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Under currently uncertain and fast-changing environments, it is important for firms to supplement their main strategy with alternative ones so that they can quickly change courses of actions. Strategic flexibility is thus an important factor for the viability and success of firms. Although previous research has emphasized the need for strategic flexibility, some firms are reluctant to do so since it requires high investments. Existing studies on strategic flexibility have emerged from various disciplines and drawn on diverse theoretical perspectives. Due to the increasing importance of strategic flexibility, this chapter reviews and summarizes existing studies on strategic flexibility based on the applications of strategic flexibility in various business disciplines, including management and strategy, business entrepreneurship, and marketing. The authors also summarize different theoretical perspectives, including upper echelons theory, resource-based view theory, and dynamic capabilities theory, as well as their limitations.

Quality-Oriented Education (su zhi jiao yu) is a national education reform initiative that presents ongoing opportunities and challenges to schools, local bureaus of education, and the overall educational system in China today. This chapter seeks to gain insight into if and how Quality-Oriented Education, 10 years into its enactment, has taken root in practice. We posit that a reform agenda is best manifested through well-aligned and operable standards for school effectiveness. We introduce the policy-driven definition for school effectiveness and an evaluation framework depicting the intended focus of Quality-Oriented Education. Using an iterative and inductive process for content analysis, we compare the policy-driven framework with the coding results of a 2009 national inventory of actual school evaluation schemes in 91 Chinese school districts. Our review points out that the new mission of Quality-Oriented Education advocates educational equity, curriculum reform, and systemic support for school-based management. However, at the operational level, there are great variations in terms of content domain, focus, and function among school evaluation schemes with notable regional differences. Furthermore, schools are still caught between the existing system that measures school performance by achievement and the intended accountability scheme that calls for enhanced student ability. This chapter adds to the empirical foundation for the development of a new framework that not only captures the spirit of the national educational reform but also is informed of the developmental needs of schools in drastically different geo-economical and social conditions.

Based on government data from 1993 to 2008, this chapter aims to compute and analyze the trends of inequity in interprovincial and regional per-student spending in China's compulsory education, and to ascertain the potential impact of changes in education financing policies. Appropriate inequity measures (Gini and Theil index and Gini decomposition, among others) are employed to provide a systematic picture of the trends. Main findings include: (1) all inequity measures show large and overall increased disparities among provinces and among regions, between 1993 and 2008. (2) However, a slight drop of spending inequity is observed at the primary education level around 2002 and a larger reduction in 2005 and on. There are more turning points in the trend of lower-secondary per-student spending among provinces. These patterns are consistent across different inequity measures and spending indicators (per-student total spending, per-student recurrent spending, and per-student nonpersonnel spending). (3) The trend toward more balanced resource allocation around 2002 and 2005 could be the impact from the Reform of Tax and Administrative Charges and the New Mechanism for Financing Rural Compulsory Education. An increased share of budgetary expenditure in determining total spending suggests that equalizing financing policies have the potential to induce a significant reduction in spending inequity. These findings may help policy makers to better understand and alter the extent of spending inequity in compulsory education. This is an original empirical study that systematically derives the spending inequity trends over a long period in China's compulsory education.

This chapter looks into unpleasant affective states, or rather “dreaded emotions,” in leadership. Specifically, the adaptive roles and functions of fear, anger, and sadness are reviewed and discussed in a leadership context.

The social functions of fear, anger, and sadness are first presented. Following each emotion, the target of emotional expression – both other-directed (i.e., targeting followers and/or emotion-eliciting events) and self-directed (i.e., targeting leader) – is further discussed.

A symmetrical assumption has emerged over recent years that positive emotions result in positive outcomes and negative emotions lead to negative outcomes. In practice, the realities of organizational life and leader–follower interactions do not reflect such a neat juxtaposition. Positively valenced emotions can yield negative outcomes, and negatively valenced emotions can bring about positive outcomes.

Unpleasant emotions – fear and sadness, in particular – remain understudied in organizational and leadership literature, even though leaders experience these emotions just like the rest of us. This review offers ideas, through the combination of psychological and leadership research, on how social functions of dreaded emotions, including fear, anger, and sadness, can yield desirable leadership outcomes.

This chapter provides a review on unpleasant emotions (i.e., fear, anger, and sadness) that are rarely discussed and underresearched in leadership literature.