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Penrose introduced the concept of “unused services” which she identified as the internal inducement to firm growth. The purpose of this paper is to explore “unused services”, insufficiently examined in the literature to date, by applying Eastern conceptual thinking to refine Penrose's arguments.

The centrality of “unused services” to Penrose's theory is highlighted. The rationale for a general propensity of entrepreneurial managers to overlook the generation of such services in practice is developed and two Chinese concepts (Xing and Shi from Sun Tzu) are employed to work through their implications for Penrose's concept.

The continuous availability of unused services represents the firm's propensity to grow (Shi) and is derived from the disposition of existing resources (Xing). The authors' cross‐cultural perspective highlights the fundamental and inherent force governing the growth of the firm as the process through which the management team makes meaning of existing and potential productive resources to explore and exploit their unused services.

Greater focus is required on the relationship between a firm's physical resources and the thinking and sense‐making of its managers. The art of achieving growth from a firm's productive resources arises from the meaning‐making capability and progression in managerial thinking of the management team, facilitating its members to “see” and exploit the inherent force for growth available in unused services.

The paper's cross‐cultural perspective permits refinement of Penrose's theory true to her focus on the inherent incentives and constraints on firm growth. Thus, thinking is advanced in terms of exploring the dominant factor governing the identification of potential productive opportunities within firms, i.e. their source of growth. Implications for practice are provided in the research agenda.

The purpose of this paper is to provide the historical background of genealogical records and analyze the value of Chinese genealogical research through the study of names and genealogical resources.

The paper examines the historical evolution and value of Chinese genealogical records, with the focus on researching the Islamic Chinese names used by the people living in Guilin. The highlight of this paper includes the analysis and evolution of the Islamic Chinese names commonly adopted by the local people in Guilin. It concludes with the recommendations on emphasizing and making the best use of genealogical records to enhance the research value of Chinese overseas studies.

The paper covers the history of Islam and describes how the religion was introduced into China, as well as Muslims' ethnicity and identity. It also places focus on the importance of building a research collection in Asian history and Chinese genealogy.

This research study has a strong subject focus on Chinese genealogy, Asian history, and Islamic Chinese surnames. It is a narrow field that few researchers have delved into.

The results of this study will assist students, researchers, and the general public in tracing the origin of their surnames and developing their interest in the social and historical value of Chinese local history and genealogies.

The study of Chinese surnames is, by itself, a particular field for researching the social and political implications of contemporary Chinese society during the time the family members lived.

Very little research has been done in the area of Chinese local history and genealogy. The paper would be of value to researchers such as historians, sociologists, ethnologists and archaeologists, as well as students and anyone interested in researching a surname origin, its history and evolution.

It is widely accepted that enterprises obtaining academic discoveries through R&D collaboration improve their innovation performance. However, it is not necessarily true in emerging economies, such as China and post-socialist countries in Europe. The purpose of this paper is to fill the gap by investigating how R&D collaboration between industry and academia (i.e. universities and research institutes) affects the industrial innovation performance; and whether and how intermediaries moderate their relationships.

This paper constructs the research model according to the knowledge production function, and the pooled ordinary least square regression is used to verify our hypotheses.

Evidence from a sample of Chinese industrial enterprises in thirty provinces spanning from 2009 to 2014 suggests that R&D collaboration with research institutes (CWR) is positively related to innovation output, while R&D collaboration with universities (CWU) exerts negative effect on innovation output measured by sales revenue of new product (NPSR). The significant moderating role of technology transfer institutions is confirmed in the negative relationship between CWU and NPSR.

This paper empirically examines the moderating role of intermediary organisations in academia–industry cooperation and industrial innovation, and has practical implications for the government to formulate policies to improve the quality and effectiveness of cooperation between academic and industrial sectors. These results vary in inland and coastal areas, which suggest the policy makers to formulate policies according to local conditions not only in China but also in other countries, like European countries.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of social capital on the mental health of older adults in rural China. The authors also examine potential heterogeneous effects and two possible pathways from social capital increase to mental health improvement.

Based on a panel data of China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study, this paper employs a fixed effect model to examine the impact of social capital on health. A two-stage instrumental variable approach is adopted to alleviate the issue of endogeneity.

Results demonstrate that social capital has improved the mental health of older adults in rural China significantly. The beneficial effect is stronger for female, people with lower income, aged people and mainly observed in the central and western regions. Social capital affects the mental health of rural older adults through raising the awareness of healthy behavior and lowering the searching cost of health-related information.

Social capital plays a vital role in improving the mental health of older adults in rural China and is necessary for the construction of beautiful countryside in China. The authority should increase the investment in both the hard and soft infrastructure to improve the mental health of rural residents and narrow the inequality in health status.

