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This study aims to explore the emergence and development of new industries, especially in the context of developing countries, by considering industry emergence and development as a large-scale institutional change or transition.

The authors conducted an inductive case study research on the emergence of the biopharmaceutical industry in a developing country. The data on the emergence and development of Iran’s biopharmaceutical industry during 1990 and 2018 were collected through semi-structured interviews, participation in meetings, visits to companies and analysis of archival texts. The data analysis was an inductive and iterative process.

In the emergence and development of the biopharmaceutical industry, there have been a few key agents, institutional entrepreneurs (IEs), in both the state and private sectors, who played main roles. Moreover, the most important type of knowledge which has been crucial for the decision-making of IEs has been informal, tacit and institutional knowledge. Furthermore, the authors identified a mechanism, inter-institutional circulation, as being most effective in the transfer of institutional knowledge among IEs.

The originality of this study is applying insights from institutional entrepreneurship and knowledge management literature to the extant literature on industry emergence and development.

This study explored the mediating effect of political embeddedness on the relationship between gender and performance of private enterprises in the emerging economy of China. Political embeddedness is examined in terms of personal characteristics of owners and their firm.

Secondary data were collected from the Chinese Private Enterprises Survey for the years 2002, 2006, 2014 and 2016 using responses to identical questions. Tobit models were implemented to examine hypotheses related to the gender gap. A bootstrapping approach was applied to examine hypotheses related to mediation through political embeddedness.

The gender effect on enterprise performance was found to be partially mediated by political embeddedness at the personal level and even more strongly by political embeddedness at the firm level, which is beyond the well-known mediation effect of bank loans.

The Chinese sample, in which guanxi plays a significant role with respect to women-led firms, may limit the generalizability of the findings to other emerging economies.

Given the mediating effects on firm performance of political embeddedness at the personal and firm levels, women business owners in China should pursue political involvement, possibly with the support of policymakers and mentors.

The relationship between businesswomen and political embeddedness is underexplored. This study innovates by applying the gender lens to the notion of political embeddedness and extending the construct of personal political embeddedness to the firm level.

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of corporate social capital and local embeddedness on perceived business performance of Chinese enterprises operating overseas, whose recent growth resulted from the Belt and Road Initiative.

This study reports the results of a sample of 83 Shaanxi outward foreign direct investment (FDI) firms operating in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe and North America. In-depth interviews with a few sampled firms are used to develop the survey questionnaire and help interpret the results of statistical analysis.

This study proposes two hypotheses and both are supported by the data. First, corporate social capital is a three-dimensional concept, covering governmental, market and personal sources with each source making an equal, positive effect on perceived overseas performance of the surveyed firms. Second, these firms do better when having developed a higher degree of local embeddedness, a measure on local channels used to obtain information and mobilize resources. While local embeddedness indeed mediates some effect of corporate social capital, both variables have shown direct impact on performance.

Reported findings are from a small sample of 83 firms in an inland Chinese province, and business performance is measured by subjective evaluation rather than economic output.

The practical implication is that a Chinese FDI firm is expected to maintain all three relational channels – governmental, market and interpersonal – because the firm can gain different kinds of information and resources from these sources and each channel is necessary and equally important for the firm’s development. Importantly, it needs a different strategy to maintain and best use each channel. For the Belt and Road Initiative to be effective, China must establish platforms through which enterprises can strengthen and reconfigure their corporate social capital, as well as to cultivate and sustain their local networks in foreign destinations.

This study aims to present multi-layered embeddedness and explore the main and interaction effects of political embeddedness on the performance of private enterprises in China. This study tests multi-layered embeddedness through interaction effects between three layers, namely, political, territorial and inter-firm embeddedness. Political embeddedness is related at the personal and the firm levels.

The authors used secondary data of four non-panel waves (2002, 2008, 2010 and 2016) of large samples having identical questions based on the Chinese private enterprises’ survey. The accumulated number of business owners’ responses is a total of 10,686.

The main effects of each of the layers of embeddedness showed a positive influence on enterprise performance consistently and unchanged over time which fits the Chinese Guanxi regardless of the immense macro-economic transition. However, unexpectedly some interactions showed negative significant effects on performance.

First, business owners should be aware of the specific contribution to the performance of political embeddedness at both the firm level and the personal level. Second, the pursuit of exercising simultaneously several layers of embeddedness may be detrimental to company performance. This study provides generalizable lessons regarding different embeddedness layers beyond the context of China’s transition economy.

First, the authors extend political embeddedness to the firm level whilst in previous research this construct had been mostly related to the personal level. Second, building on the resource-based view and redundant resources the authors present the disadvantage of “over-embeddedness” as related to multi-layered embeddedness which has been understudied.

Aim of the present monograph is the economic analysis of the role of MNEs regarding globalisation and digital economy and in parallel there is a reference and examination of some legal aspects concerning MNEs, cyberspace and e‐commerce as the means of expression of the digital economy. The whole effort of the author is focused on the examination of various aspects of MNEs and their impact upon globalisation and vice versa and how and if we are moving towards a global digital economy.

