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The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of two Chinese cultural constructs, guanxi (networks) and xinyong (interpersonal trust) in the burgeoning vegetable supply chains.

Data were collected using a validated survey instrument and 520 usable responses were obtained from vegetable farmers in three main vegetable producing provinces of China.

The findings revealed that farmers' guanxi promotes xinyong and collaboration of buyers. It was also determined that xinyong is the key mediator between guanxi and the two outcomes, loyalty and financial performance of farmers. Additionally, xinyong influences collaboration of the buyer.

This paper offers strategic insights into both academicians and practitioners associated with the vegetable industry regarding enhancement of inter-organisational relationships (loyalty) and financial performance of farmers in China through the embedded concepts of guanxi and xinyong.

Despite its potential importance, relatively little is known about these two concepts especially with respect to supply chains of fresh produce.

This paper aims to provide a comprehensive and systematic review of the extant empirical body of knowledge regarding the impact of Guanxi on international Business-to-Business (B-to-B) relationships.

After the collection and refinement of studies that appeared in marketing, business and management literature during 1995-2018 period, a systematic review was conducted to discover the current situation and future research directions on the subject.

Theoretically, vast majority of the reviewed studies lacked a theoretical foundation, with the remainder anchored primarily on the resource-based view, social network theory and social exchange theory. Methodologically, Ganqing, Xinren and Mianzi are the most frequently investigated dimensions, whereas Renqing is the least investigated dimension. Data are mostly obtained from both Chinese and Western counterparts through survey and analyzed through univariate and multivariate data analysis techniques. Empirically, extant research focused on many diverse outcomes including trust, financial performance, cooperation, satisfaction, time orientation, opportunism and liability of foreignness, while under-examining the drives of Guanxi.

This study provides a synthesis of extant line of research on the subject that are published in peer-reviewed international journals, which publish research in English. A meta-analysis may be conducted for providing a further detailed framework.

This study contributes to international marketing literature by providing an in-depth and synthesized inventory of knowledge to scholars; deriving a comprehensive analysis of theoretical foundations, methodological approaches and findings addressed by scholars in the field; noticing theoretical, methodological and empirical gaps to be examined; and providing future research directions.

The aim of this paper is to examine social networks from a Western and Eastern view.

The paper uses case study methodology to gather evidence of how world pioneering firms from Asia and Europe measure and report their social connections from a Western perspective.

It is examined the basic indicators firms use to measure these networks and the major issues managers should consider when measuring and reporting these knowledge‐based resources. These indicators can be classified into four categories: customer description, customer portfolio, stakeholder capital and social networks. In total the study finds 29 relevant indicators for organizational social connections.

The paper provides great value both for academics and executives interested in the analysis of social networks both from a Western and Eastern view.

This study incorporates two Chinese cultural variables guanxi (personal relationship) and xinyong (personal trust) with other relational variables that are well defined in the west, i.e. supplier competence, commitment, conflict handling and satisfaction to see how they generate partnership relationship in a sino‐western relationship marketing context.

Research objectives are achieved through a combination of model building, quantitative design, testing of hypotheses using AMOS and analysis of findings. The subject scope is imbedded within cultural impact on relationship marketing in a sino‐western context.

This study finds that Western suppliers must be competent in product knowledge, market development, and adaptation to buyers' requirements to resolve conflicts in order to establish their xinyong with the buyers. Competence allows suppliers to show psychological commitment and establish guanxi with the buyers. It also shows that guanxi has a stronger influence on xinyong than on satisfaction. Suppliers should use guanxi to generate buyer's perception on xinyong whilst maintaining a reasonable level of buyer satisfaction with their products and services. Also, relationship between xinyong and satisfaction is not significant. A buyer's satisfaction on the supplier's product and services does not necessarily mean that this buyer perceives the supplier having xinyong because Chinese mix (up) business with personal relationships together and sometimes they make trade‐off between them!

This relationship study was conducted in a single‐product relationship context within the clothing industry in the PRC environment and therefore, its findings may not be generalised to other industry. Future Chinese relationship study should increase the sample size so as to cover more industries to allow comparison across industries. This is especially valid between a manufacturing and a service‐based industry. A service‐based industry may even emphasize more on guanxi and xinyong because of its intangible aspects! Future research should include the xinyong constructs, the concepts of face and reciprocity. To what extent these important Chinese cultural values affect satisfaction and xinyong have not been determined.