This study enriches the empirical literature on the relationship between social capital and mental health by providing new evidence from China. Also, we choose the social activities and communications of individuals to construct a standardized index for social capital, which can better capture the social capital at the individual level.

This paper seeks to discuss the genealogical sources for Chinese immigrants as well as the settlement of Chinese in the USA and the historical evolution of Chinese names, their origins, arrangement and development. It aims to cover the origins of various classes of Chinese surnames, followed by the content description of a traditional genealogical book for jiapu.

The paper researches the various ways that a Chinese person can find out about their ancestry.

The paper reveals the roles of libraries, including serving the needs of patrons interested in genealogical research, preserving and interpreting information through oral and family history projects and collaborating with other libraries through interlibrary loan, document delivery, library consortia, collection management and international resource‐sharing.

The study provides information on where and how to locate the genealogical resources for researching the genealogy of a Chinese family.

The paper analyzes the value of genealogical research as a documentary source for population history, life expectancy in a clan, marriages and family connections, as well as lineage organizations and inter‐lineage relations.

How do entrepreneurs use simple rules to build their business models? Based on an inductive study of three Chinese Internet and technology firms, the authors find that business models emerge from simple rules that entrepreneurs learn from their experience. Simple rules also guide entrepreneurs to actualize and exploit opportunities in the marketplace, and they can help business models evolve through market feedback, especially in internationalization. This paper aims to delve into the black box of entrepreneurial decision-making and offer a better depiction of the business model development process in uncertain and fast-changing environments and thus provide guidance for future entrepreneurs.

Following the case method (Eisenhardt, 1989; Yin, 2003), the authors first present a thick description of characteristics of three companies and the dynamics of their business models. They then code these descriptions into first-order measures. Finally, they aggregate these measures into abstract constructs. They constantly compare the theoretical constructs and the emerging theory with the existing literature on business models.

The authors generate three key insights from the findings: business models emerge from simple rules learned from entrepreneurs’ experience, simple rules help entrepreneurs exploit and actualize opportunities in the marketplace and simple rules help businesses expand and evolve business models through market feedback, especially in internationalization.

This paper falls into the intersection of strategy and entrepreneurship – an emerging new field of strategic entrepreneurship – and is concerned with how businesses create and sustain a competitive advantage while simultaneously identifying and exploiting new opportunities. The authors bring people – the individual decision-makers for businesses – back in strategy research and depict a more realistic picture of the behavior of successful entrepreneurs and their business model development process.

Quality Functioni Deployment (QFD) is a useful planning process in new product development. It achieves the maximum custom satisfaction through translating Voice of the Customer (VOC) into voice of the engineer in the House of Quality (HOQ), and ensures the customer focus from house to house translation. In QFD, the relationship matrix and correlation matrix are important pars, which will influence the final priorities of the technical response. According to the traditional methods, these matrices are determined by the people’s experience and filled with ordinal numbers. It would inevitably result in inaccuracy and curtness. Design of Experiments (DOE) is employed to determine the effect of variables on the process. In this paper, the author puts forward the idea of integrating DOE into the process of QFD. This integration helps to produce scientific decision and robust product design. A famework on QFD/DOE is presented and explanations are also made.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent to which Confucian moral standards may serve as a moral root of employees' organisational citizenship behaviour (OCB) in the People's Republic of China (PRC).

The approach is conceptual, based on research within the field.

This paper suggests that the moral characteristics of Confucianism (based on a strong body of empirical studies): harmony, group orientation, guanxi (relationships), diligence, self‐learning and thrift, are the great virtues of the indigenous forms of OCB in the PRC, including helping co‐worker; individual initiative and/or functional participation; group activity participation; self‐development; social welfare participation; promoting company image; voice; protecting and saving company resources; interpersonal harmony and keeping the workplace clean; and keeping departmental harmony and coexistence in adversity.

First, this paper contributes to the extant knowledge as to the ways in which Confucian moral standards may affect Chinese exhibition of OCB. Second, this paper contributes to discerning Chinese economic success on employees' OCB performance with recourse to its traditional cultural heritage of Confucian moral standards. Finally, it highlights the presence of voice as a type of OCB which may be attributed to China's opening up to the West.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that the sustainable development thought is one good reason why Chinese civilization is continuously developing, and it can be used as a reference for the development of Chinese agriculture today.

The paper employs a historical analysis approach to examine the sustainable thoughts concerning Chinese traditional agriculture, including view of sancai, farming season, fertility, the nature of matters, recycling, and economization.

The results reveal that the nature of Chinese traditional agriculture is akin to ecological agriculture, which is precious heritage for China and the whole world.

The originality of this paper is that it confirms the fundamental reason of the continuous development of Chinese civilization which, based on organization of sustainable development thought, lies in traditional agriculture.