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The purpose of this paper is to use principles from Tzu's The Art of War to develop a conceptual framework for the exploration of brand persuasion and the manufacturing of consumer consent and consumption.

The conceptual framework is based upon formal theoretical links between Tzu's concept of engagement and the political economic aspects of Herman and Chomsky with regard to manufacturing consent and consumption engineering via use of the mass media.

Within the framework the consumer is simultaneously the enemy, the manipulated target for consumption engineering and the protected people in the sales “war”. The business culture and ethical considerations of such a position are examined and hence the paper offers a novel insight into how theoretical concepts link political, social and commercial paradigms in order to gain an insight into market interventions, consumption engineering and marketing leverage.

The paper contributes to the body of knowledge examining the relationship between Chinese and Western theoretical concepts whilst providing insight for executives seeking to leverage marketing strategy.

In the context of the widespread and extensive use of team work in organizations this study analyses the relationship between individual team role preference and styles of managing interpersonal conflict. Data were collected from 26 work teams containing 169 individuals at two times four months apart. Results show that team role preference is related to Dominating, Integrating, Avoiding, Compromising and Obliging conflict management styles. Moreover, two different effects were observed over time. Firstly, at Time 2 an increase in the role clarity (reduction of role ambiguity) of team members was observed. Secondly, time pressure and team learning processes moderated the relationship between team roles and conflict managing style. Results have theoretical as well as practical implications for team building programmes in search of integrative solutions to conflict.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impacts of technological capability (TC) and technology management (TM) on the development of China’s telecommunications industry by examining two interrelated questions: Which is the order parameter for China’s telecommunications industry? and What are the relationships between TC and TM? The paper will develop models to analyze TC, TM and the development of China’s telecommunications industry quantitatively.

The paper reviews literature related to TC and TM and investigates the technical features of China’s telecommunications industry. Then, the paper makes a theoretical analysis of the relationships among them. First, it analyzes the effects of TC and TM on the industry and tries to explore the order parameter. Second, the paper analyzes the interaction between TC and TM. Then, the paper applies the Haken model to construct an analysis model. It also constructs models for measuring TC and TM. Using the data of China’s telecommunications industry from 1991 to 2010, the paper identifies the order parameter for the industry and tests the relationships between TC and TM.

The paper finds that TC plays a dominant role in the development of China’s telecommunications industry. The paper also finds that TC promotes the development of TM. However, TM fails to promote the development of TC. The paper presents two other important findings. The first one is that China’s telecommunications industry has constructed a positive feedback mechanism for continuous development of TC, which provides an impetus for industry upgrades and development. The second one is that there is no positive feedback growth mechanism for TM capability, which has increased the lag between TM and TC and has become one of the important reasons why TM does not promote TC.

Theoretical and managerial implications are put forward. Thus, TC must be improved to propel the development of China’s telecommunications industry; TM should be greatly improved and an effective growth mechanism for TM should be constructed; the synergy between TM and TC should be achieved. Research limitations are also pointed out. Thus, the results in this paper probably cannot be generalized to other industries; it does go on to discuss the synergetic mode of TM and TC that can best compel industrial development, and it does not explain what the growth mechanisms for TM and TC should be.

The paper is original, as it provides new perspectives of TM and TC for analyzing industrial development, and it provides the method and model for quantitatively analyzing TC and TM at an industry level. It discovers the order parameter and new problems of China’s telecommunications industry, which no one has identified before. The paper also offers references for analyzing other industries from the perspectives of TM and TC.

The European Forum for Enhanced Collaboration in Teaching (EFFECT, 2015–2019) (EFFECT, 2019), a project co-financed by the European Commission, through its Erasmus+ programme, has been exploring effective methods for university teachers’ development at the European level, including pedagogical staff development “modules” to support inclusivity and citizenship in teaching and learning practice. Throughout the project and in this chapter, the authors have taken “inclusivity” to convey an attitude and appreciation for principles which inform “inclusion” as a practice – in the context of reflective and reflexive practice the words become largely interchangeable.

The way academic staff teach is of critical importance in any reform designed to enhance inclusion and citizenship in higher education. Conveying these values-related topics in an academic context hardly lends itself to a traditional pedagogical training model. Promoting inclusion means stimulating discussion, challenging stereotypes and unconscious biases, as well as improving educational and social frameworks. The Change Laboratory methodology (Engeström, 2001) was chosen for the pedagogical staff development workshops under EFFECT, with a view to engaging teaching staff in a deeper reflection about the topics and about their teaching practice. Change Laboratory is an intervention-research methodology that aims at reconceptualizing activity: it intends to provoke authentic reactions, responses and disagreements among the participants and provides opportunity for them to work together to reimagine their activities and to identify “concrete” solutions that address persisting issues in their practice. The theory takes a broad conceptualization of “activity” and “practice,” which is not specific to the education sector or the “classroom.” The Change Laboratory is a methodology designed to support the “expansive learning cycle” described by Engeström and as such can be understood as a theory of change which the EFFECT project team applied to a pan-European higher education learning and teaching context.

