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This purpose of this article is to report the second part of a recent interview with Dr Ming-Jer Chen. He shares his values, beliefs and philosophies on life, business and scholarship; relates how these philosophies have shaped his approach to teaching, research and service; and outlines his strategies for making important career and professional decisions.

Interview with Dr Ming-Jer Chen.

Dr Ming-Jer Chen’s firm belief in the Oneness (精一) is reflected in his constant pursuit of “making the world smaller” by closing divides of various kinds. During his career journey, Dr Chen has applied the philosophy of “keeping a balanced and integrated view” to tackle professional and career challenges and reinforced that with the wisdom of his ambicultural perspective. His East–West background and beliefs shape his engagements with the research and business communities and his expertise includes management education and decision-making, as well as teaching, research and professional services.

Dr Chen’s unique life and career experiences make him a role model for those who intend to pursue a career in management research. His ambicultural insight and balanced and integrated perspective may help junior scholars to deal with challenges in their professional lives.

The interview profiles a thought leader and strategist in management research and education, whose experience and wisdom may enlighten junior scholars along their career paths.

The purpose of this article is to report the first part of a recent interview with Dr Ming-Jer Chen. He shares his values, beliefs and philosophies on life, business and scholarship, how these philosophies have shaped his approach to teaching, research and service and his strategies for making important career and professional decisions.

This article is based on a recent interview with Dr Ming-Jer Chen.

Dr Ming-Jer Chen's firm belief in the oneness (Fixed graphic 1) is reflected in his constant pursuit of “making the world smaller” by closing divides of various kinds. During his career journey, Dr Chen has applied the philosophy of “keeping a balanced and integrated view” to tackle professional and career challenges with the wisdom of an ambicultural perspective. Practices influenced by his East–West background include management education and decision-making, as well as teaching, research and professional services.

Dr Chen's unique life and career experiences make him a role model for those who intend to pursue a career in management research. His ambicultural insight and the “balanced and integrated view” he applies may help junior scholars in dealing with challenges in their professional lives.

The interview profiles a thought leader and strategist in management research and education, whose experience and wisdom may enlighten junior scholars along their career paths.

The purpose of this paper is to bridge the understanding of apparent dichotomies such as East and West, philosophy and social sciences, and antiquity and modernity, and to continue the vibrant expansion of competitive dynamics study into the realm of East-West theoretical fusion.

The author looks to classical Chinese philosophy to discover the origins and nature of competitive dynamics. The paper develops the premise that the foundational thrusts of this contemporary Western management topic spring from ancient Eastern conceptions of duality, relativity, and time.

Research inroads are made along two paths. First, the paper traces the theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of competitive dynamics to Eastern thinking. Then by bridging what have customarily been perceived as fundamentally different paradigms, it reveals, in a new light, empirical findings in this strategy subfield.

Linking Western management science, and specifically the study of competitive dynamics, to classical Eastern philosophy raises new research questions in the areas of international management and management education as well as competitive dynamics. In the latter, the paper suggests opportunities for exploring connections between traditional Chinese concepts and contemporary organizational and competition research issues, including competitive and cooperative relationships at the industry level. Future research may also investigate the fundamental differences and similarities between Eastern and Western philosophies, and their implications for competitive strategies.

From a relatively obscure corner of business academia, competitive dynamics now occupies a distinct place in strategic management research and is a topic of intense interest to scholars in a variety of disciplines. The usual view is that competitive dynamics fits squarely in the spectrum of social sciences, an organically home-grown area of Western study. This paper examines the topic from a distinctly different angle – through the lens of ancient Eastern philosophy – to discern deeper a deeper meaning and wider application.

The purpose of this paper is to comment on Professor Ming-Jer Chen’s recent publication titled “Competitive dynamics: Eastern roots, Western growth” and present an asymmetry reversing perspective on the competitive dynamics between two nonobvious, invisible or indirect competitors, namely, how emerging market resource-poor firms compete and outcompete advanced country resource-rich rivals.

The author first identifies an important neglect in Professor Chen’s scholarship on competitive dynamics, i.e., the neglect of the ubiquity of the less visible competition between two actors who initially would not be considered as competitors. Then, the author proposes an asymmetry reversing theory (ART) of competitive dynamics to redress this neglect. The theory is presented in two parts. The first part describes the competitive dynamics between the two actors as a three-stage process of reversing the asymmetry in resource possession and market position between the resource-poor firm and its resource-rich rivals. The second part explains the key success factors for the resource-poor firm to go through each of the three stages.

The growth process of the resource-poor firm can be broadly divided into three stages: surviving, catching-up, and outcompeting. For ambitious yet pragmatic resource-poor firms, in the surviving stage, they often (have to) accept the asymmetry between themselves and their resource-rich rivals in terms of resource possession and market position, and try to avoid any direct competition with the strong incumbents. They often tactically appear to pursue different paths of development from those of the strong incumbents by focusing on particular product categories and market segments. Doing so allows the resource-poor firms to win times and spaces for non-interrupted growth. Once they have accumulated sufficient resources and market experiences, they start to reduce the asymmetry between themselves and their better-endowed rivals by entering the similar or same product categories and market segments. To effectively catch up and outcompete the incumbents, they often differentiate themselves from their rivals by offering cheaper products or services, adding new features to their products, providing extra services to their customers, inventing new business models, etc.

