competitiveness of social enterprises. To enhance organizations’ credibility, quality of products and service should be monitored and organizational transparency needs to be enhanced.

It is suggested that the government specifies legal forms and legitimates interests of social enterprises, formulates preferential policies to stimulate the development of social enterprises, and develops a set of qualification authentication system to regulate this emerging sector.

The study examines the manifestation of business and social tensions and presents dual-goal management strategies from a non-western perspective. As an original contribution to the field of social entrepreneurship, the study responds to calls for in-depth analysis of conflicting objectives and tension management in social enterprises.

The origins of corporate social responsibility (CSR) have been widely attributed to the work of scholars, and business managers as well, in North America and Western Europe. Inevitably, however, as the economic interaction of individual firms and entire nations has grown over the past several decades — call it globalization — so too has the concept and the practice of CSR spread throughout the world. It is certainly time to explore how CSR is being incorporated into the practice of business management in other regions and other countries. Therefore, in this chapter we will focus on Asia: specifically on Japan, South Korea, India, and China. It is interesting for academicians to understand how CSR is being absorbed and adapted into the business cultures of these four countries. Perhaps of even greater importance, it is vital that business managers know what to expect about the interaction between business and society as well as the government as their commercial activities grow in this burgeoning part of the world.

For each of these four countries, we will provide an overview of the extent to which CSR has become a part of the academic community and also how it is being practiced and incorporated in everyday management affairs. We will see that there are very significant differences among these countries which lead to the natural question: why? To answer this question, we will use an eight-part analytical framework developed specifically for this purpose. We will look at the history, the dominant religious beliefs, the relevant social customs, the geography, the political structures, the level of economic development, civil society institutions, and the “safety net” of each country. As a result of this analysis, we believe, academicians can learn how CSR is absorbed and spread into commercial affairs, and managers can profit from learning more about what to expect when doing business in this increasingly important region.

This study aims to compare the different effects of the 2008 economic crisis on companies’ corporate social performance (CSP) in coordinated market economies (CMEs) and liberal market economies (LMEs).

This paper mobilizes a pluralistic theoretical framework that borrows from neo-institutional and corporate governance theories to compare the impacts of the 2008 economic crisis on long-term CSP in an international context. Based on the longitudinal database of Vigeo Eiris (2004–2015), the panel was decomposed between two models of capitalism (LME and CME). For each model, this paper conducted a series of regressions, taking into account the longitudinal nature of the data using estimates based on generalized estimating equations (Liang and Zeger, 1986).

The paper shows that the economic crisis prompted companies operating in LMEs and CMEs to reorient their corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices in quite different ways during the four-year period that the crisis lasted, as well as the succeeding four-year post-crisis period. While CSR was perceived in LMEs as a threat during the crisis period because of the additional costs it generated, it offered CME companies a way of redefining how they relate to the rest of society, with their goal becoming the creation of greater shared value.

The results are dependent from the data, and specifically from the Vigeo Eiris database. It would be interesting to extrapol this kind of research with the use of other CSP/environmental, social and governance (ESG) databases as Morgan Stanley Capital International, Sustainalytics or RepRisk, to compare and conclude more globally on tendencies. Another limitation relates to the binary nature of Hall and Soskice’s (2001) typology, with its neo-institutionalist inspiration, that puts Continental European and social-democratic models of capitalism on the same plane.

This study teaches managers, analysts and policymakers that CSR can be a powerful strategic lever capable of remedying the harmful effects that economic crises have in both LMEs and CMEs, notwithstanding the cultural, socio-economic and political differences between these models of capitalism. Economic and social crises must help companies to rethink and revisit their business models and CSR practices to subsequently implement sustainability strategies more in sync with the values forced upon them by the economic systems to which they belonged but also by all their stakeholders.

From a managerial standpoint, this study allows practitioners to consider CSR as an opportunity to rethink their strategy and business models in a period of crisis, and no more a threat that could reduce the economic performance in increasing the costs, and thus, the cost of financing.

After reading the literature on the topic, this paper clearly thinks about the high degree of contribution of the paper, as the topic is not so developed and that the study implies several contributions. First, from a theoretical level, the study differs from previous research studies insofar as it compares the impacts of the economic crisis on companies’ CSP in CMEs and LMEs using a theoretical framework that operationalizes both contractual and neo-institutional theories. Second, from a methodological standpoint, the approach using an ESG data provider known worldwide (Vigeo Eiris) has not been down yet. Third, on a managerial level, the present study teaches managers, analysts and policymakers that CSR can be a powerful strategic lever capable of remedying the harmful effects that economic crises have in both LMEs and CMEs, notwithstanding the cultural, socio-economic and political differences between these models of capitalism.

The purpose of this paper is to present an automatic approach for mesh sizing field generation of complicated  computer-aided design (CAD) models.

In this paper, the authors present an automatic approach for mesh sizing field generation. First, a source point extraction algorithm is applied to capture curvature and proximity features of CAD models. Second, according to the distribution of feature source points, an octree background mesh is constructed for storing element size value. Third, mesh size value on each node of background mesh is calculated by interpolating the local feature size of the nearby source points, and then, an initial mesh sizing field is obtained. Finally, a theoretically guaranteed smoothing algorithm is developed to restrict the gradient of the mesh sizing field.

To achieve high performance, the proposed approach has been implemented in multithreaded parallel using OpenMP. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed approach is remarkably efficient to construct reasonable mesh sizing field for complicated CAD models and applicable for generating geometrically adaptive triangle/tetrahedral meshes. Moreover, since the mesh sizing field is defined on an octree background mesh, high-efficiency query of local size value could be achieved in the following mesh generation procedure.

How to determine a reasonable mesh size for complicated CAD models is often a bottleneck of mesh generation. For the complicated models with thousands or even ten thousands of geometric entities, it is time-consuming to construct an appropriate mesh sizing field for generating high-quality mesh. A parallel algorithm of mesh sizing field generation with low computational complexity is presented in this paper, and its usability and efficiency have been verified.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the evolution of Chinese technology policy, assess its technological and economic performance from the visual angle of “market in exchange for technology” strategy.

A quantified method based on policy contents from policy power, policy goals and policy means was developed to build a policy database, and analyze the evolutionary tendency of Chinese technology policy. In addition, econometric models were built to assess the performance of technology policy.

The critical goals of Chinese technology policy are introducing technology directly or indirectly by introducing foreign investment and innovation, but the critical linkage between introduction and innovation‐technology absorption was absent – almost all policy means aim at the introduction of foreign investment and innovation but not technology absorption. More unfortunately, the econometric results show that introduction of foreign investment contributes little, while technology absorption contributes much more. Institutional path‐dependence and the competition for benefits among different departments have aggravated an already unbalanced emphasis on technology policies during the reform.

During the quantification of technology policy, one perhaps loses some information about policy, and it can only be used to analyze the technology policy system, not special technology policy.

Analyses of the evolution of Chinese technology policy and econometric results show the blunder of “market in exchange for technology” strategy from policy formulation and execution. Also, it leads to the optimization of technology policy from policy targets, implements based on national technology and innovation strategy.

The paper develops the method of technology policy quantification and builds econometric models to assess the contribution of technology policy to technology progress and economy development.