The chapter presents a theoretical framework that deals with the basic question of how networks and industries coevolve. We draw upon the structural and relational perspectives of networks to theorize about changes occurring in interfirm networks over time and the coevolutionary linkage of these changes to the industry life cycle. We further extend the widely accepted industry life cycle model by claiming that industry-specific evolutionary patterns impact the structure of the network’s relations, which in turn lead to diversification in the sources of innovation and to variation in the patterns of industrial evolution.

To explore the mechanism that shapes firms' supply chain learning (SCL) practices, this study examines the relationship between firms' knowledge network embeddedness and their SCL practice in a supply chain network, as well as the moderating role of supply chain network cohesion in this relationship.

Using patent application data and supply chain partner information from 869 listed firms between 2011 and 2020 in China, this study uses fixed-effect regression models to reduce endogeneity problems by controlling for individual heterogeneity effects that cannot be observed over time.

Firms' knowledge network embeddedness has an inverted U-shaped effect on their SCL, and this non-linear relationship is conditional on supply chain network cohesion, which strengthens (weakens) the positive (negative) effect of knowledge network embeddedness on SCL.

The findings show that managers can reconcile the downsides of knowledge network embeddedness on SCL by fostering greater supply chain network cohesion.

Drawing from the network pluralism perspective, this study contributes to supply chain literature by extending the research context of the antecedents of SCL from a single-network setting to a dual-network setting. It extends the network pluralism perspective by showing that not only positive effects but also negative effects of network embeddedness can transfer from one network to another.

Few efforts have considered political embeddedness heterogeneity and examined whether different types of political embeddedness can pose different valuation effect on green innovation. Address to this concern, this paper aims to provide a more nuanced conceptualization of different types of political embeddedness and their effects on green innovation.

This paper conducts negative binomial method to test our predicts and adopts propensity score match (PSM) and placebo test to mitigate endogeneity issues.

The interpersonal political embeddedness (IPPE) has a stronger positive effect on green innovation than the interorganizational political embeddedness (IOPE) and that such effect depends on multiple factors at an individual (i.e. Cheif executive officer (CEO) duality), firm (i.e. firm growth) and environment (i.e. industrial competition) level. Figure 1 is the research model. The relationship is more pronounced when the firm has a dual leadership structure and a high level of firm growth and is less pronounced when a firm is engaged in intensive industrial competition.

The authors extend political embeddedness literature by introducing and distinguishing the concept of IPPE and IOPE. The authors enrich green innovation research by revealing how corporate green innovation is effected by the IPPE and the IOPE.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the evolution of relationship marketing (RM) in a new technology-based firm (NTBF) and to illustrate how social embeddednesss benefits can be achieved by engaging in RM in a rural resource-constrained bilingual context.

A single in-depth case study of a NTBF operating in a rural bilingual context was explored over a five-year period. As part of the case study, participant observation was carried out and interviews with the novice entrepreneur, the firm’s employees and its customers were conducted.

Developing mutually beneficial relationships with customers and key partners can enable a novice entrepreneur with no prior business ownership and limited marketing experience to accumulate and mobilise resources in order to achieve credibility and business growth. By analysing information from the NTBF’s entrepreneur, customers and other actors, the authors build theory and present propositions relating to the RM process.

This case illustrates that RM can enhance the legitimacy of an inexperienced entrepreneur, and can enable a firm to address the liabilities of newness in a rural resource-constrained context. Entrepreneurs need to focus on relevant and specialised partnership and alliance relationships that can provide strategic resources for firm development. The bilingual influence has also been shown to aid the development of new relationships and thus ensuring social embeddedness.

The theoretical contribution of this study is to integrate insights from both RM and social embeddedness theories, and illustrate the extent to which a NTBF demonstrates social embeddedness benefits relating to customer retention and accumulation of strategic resources due to RM.

The purpose of this paper is to describe different ways in which a buyer and supplier can be embedded in a dyadic relationship and how these differences influence patterns of inter-firm innovation activities and outcomes. Specifically, to address the relative paucity of theoretical work on how dyadic configurations influence parties’ joint innovation behavior, this study examines how different buyer-supplier embeddedness (BSE) configurations change the four choices that pertain to the levels of involvement buyers and suppliers exhibit in inter-firm innovation activities. These choices concern the processes buyers use to engage suppliers; the scope of efforts in each party; the locus of effects determining the beneficiaries; and the extent to which parties disclose private innovations within the relationship.

Drawing on social embeddedness literature, the authors conceptualize dyad level, BSE in two dimensions: relational and structural. The relational dimension describes the quality of relationship, while the structural dimension describes the intensity of exchanges between the parties. Together these dimensions allow the authors to map the differences in BSE configurations and provide a basis for exploring their links to inter-firm innovation patterns.

The authors demonstrate the configurational approach to the innovation patterns in inter-organizational setting. That is, the authors conclude that different configurations of BSE are likely to produce distinctive patterns of choices for inter-firm innovation activities.

This study applies social embeddedness perspective to conceptualize dyadic BSE. Adoption of this concept allows dimensionalizing the dyadic relationships into two distinct dyadic elements, relational, and structural dimensions. Also, the concept has rich implications for how partner firms interact and share information. The dyad’s innovation potential and patterns are considered based on the configurations of dyadic embeddedness.