One limitation of this paper is that the ART framework has so far been built on anecdotal evidences. It needs to be tested by empirical studies and refined further in the future. Another limitation is that the proposed theory is based on competitive dynamics between emerging market resource-poor firms and advanced country resource-rich firms. It needs to be tested whether this theory has applicability to any other firms.

This paper fills an important research gap in the competitive dynamics literature by proposing an asymmetry reversing theory of competitive dynamics between a weak latecomer and a strong incumbent in a competitive field.

This article aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting‐edge research and case studies.

The briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments, and places the article in context.

The paper finds that the observation that someone is a natural‐born leader can sometimes be taken a face value; at others, it can have a pejorative ring to it.

The article provides strategic insights and practical thinking that have influenced some of the world's leading organizations.

The briefing saves busy executives and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy‐to‐digest format.

The purpose of this paper is to share a personal perspective on the 2011 Academy of Management meeting held in San Antonio, Texas. It explores the author's experience of the conference theme of “West meets East: Enlightening, Balancing and Transcending” as well as providing a doctoral student's overall reflections of a major conference.

The paper uses a constructivist perspective in order to reflect upon conference experiences. Observations and the gathering of conference materials helped inform the approach.

This paper argued that the Academy of Management Annual meeting is likely to have a lasting impact on the author. The author was inspired to continue to discover how to become an engaged scholar and practitioner, as well as broadening her understanding of East‐West management practices and cultures.

This paper has value as it presents a personal perspective of a first‐year doctoral student attending her first large, international conference.

This paper aims to outline different views on international business (IB) as an academic discipline and looks into how IB scholars can cope with challenges to their disciplinary identity when stand-alone IB departments are merged with other departments such as management, marketing or strategy in business schools and universities.

The article offers a critical reflection on the development and future of IB as a discipline. The two authors are an IB and a Management scholar, both of whom were engaged in recent departmental mergers at their respective business schools. While the authors do not analyze these particular mergers, their experiences are inevitably interwoven in the views they express.

Mergers of stand-alone IB departments with other departments bring to light the nature of the IB discipline as a contested terrain. The article discusses how these structural changes challenge the disciplinary identity of IB scholars. It contributes, first, to discussions on the development of IB as a discipline and, second, to understanding identities and identification during major organizational change events in academia.

The authors suggest that the threat of marginalization of IB in the context of business schools and universities necessitates a move beyond the “big questions” debate to a critical self-examination and reflection on IB as a discipline and as a global scholarly community.

The article offers a critical view on current processes and challenges related to IB as a discipline and an academic community.

The purpose of this study is to review the current status of the Journal of Chinese Human Resource Management (JCHRM) in this initial stage and present a number of emerging unique Chinese phenomena for scholarly attention in relation to JCHRM entering its fifth year.

Based on a review of JCHRM's status, we further reviewed literature and media reports to identify new research opportunities for indigenous Chinese human resource management (HRM) research.

JCHRM has demonstrated its strength and uniqueness in contributing to management knowledge production and dissemination in the first four years, thanks to enthusiastic support from the worldwide research community. Moving forward, we identify a number of intriguing indigenous phenomena, including distinctive social political contexts in state-owned enterprises, emerging trends in embracing the Party Branches (dang zhi bu, Fixed graphic 1) by multinational corporations (MNCs) in China and the indigenous Chinese suzhi (Fixed graphic 2) phenomenon, for new opportunities in Chinese HRM research.

The three indigenous phenomena constitute only a few samples. Developing a theoretical understanding of Chinese HRM phenomena has a long way to go. Continued inquiries in this area will not only help build local knowledge on complex organizational dynamics but also enrich the overall management knowledge base.

We review the status of JCHRM in its first four years and bring a sample of intriguing indigenous Chinese phenomena to the attention of the worldwide scholarly community for future research.

The author was invited to give the 2011 Inaugural Conference address of the Africa Academy of Management (AFAM). The purpose of this paper is to summarize the remarks of the author's keynote address, so as to make them more widely available to varied audiences and to stimulate research and discussion about the future of African management.

It is a personal story of an African pioneer in African management education, research and practice. The author also shares personal thoughts for building business schools in Africa.

AFAM and its members have a role to play to advance Africa's management, leadership and overall development.

The idea is not for others to replicate the author's journey but to learn from it as they forge their own.

The purpose of this paper is to offer an alternative framework and solution for balancing exploitation–exploration tensions and their management.

A case study method was adopted to uncover what underlies tensions and contradictions between exploitation–exploration that emerge for Chinese manufacturing companies due to the competitive global environment and their latecomer disadvantages when they source new technologies by cross-border mergers and acquisitions. The acquiring firm that acquires two companies is thus not a single but a cross-case study.

The authors present three contradictory points needing to be balanced and according to which three paradoxes emerge: exploitation from a similar knowledge base and innovation from a complementary knowledge base, efficiency and flexibility, as well as profit and breakthroughs. The authors theorize how paradoxical integration helps manage these interwoven tensions. Further, the assimilate-integration-apply (AIA) path suggests a new behavior logic and path choice for Chinese companies when they follow an ambidextrous strategy.

This paper has implications for future research and for companies’ everyday practice on ambidexterity in Chinese society.

The authors combine ambidexterity perspective and AIA path with linkage-leverage-learning (LLL) to offer an alternative framework and solution for balancing exploitation–exploration paradoxes in EE firms’ internationalization to increase LLL’s explanatory power.