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In daily life, consumers usually experience economic limitations on their consumption, which in turn results in experiencing financial constraints. The purpose of this article is to examine how feeling financially constrained influences variety seeking in consumption.

The authors conducted three experiments to test the proposed hypotheses by applying multiple methods of manipulation of financial constraints and different measures of variety seeking.

The authors found that feeling financially constrained increases consumers’ insecurity, which in turn decreases their variety-seeking behavior. Additionally, the authors noted that individuals’ positive illusion could moderate the aforementioned effect. The negative effect of financial constraints on variety seeking only existed among consumers with a low positive illusion.

The findings in this article could help marketers attain a better understanding of consumers’ choices under financial constraints and could help retailers optimize their product lines and distribution.

This research marks the first attempt to examine the relationship between financial constraint and variety seeking. The findings make for a valuable addition to both the financial constraint and variety-seeking literature reviews. The research study also extends the literature on how insecurity and positive illusion influence individuals’ decisions in the consumption context.

The purpose of this study is to investigate hybrid brand positioning strategies for emerging market brands based on two positioning elements: brand country-of-origin (COO) and brand globalness.

Researchers conducted two studies. In Study 1, a survey of 128 brand managers of emerging market brands were used to examine whether asymmetric positioning strategies improve brand preference more than symmetric strategies, and if so, which type of asymmetric strategies improves brand preference more. In Study 2, a consumer experiment in the USA was conducted to identify the positioning strategy for emerging market brands that improve brand preference the most.

For emerging market brands, at any given value of COO or global elements, asymmetric strategies outperform symmetric strategies in terms of brand preference. On average, the best hybrid positioning strategy is the one that highlights brand COO and de-emphasizes brand globalness.

A large body of branding literature examines COO and globalness separately without considering their co-presence in the same brand positioning strategy. Few studies that examine the joint influence of brand COO and globalness focus on established brands from developed markets and do not examine whether highlighting both brand COO and global elements equally is an effective positioning strategy for emerging market brands. This study introduces a framework to systematically examine the various combinations of COO and global elements in a brand’s positioning strategies for emerging market brands. By conducting two studies, the authors empirically test the influence of various combinations of COO and global elements on brand preference for emerging market brands from both firm and consumer perspectives.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the typology of Chinese indigenous exporters by incorporating proactive‐reactive and long‐ and short‐term export motivations as inputs. This study also seeks to find out whether, when driven with a different strength of four export motives, firms differ significantly in terms of commitment, learning, competence and performance.

This paper employs cluster analysis to explore the typology of Chinese exporters and conducts ANOVA to compare subsequent differences in organizational characteristics, competence and performance. Case studies are then used to validate and exemplify the typology.

Findings suggest that Chinese exporters fall into four segments: the prospector, the strategist, the hesitator and the experimentalist. Each shows a unique set of organizational characteristics and different performances. The prospector is most competitive and the best performer, followed by the strategist.

The study uses limited export motives and profiling variables to understand this in a static way. Other motives and profiling variables are welcomed, and future study can address this in a dynamic way.

The findings suggest an evolutionary path for exporters and implies how to strengthen proactive and long‐term motives in order to achieve superior performance.

This paper for the first time looks at firms that are already involved in exporting, how differently they are motivated and how their initial internationalization motivations lead to sharp differences in export performance.

I learned my first important lesson on research from the research design seminars offered by Drs Tamer Cavusgil and Roger Calantone. During my first semester in the Ph.D. program, I took a Ph.D. seminar class, international business research with Dr. Tamer Cavusgil. In that class, each student was asked to select a topic to research, present findings to the rest of the class, and write a term paper that could be turned into a potential publication. In the midst of my struggle to find this big bang topic that could lead to a potential publication, Dr. Tamer Cavusgil showed us a few surveys designed by previous Ph.D. students. He mentioned that we could use these surveys as guidelines to develop our own thoughts. These surveys turned out to be the concrete piece of information that I needed to be on track with my research. Prior to this, I had gained some interests in understanding how trust and relational norms govern inter-organizational relationships. One of the surveys Dr. Cavusgil passed to us happened to be about this research area. Under the guidance of Drs Cavusgil and Joseph Bonner, I developed my first research ideas on understanding the third way of governance, relational norms in international channels of distribution.

Wonders whether, owing to severely restricted access, China’s government policy towards digital communications will remain in a constant state of flux – or will it gain economic benefits without a social penalty? Concludes that China has to link the forces of change to channel and deflect domestic resistance.

The purpose of this paper is to study the evolution of Chinese industrial relations after the market reform of 1978, while basing its arguments and conclusion on analysis of the interactions of key actors in the labour arena in China. The significant phenomena in the evolution of industrial relations are the coming of transnational capital and the emergence of self‐organising protests by migrant workers.

The paper uses a case study approach.

The Labour Contract Law and the local political economy experience strong effects from TNCs and other business players. Meanwhile, globalisation has introduced the civil society movement to China, which has given rise to an increasing number of NGOs working for labour rights. Tight financial and technical connections between grassroots NGOs and international donor organisations make it possible for bottom‐up labour activities to counteract the unilateral influence of the state and market over the Chinese workforce. Since the ACFTU, the official trade union umbrella, has many institutional constraints to undertake a thorough transition towards labour in the near future, workers' representation is diversified.

One implication for further theoretical studies is that tripartism cannot fully disclose the reality of Chinese labour, and that labour representation derives from both unions and self‐organisation of workers, such as NGOs, which opens more room for the entrenchment of the grassroots labour movement to sustain the balance of power among the state, ACFTU, firms, international market forces and individual workers in the long term.

The cities, for the most part, appeared up until the middle of the 1990s to be islands within the larger Chinese political economy in which job-secure workers could be certain that their livelihood, health, education, and living abodes would evermore undergird their and their children's sustenance. At least until the late 1980s, urbanites who stuck with the state sector even considered good treatment on the job a kind of birthright, an entitlement that was sure to be enforced. In the cities, true, there had always been the disadvantaged after 1949 – those without offspring or spouses, the disabled, and people unable to support themselves. But this relatively tiny batch of individuals generally survived in the shadows and out of sight, subsisting – but just barely – as members of the “three withouts” on a mere pittance, in the form of meager “social relief” disbursed by civil affairs departments.⁸