In 2017, the project team designed and implemented four physical, face-to-face pedagogical staff development workshops on inclusivity and citizenship skills based on this methodology, attended by over 100 participants from across Europe. In 2018, the workshop model was adapted to a virtual learning environment and three online sessions on inclusivity and citizenship skills for higher education teaching staff were offered.

The pedagogical staff development workshops enabled participants to use open reflective questions to provoke discussion about the challenges faced in their own learning and teaching contexts, think about their pedagogical practices and identify their unconscious biases. Most of the participants rated the workshops as very good and innovative, and considered the methodology an effective vehicle for promoting meaningful open discussion.

In this chapter, the authors reflect on the design, implementation and lessons learnt from the pedagogical staff development workshops on inclusivity and citizenship skills. The authors propose a set of recommendations for individual teaching staff and institutional leadership to consider when addressing continuous professional development for inclusivity and citizenship.

This paper tests which theoretical perspective(s) can better explain firms’ external knowledge search behavior. Information processing and resource-based view theories propose a positive relationship between environmental turbulence and knowledge search breadth, whereas transaction cost economics and managerial attention theoretical perspectives posit that knowledge search breadth will be negatively influenced by environmental turbulence. In the context of Chinese small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), this study examines the direct effect of environmental turbulence and the interactive effect of environmental turbulence and absorptive capacity (ACAP) on external knowledge search breadth.

This study adopted firm-level data collected via questionnaires from SMEs within the manufacturing sector in China. The partial least squares method was used to explore the determinants of the external knowledge search breadth of Chinese SMEs.

The results reveal that external search breadth tends to increase with an increase in a firm’s perceived environmental turbulence. In addition, the interaction between ACAP and environmental turbulence will be negatively related to external knowledge search breadth. The empirical evidence indicates information processing and resource-based view theories are more powerful in explaining the external knowledge search behavior of Chinese SMEs.

Unlike most of the innovation search literature, which have focused on the effect on performance of external search, this study focuses on the antecedents of firms’ innovation search behavior. The study contributes to the understanding of the relationship between environmental turbulence and knowledge search breadth as well as the understanding of the influence of ACAP on external knowledge search in the context of SMEs from emerging economies.

This study aims to explore the impact of search breadth and depth on corporate entrepreneurship (CE) through the mediating effect of opportunity discovery under the consideration of the technological environmental dynamism as a moderating factor.

This study adopts a quantitative method, collecting 246 questionnaires from high-tech firms in the national industrial park of the Yangtze River Delta zone in China. The authors examine the hypotheses using multiple hierarchical regressions and conduct Sobel and bootstrapping tests to further assess the mediating and moderated mediating effects of the variables.

The results indicate that both the relationship between search breadth and CE and the relationship between search depth and CE are mediated by opportunity discovery. The authors further show that technological environmental dynamism positively moderates the indirect effect of knowledge search breadth on CE and negatively moderates the indirect effect of knowledge search depth and CE.

This study provides a valuable theoretical framework for entrepreneurship literature by differentiating the effects of search depth and search breadth on the promotion of CE in established firms and pioneers the examination of the mediating role of opportunity discovery and the moderating role of technological environmental dynamism in these links as well.

This study aims to investigate the relationships between radical innovation, market forces and political/business relationships in China by combining social capital theory and contingent theory. The paper focuses on how two types of managerial ties (i.e. business and political ties) impact firms’ capacity for radical innovation. It also examines the different moderating effects of market forces (i.e. demand uncertainty, technological turbulence and competitive intensity) on the linkage of managerial ties with radical innovation in the Chinese transitional context.

A systematic literature review on managerial ties, radical innovation and market forces in emerging markets provides the theoretical foundation of our conceptual model and hypothesis. Using a survey sample of 119 Chinese firms, the authors conduct a regression analysis on the theoretical model and hypotheses.

The results show that business ties have an inverted U-shape effect on radical innovation, while political ties have a positive impact on radical innovation. Furthermore, the market forces in transitional economies (i.e. demand uncertainty, technological turbulence and competitive intensity) have different moderating effects on the relationships between two types of managerial ties and Chinese firms’ radical innovation.

This study adopts its data set from the Chinese context. It would be necessary to replicate this research in other transitional economies because of specific differences between China and other transitional economies.

Findings from our study indicate that firms which wish to succeed in radical innovation may need to adapt their tie-based strategies according to different market settings.

The paper is original in its comparative investigation of the effect of business ties and political ties on radical innovation in contingent transitional market environments using a combination of social capital and contingent theories.