Effective conflict handling skills and guanxi are vital to formulate a xinyong positioning strategy. A supplier must be competent in product knowledge, market development skills, and adapt to a buyer's requirements to resolve conflicts with the buyer to establish xinyong.

This research is an initial attempt to establish the relationship between guanxi, xinyong and partnership relationship and generates a new research area in Chinese relationship marketing.

The purpose of this paper is to examine empirically how managers establish ethical guanxi (interpersonal relationships) with their business partners to prevent potential ethical incidences in Chinese and Western business contexts.

The present study is guided by a qualitative, abductive approach and draws on in-depth interviews with ten senior managers in five urban New Zealand organisations.

The results point out that guanxi (interpersonal relationships) purely working through renqing (reciprocity) is not sustainable, because it perpetuates a never-ending cycle of favours, once exchanging favours stopped or disappeared, then business relationships dwindled. To establish an ethical guanxi model, the authors found that xinyong (trust) is the foundation, and its enlargement stimulates lijie (empathy) that transfers pure business relationships to a genuine friendship which enhances ethical decision-making. They also posit that once managers are embodied with lijie, then they will have the virtue of ren to behave like junzi (ideal Confucian ethical person) whose business actions tend to be intrinsically guided by a sense of obligation to do something right that will work for diverse stakeholders’ interests, for the prosperity of organisations and society.

This study suggests that managers should take Confucian virtues of xinyong (trust) and lijie (empathy), because they will trigger ren (humanity) as an intrinsic value. In this way, it is more likely for them to become junzi (ideal Confucian ethical person) whose business actions are intrinsically guided by a sense of obligation to do something right that benefits various stakeholders, organisations and society.

This study contributes to the extant literature on preventing ethical incidents of guanxi (interpersonal relationships) by drawing a framework of ethical guanxi, which is built on Confucian virtues of xinyong (trust), lijie (empathy) and ren (humanity). Further, this paper strongly suggests that companies should educate their staff to become more humane to make moral decisions in daily management practice.

This study provides an insight into and a solution for the conflict among marketing channel members in China. It also examines the application of a Western channel conflict management (CM) model in China and suggests future research directions for CM of marketing channel members.

A replication research study with extensions was conducted following previous studies' suggestions. Using a Chinese sample, the author further evaluates a Western conceptual framework with hypothetical relationships of variables. Different from the original study using students in a simulated network environment, this study used channel members involved in actual network activities. Data were collected by a questionnaire survey and analyzed.

The results show CM of channel members in China and do not fully support the hypotheses in the Western model. This study identifies the determinants of an effective approach toward resolving conflicts among members from the perspectives of network outcomes, conflict types and management styles. The choice of CM style is imperative to member performance, especially for achieving specific network outcomes or CM goals.

This study contributes to existing studies of CM of marketing channel members by providing empirical evidence of managing conflict of members in the Chinese channel, revealing the effectiveness of CM of members with different cultural norms, providing managers with practical solutions to effectively manage conflicts among members and providing future research directions regarding this topic.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how Chinese and Finnish managers in cross-cultural supply-chain relationships evaluate their business partners’ trustworthiness and distrustworthiness.

Representatives of two Finnish companies and their Chinese and Finnish suppliers were interviewed to collect qualitative data from 23 managers.

The Chinese managers emphasized relationship-specific, personalized trustworthiness. They highlighted personalized communication and benevolence, which manifested in respect and reciprocity, rooted in the Chinese notion of “guanxi” as personal ties. In contrast, the Finnish managers’ view of trustworthiness was more associated with depersonalized organizational attributes. They emphasized the dimension of integrity, especially promise-keeping. In addition, tentative signs of trust ambivalence, as a balance between trust- and distrust-related factors, were identified for both the Chinese and the Finns.

Due to the exploratory nature of this study the validity of the findings is limited to these data and context. Future studies could explore other national contexts as well as the effects of industry, market position, and position in the supply chain.

The findings of this study bring a valuable understanding of the potential pitfalls and unique challenges in cross-border inter-firm transactions. These can enhance inter-firm trust building in a cross-cultural context.

This study enriches the view of trust as a holistic process of simultaneous evaluation of both trustworthiness and distrustworthiness. In this process, trust ambivalence could serve as the intermediate construct between trust and distrust. These two contrary yet complementary opposites constitute a duality to be managed from the perspective of yin-yang balancing.

