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The study of business ethics has seldom shed light on small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) despite their theoretical and practical significance. Drawing from strain perspective, the purpose of this paper is to address this insufficiency and investigate SME owners’ ethical attitudes toward money-related deviances.

Based on a large sample of 741 Chinese SMEs, an OLS regression analysis was employed to test associated hypotheses. The robustness of results was additionally checked.

The results suggest that for stratification variables, education level is positively related to ethical attitudes, whereas household income level is surprisingly negatively associated with ethical attitudes; for materialism facets, success and happiness exert a negative impact on ethical attitudes as hypothesized, but centrality has no associated impact.

This study has examined both structural and motivational sources of personal strains on the ethical attitude of SME owners, while the characteristics of these strains could be explored in the future studies.

This study advances and complements the dominant behavior approach that emphasizes cognitive and other psychological processes in explaining individual ethical attitudes. It is also seemingly the first study to examine the influence of three materialism facets on entrepreneurial ethical attitudes.

This study investigates the role of transnational mixed-embeddedness when transnational entrepreneurial firms (TEFs) become internationalized. First-generation immigrant entrepreneurs who maintain business arrangements in their home and host countries own TEFs. In many cases, they internationalize from emerging economies to advanced economies. Nevertheless, this study focuses on TEF cases that internationalize from an advanced to an emerging economy, which prior transnational entrepreneurship studies have largely overlooked.

This research uses a qualitative approach based on six TEF case studies from Canada and the UK venturing into China to explore TEFs' internationalization.

The case studies explore the elements that constitute TEFs' cognitive and relational embeddedness—two main types of embeddedness—in home and host countries and how TEFs exploit such embeddedness for their internationalization. The results suggest that high levels of transnational mixed-embeddedness help TEFs reduce resource and institutional distance barriers in home countries, thereby assisting their internationalization. A framework that visualizes the role of transnational mixed-embeddedness in TEFs' internationalization and novel categorizations of transnational mixed-embeddedness is proposed.

Although there has been a growing demand for research on the emergence of internationalized smaller firms, there have been few empirical efforts on TEFs' internationalization. It is still unclear how TEFs internationalize differently than homegrown entrepreneurial firms. This study fills this gap in transnational entrepreneurship literature by examining the influence of transnational mixed-embeddedness on TEFs' internationalization.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how qualitative case research (QCR) has been conducted in the field of international entrepreneurship (IE) in terms of onto-epistemology and methodology. QCR can serve as an umbrella approach for contextualizing and capturing the complexity of IE opportunities, events, conditions and relationships, and to illuminate and enrich the understanding of related IE processes.

A thorough literature review was conducted of IE journal articles published between 1989 and mid-2017. This paper identified and analyzed 292 journal articles in terms of theoretical purpose and research design.

The findings suggest that the “positivistic” QCR is the customary convention of QCR in IE. “Exploratory” and “theory building” are the two most commonly pursued objectives. There have also been atypical practices and increased methodological rigor in recent years. Alternative paradigmatic QCRs that depart from positivistic assumptions are in an early stage of development in IE.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first research examining QCR onto-epistemology and methodology approaches in IE, providing a useful state of the art that has been hitherto lacking in the literature. Based on this paper’s findings, the authors suggest that the IE field would benefit from greater methodological transparency in the reporting and writing of QCR. Also, the breadth of knowledge and legitimacy of the IE area would be enhanced through more studies involving unconventional (beyond positivistic) QCR.

The purpose of this paper is to examine international decision making, information processing, and related performance implications. The authors aim to explore the relationship between international decision making and problem-solving dissensions related to entry mode decisions. In addition, they aim to investigate the effects of dissension on entry mode performance, and the moderating effect of the foreign direct investment (FDI) vs non-FDI decision as it relates to dissension-mode performance. Despite their significance from an information processing perspective, these issues have not been sufficiently explored in international entry mode research.

This research presents data collected from 233 privately owned internationalized Chinese firms. The analysis in this investigation includes hierarchical ordinary least squares regression.

The findings suggest an inverse U-shaped relationship between dissension and entry mode performance, as opposed to a linear one, and a moderating effect of FDI vs non-FDI decisions on this curvilinear dissension-performance association. These findings support and refine the rationale of the information processing perspective.

These findings add realistic elements to the alleged “rational” international decision-making doctrine assumed in previous entry mode literature. The findings show the importance of the heterogeneity of information processing in entry mode strategic decision-making processes (SDMPs), and its effects on specific decision types. The authors believe that this is the first empirical study to use an information processing perspective to examine the effects of SDMPs on entry mode performance.

Purpose – To identify and systematically analyze empirical works in the emerging field of global online entrepreneurship.

Design/methodology/approach – A review of empirical articles published in peer-reviewed academic journals (1997–2008) focused on global online activities of entrepreneurial firms. The methodology purposefully compares a large number of recent studies on the main objective, type of research, theoretical framework, methodology, and main findings.

Findings – The systematic analysis of 45 articles reveals the most relevant publications in the field highlighting the collective contribution of this body of literature. The review offers insight into the state of the art of the field, discusses the implications for future development, and provides insights into the entrepreneurial aspects of e-commerce use.

Research limitations/implications – The review is limited to empirical articles published in academic journals and does not cover important conceptual contributions, book chapters, or conference publications.

Practical implications – The review highlights avenues for the future development of the field and provides guidelines for practitioners involved in global online business.

Originality/value – This paper provides a consolidation of an emerging field and offers practical advice to firms involved in global e-commerce.

This volume of Progress in International Business Research comprises of a selection of 12 competitive papers from the 34th EIBA (European International Business Academy) annual conference, which was held in Tallinn, Estonia in December 2008 with the theme “International Business and the Catching-up Economies: Challenges and Opportunities”. It addresses two main issues – (1) the internationalization process and (2) the role of knowledge and innovation for internationalization – that are important in the current economic slowdown both for catching-up and for other economies, scholars, and practitioners.

With the continuous improvement of social and economic development as well as the rising level of demand for spiritual life, the design of cultural and creative products has ushered in new opportunities and challenges. Therefore the research related to cultural and creative products design is an inevitable choice for industrial innovation and market competition. The article aims to analyze the frontier hotspots and trend evolution of theoretical research on cultural and creative design in China by presenting different research fields, personnel and institutions embodied by cultural and creative products, thus providing a forward-looking development reference for China's special cultural and creative product design practice.

In this paper, the visualized citation analysis tool — CiteSpace V is used to analyze and map the relevant literature of Chinese cultural and creative design in CNKI (Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure) as the data sources, through bibliometric methods, in order to study the application development of Chinese cultural and creative design and provide reference for the application research of Chinese cultural and creative industries.

With the improvement of China's comprehensive strength, cultural self-confidence and strategy are being paid more and more attention by scholars; with the future research of China's cultural and creative design theory, cross-integration becomes the future trend; with the gradual maturity of China's cultural and creative design methodology, how to choose the right method for pioneering research is a difficulty for the future development of cultural and creative design; with the continuous development of China's economy, the method construction of innovative cultural and creative industry system becomes the focus of future research; with the continuous progress of science and technology, the integration of emotion and product industry is the mainstream of future development on cultural and creative design.

Through an objective empirical analysis of the development of Chinese cultural and creative products, it will broaden the research horizons of relevant scholars, understand the development direction of China's cultural and creative industries, enrich the design practice application of Chinese cultural and creative products, enhance the understanding of international counterparts on Chinese cultural and creative design research and promote the exchange among international counterparts.