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This study aims to examine the effects of formal and informal institutional factors (i.e. marketization and guanxi culture) on interorganizational conflicts (IOCs) and their interaction effects.

Drawing on IOC literature and an institution-based view, the authors use a sample of 12,022 Chinese firms from the World Bank’s Investment Climate Survey. A zero-inflated negative binomial regression was used to analyze the data.

The results suggest that guanxi culture has U-shaped effects, but marketization does not negatively affect IOCs. Furthermore, a low level of marketization weakens the U-shaped effect of guanxi culture on IOCs. A moderate level of guanxi culture can enable marketization to reduce IOCs.

This study provides a better understanding of the management of IOCs. Managers should fully understand the differential effects of the institutional environment in different regions and their interactions by adopting different response strategies.

This study enriches the literature on IOCs’ antecedents and contextual factors by examining the institutions’ direct and interaction effects on IOCs.

This chapter provides an historical perspective on the evolution of educational marketing both as a professional field within the management and leadership of educational organisations and as a research field for academics and practitioners. It weaves together three important strands of analysis:•The evolution of the political, economic and social ideologies which have created the context in which marketisation of education has occurred.•The development of approaches to educational marketing in schools, colleges and universities.•The development of the research arena focused on marketisation and marketing in educational institutions.

The analysis considers the challenges that market-based concepts have brought to the existing hegemonies within both education and academic research, and also the politics and sociology of academic research. This provides a perspective on the challenges of developing a ‘new’ research field as a valid and significant area of study. The chapter concludes that educational marketing has evolved very significantly over the last 30 years, but has a done so in a context of substantial intellectual and sociological challenge. Resistance to its development has at times reflected resistance to the underlying concepts of marketisation rather than a concern that its approaches and findings are not important.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the influences of negative performance feedback on firms' cost behaviors including productive behaviors (i.e. R&D behaviors) and non-productive behaviors (i.e. selling behaviors and business entertainment behaviors), as well as to investigate the roles of ownership types and marketization.

A sample of Chinese manufacturing firms from 2007 to 2018 is analyzed employing multiple regression models.

The results show that negative performance feedback has a positive but not significant effect on R&D behaviors, while its effect on selling behaviors is significantly positive. Meanwhile, there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between negative performance feedback and business entertainment behaviors. Furthermore, when facing a performance dilemma, state-owned enterprises tend to adjust selling behaviors, while nonstate-owned enterprises pay more attention to business entertainment behaviors. In terms of marketization, the firms in high-marketization regions are more likely to adjust their R&D, selling and business entertainment behaviors, while the firms in low-marketization regions are difficult to adjust these cost behaviors.

This study explores the role of negative performance feedback in firms' cost behaviors and provides empirical evidence about the differentiated influences regarding ownership types and marketization.

Integrating insights from existing studies and introducing the behavioral theory of the firm and prospect theory, this study proposes a more inclusive framework that addresses the impacts of negative performance feedback on firms' cost behaviors. This paper deepens the understanding of firms' decision behaviors in the dilemma of performance shortfall.

The impact of network centrality on innovation performance is inconclusive. The purpose of this paper is to examine how formal and informal institutions affect the influence of network centrality on firms’ innovation performance in emerging economies by integrating social network theory and institutional theory.

Multisource and lagged data from 234 technology-based entrepreneurial firms listed on the Chinese Growth Enterprise Market were leveraged to test a proposed research model.

Results suggest that formal institutions (marketization) positively moderate the relationship between network centrality and innovation performance, whereas informal institutions (social cohesion) negatively moderate this relationship. Moreover, formal and informal institutions have a strong joint impact on such relationship, that is, the effect of network centrality on innovation performance is most positive when marketization is high and social cohesion is low.

This empirical research provides new insights into whether and how firms can grasp the innovation benefits of network centrality by exploring institutional contingencies. It further sheds on light the scope of the network centrality–innovation issue by extending its research context to Chinese entrepreneurial firms.

The paper aims to empirically examine the role of intra-national institutions in business performance. In particular, the article develops hypotheses regarding financial marketization and business venturing with organizational slack and political connections as moderating variables.

The authors choose listed firms from the pharmaceutical industry in China and focus on the period of 2001-2009. Results from the Hausman specification test indicate that the random effects model is appropriate for data. Because the dependent variable is dichotomous, the random effects logistic regression technique in Stata is used. To check the robustness of the estimation, the random-effects Tobit regression technique in Stata is also used. Overall, models are robust and statistically significant.

It was found that the level of regional financial sector marketization is positively associated with the likelihood of engaging in corporate venturing by firms within the region. Moreover, it was found that organizational slack significantly decreases the institutional influence on corporate venturing.

This study is one of the first to theorize and empirically test the impact of intra-national institutions on corporate venturing in China’s pharmaceutical industry. Institutions matter more when organizational slack is low. Firms in the pharmaceutical industry in China do not seem completely dependent on political connections for business venturing and use organizational slack to buffer against (adverse) institutional change.

The purpose of this paper is to make an empirical-based conceptualization of the contemporary domestic state-owned enterprises (SOEs) as domestic institutional market actors (IMAs) in the marketization of public service delivery.

The paper is based on a qualitative comparative case study of the SOEs in passenger rail in Denmark and Sweden from 1990 to 2015.

The paper shows how marketization results in a layered institutional set-up of public service delivery based on both competition and monopoly where the SOE becomes what we call an IMA bridging sectorial challenges. In Sweden, this role has a new public governance form as the monopoly over time is fully dismantled. In Denmark, over time marketization is put on hold due to problems with the SOE as a market actor, but the SOE is nevertheless safeguarded in a new Weberian model as a sector coordinator.