Guanxi is the foundation of business success in Chinese and other Eastern cultures, but little is known about the extent to which guanxi influences brand outcomes in channel relationships. The purpose of this study is to propose a novel theoretical framework of interpersonal and interorganizational guanxi relationships in a sales channel context and how these relationships influence brand outcomes.

The authors conceptualize, develop and validate new scales measuring interpersonal and interorganizational guanxi and test the proposed model with a field study to validate the effects of guanxi on brand loyalty. The causal relationships between interpersonal guanxi and brand attitudes and affect are confirmed in a separate field experiment.

Findings show that interpersonal guanxi is antecedent to interorganizational guanxi, and these two constructs have significant and differential direct and indirect effects on brand attitudes, brand affect and brand loyalty.

New multidimensional scales measuring both interpersonal and interorganizational guanxi were developed. Both interpersonal and interorganizational guanxi are conceptualized as second-order reflective constructs measured by the reflective first-order guanxi elements of personal and firm trust, personal and firm long-term orientation, xinyong (integrity), reciprocity, interaction and face.

This paper aims to investigate the impact of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic on university students during the Movement Control Order (MCO) and Recovery Movement Control Order (RMCO). MCO was introduced in March 2020, and the learning process switched from face-to-face to online learning in schools and universities. Subsequently, with the reduced number of daily cases and active cases of COVID-19, the Malaysian Government implemented RMCO from 10th June to 31st December 2020, which had more relaxation of restrictions. This study particularly focuses on students studying in higher education institutions by analysing the impacts of the community of inquiry on students learning performance. The construct of the community of inquiry includes social presence, cognitive presence and teaching presence.

This paper provides quantitative analysis, independent sample t-tests and multiple linear regression on the students’ learning performance using the framework of community of inquiry. This paper presents the analysis of the online learning preference of 282 university students during MCO and 456 students during RMCO.

The results showed that there is a significant difference in students learning process during MCO and RMCO. The findings also indicated that the social presence is the most important factor in affecting learning performance during the MCO period and it changed to teaching presence during RMCO. Students lost motivation and could not perform well using online learning methods during the MCO period but the situation improved during RMCO.

This research helps to identify the impact of the pandemic on higher education and provides insights into reshaping the future of higher education system.

Students are isolated from their peers in the learning process and struggle to adapt to the new normal in online learning. The teaching faculties are picking up new skills to deliver online courses and manage the risk as best as they can. This study presented the impact of the pandemic on students learning performance and explored the space for universities as business organizations to provide better infrastructures and platforms for online learning while battling with cash flow and debt level during this challenging time.

Students need peer support and guidance from the faculty team in their learning journey. The study provides a better understanding of how we shall promote a better higher education environment, either blended or online learning.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study to examine the impact of the community of inquiry on students learning performance during the COVID-19 pandemic. Students suffered during the MCO period and the learning experience got better when they were able to adapt to the changes. The higher education system needs a reform and the agency theory in corporate governance plays an important role in the transformation.

This paper aims to propose and test a model examining the relationship of guanxi with new product performance and customer loyalty in the context of internationalizing small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in China. Social network theory and information processing theory provide the theoretical lenses for this research.

Guanxi with suppliers, distributors and customers is measured as a second-order construct consisting of ganqing, renqing, and xinren/xinyong. Research hypotheses are tested using survey data (n = 212) gathered in Anhui and Shandong Provinces. The data are analyzed using smart partial least squares technique.

The findings reinforce existing studies, which show that a locally based social network can be extended to the success of early-internationalizing SMEs. Results also suggest that the relationship between guanxi and customer loyalty is stronger when technical uncertainty is low and when market uncertainty is low rather than high.

The data were gathered from the point of view of the SMEs and may not accurately reflect the perspective of the foreign customer. The findings may not generalize beyond the regions surveyed. The study does not differentiate among the type of supply chain member, and the location of the supply chain member was not measured.

Although guanxi is typically viewed as being localized within a country, guanxi with suppliers, distributors and customers can provide information and resources needed for successful export products. Second, internationalizing SMEs must understand that even though guanxi has positive impact on new product performance which directly leads to customer loyalty only when uncertainty is low.

Although guanxi has been studied, there are a limited number of empirical studies of guanxi in a supply chain context and most focus on buyers’ guanxi with suppliers. The research on guanxi with customers and distributors is also limited. This research addresses this gap by focusing on guanxi with suppliers, distributors and customers.