The paper contributes to the recent literature on SOEs and marketization with an original and novel conceptualization of contemporary SOEs in public governance.

This paper aims to investigate the relationship between corporate environmental, social and governance (ESG) ratings and leverage manipulation and the moderating effects of internal and external supervision.

The authors draw on a sample of Chinese non-financial A-share-listed firms from 2013 to 2020 to explore the effect of ESG ratings on leverage manipulation. Robustness and endogeneity tests confirm the validity of the regression results.

ESG ratings inhibit leverage manipulation by improving social reputation, information transparency and financing constraints. This effect is weakened by internal supervision, captured by the ratio of institutional investor ownership, and strengthened by external supervision, captured by the level of marketization. The effect is stronger in non-state-owned firms and firms in non-polluting industries. The governance dimension of ESG exhibits the strongest effect, with comprehensive environmental governance ratings and social governance ratings also suppressing leverage manipulation.

Firms should strive to cultivate environmental awareness, fulfil their social responsibilities and enhance internal governance, which may help to strengthen the firm’s sustainability orientation, mitigate opportunistic behaviours and ultimately contribute to high-quality firm development. The top managers of firms should exercise self-restraint and take the initiative to reduce leverage manipulation by establishing an appropriate governance structure and sustainable business operation system that incorporate environmental and social governance in addition to general governance.

Policymakers and regulators should formulate unified guidelines with comprehensive criteria to improve the scope and quality of ESG information disclosure and provide specific guidance on ESG practice for firms. Investors should incorporate ESG ratings into their investment decision framework to lower their portfolio risk.

This study contributes to the literature in four ways. Firstly, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, it is among the first to show that high ESG ratings may mitigate firms’ opportunistic behaviours. Secondly, it identifies the governance factor of leverage manipulation from the perspective of firms’ subjective sustainability orientation. Thirdly, it demonstrates that the relationship between ESG ratings and leverage manipulation varies with the level of internal and external supervision. Finally, it highlights the importance of governance in guaranteeing the other two dimensions’ roles by decomposing overall ESG.

Purpose: Market logics have increasingly dominated consumer life worlds. Consumers may embrace marketization, or they may resist it, try to escape it, rebel against it, or actively manage its effects. This chapter examines the marketization of elderly care (in the form of transactional service provider relationships) and how consumers apply humanizing strategies to market relationships.

Methodology/Approach: This is a qualitative interpretive study using in-depth interviewing, observations, and the analysis of media coverage.

Findings: Drawing on institutional theory, this study shows how consumers humanize a marketized service relationship by weaving social logics into existing market logics. Our research finds consumers engaging in three humanization strategies: (1) moving beyond transactional relationships; (2) sharing consumption experiences; and (3) reinforcing social bonds through giving. The end result is the do-it-yourself (DIY) creation of extended family relationships from market resources.

Social Implications: The context of this study is a government-supported, non-profit, exchanged-based retirement support scheme that addresses the challenges of global population aging and the increasing anonymization and estrangement in our society. The authors tentatively suggest that our findings represent a move to mitigate adverse effects of neoliberalism.

Originality/Value of the Paper: Prior research has shown that consumers embrace marketization, resist it, try to escape it, rebel against it, or actively manage its effects. The authors identify another strategy used by consumers to address the increasing marketization of their life worlds, namely humanization. This study shows that consumers assemble market resources and humanize transactional service provider relationships by weaving social- into market logics resulting in the creation of a DIY extended family.

Market transition theory has specified general mechanisms to explain change in the balance of power between political and economic actors in transition economies. These mechanisms drive the endogenous construction of informal institutions of a market society; moreover, it is within the context of an ongoing change in relative power that the formal institutions of the emerging market economy arise. The theory makes clear predictions on the declining value of political capital as a consequence of progressive marketization, which incrementally results in transformative change in the direction of more relative autonomy between the political and economic spheres, not dissimilar from established market economies (Kornai, 1995; Evans, 1995; Nee, 2000; Lindenberg, 2000; Ricketts, 2000). In sum, the predicted change in relative power between redistributors and producers explains not only bottom-up entrepreneurial activity, but also the emergence of a market economy in departures from state socialism.

Based on the socio-emotional wealth and agency theories, this study empirically investigates the impact of family ownership and management on green innovation (GI) in family businesses, as well as the moderating effects of institutional environmental support factors, namely, the technological achievement marketisation index and the market-rule-of law index.

This study empirically tests the hypotheses based on a sample of listed Chinese family companies with A-shares in 14 heavily polluting industries from 2009 to 2019.

There is a U-shaped relationship between the percentage of family ownership and GI, and an inverted U-shaped relationship between the degree of family management and GI. Additionally, different institutional environmental support factors affect these relationships in different ways. As the technological achievement marketisation index increases, the U-shaped relationship between the percentage of family ownership and GI becomes steeper, while the inverted U-shaped relationship between the degree of family management and GI becomes smoother. The market rule-of-law index weakens the U-shaped relationship between family ownership and GI.

First, the authors enrich the research on the driving factors of GI from the perspective of the most essential heterogeneity of family businesses. This study shows nonlinear and opposite effects of family ownership and management on GI in family firms. Second, this study contributes to the literature on family firm innovation. GI, not considered by researchers, is regarded as an important deficiency in research on innovation in family businesses. Therefore, this study fills that gap. Third, the study expands research on moderating effects in the literature on GI from the perspective of institutional environmental support factors.