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Grounded in the structural and relational inertia literature, this paper aims to investigate how two types of founding conditions – prior state ownership and a founder’s state career history – may individually and interactively affect the resource acquisition and organizing capability of firms.

This study uses a unique, large-scale survey of 480 manufacturing firms in China.

The findings show that prior state ownership is positively related to a firm’s resource acquisition, and the founder’s state career history moderates the relationship between prior state ownership and a firm’s organizing capability such that a founder with a state career history can help a privatized firm overcome its structural inertia and achieve superior organizing capabilities. However, it is found that a founder’s state career history is not associated with a firm’s resource acquisition or organizing capability.

First, this study is cross-sectional. Second, this paper refocuses on Chinese manufacturing firms in two regions only. Third, the authors do not have information on how long founders had been in state sector. Fourth, the measure of resource acquisition and organizational capability is a self-reported perceptual measure.

First, this study suggests that founders’ state career history does not benefit firms in resource acquisitions. Once founders do not work for government organizations, they can lose the associated resource benefits. The founders may have to actively maintain their historical connections with the current government officials to continue to receive various information and resource benefits. Second, this study indicates that it is possible for privatized firms to have resource acquisition advantages resulting from their historical heritage and at the same time overcome the inferior organizing capabilities from their histories by having a founder with a prior state career history. Such founders tend to have the ability to overcome the unfavorable imprinting effect of previous histories and to help private firms develop better strategies and structures to fit the dynamic and competitive environment.

This study indicates that it is possible for state-owned enterprises to become efficient if they can employ capable managers with superior managerial skills.

Current literature on the effect of government affiliations on firm behavior and outcomes typically focuses on existing government affiliations and their benefits on a firm’s economic and information resources, legitimacy and new venture performance. This study is one of the first to examine how historical government affiliations may affect both the resource acquisition and organizing capability of a firm. In addition, existing studies have rarely studied simultaneously how a firm’s and a founder’s historical government affiliations may independently and interactively affect a firm’s ability to acquire resources and develop capabilities critical for a firm’s performance and survival. This study fills this gap.

This case is based on an in-depth interview with Sean Ansett on March 6, 2020 in San Francisco. For a good reference book on the interview method in social science, please see Seidman (2019). Ansett is an alumnus of the Lam Family College of Business at San Francisco State University. A follow-up interview was conducted on December 13, 2021, via Zoom. The case situations are factual, but the names of the luxury brand, the factory and the Tunisian social auditing firm were disguised. Selected video clips of the interviews are available upon request.

In 2010, Sean Ansett, a social auditor with more than 25 years of experience in promoting workers’ rights in the global supply chain, faced a momentous decision. He was hired by a luxury brand company to conduct a social audit of a Tunisian leather goods factory. During his visit to the factory, he observed the troubling signs of child labor and alarming health and safety concerns in the work environment. Should he report the factory’s situation to the local authority? What should he advise his client, the luxury brand company, to do? Ansett realized that this was not a cut-and-dried decision as reporting to the local authority may affect workers adversely if the factory was closed. This case highlights the ethical dilemmas of human rights in the global supply chain. It also raises critical questions for multinational firms regarding what constitutes an ethical brand and how to ensure effective code of conduct implementation.

This case can be used in undergraduate or graduate business courses or curated sessions and seminars related to corporate social responsibility, ethics and social auditing in supply chain management.

The purpose of this paper is to apply the social cognitive theory and social learning theory to examine the different mechanisms through which entrepreneurs’ moral awareness and ethical behavior affect the product innovation of new ventures.

The authors collected survey data from 150 founders and 389 founding team members of new ventures in China in 2015. The final sample contained 113 questionnaires from entrepreneurs and 246 questionnaires from their founding team members. Regression analyses were used to test direct effects, and Preacher and Hayes’ (2004) formal mediation test approach with bootstrapping method was used to evaluate the mediation effects.

The findings indicate that the ethical levels of entrepreneurs can affect the product innovation of a new venture through two paths: entrepreneurs with low levels of moral awareness tend to be more individually creative, which facilitates product innovation, and entrepreneurs with high levels of ethical behavior can make founding teams more creative, which also promotes product innovation.

The findings of this study suggest that entrepreneurs are not negatively affected by their low moral awareness as long as they exhibit high ethical behavior with founding team members. But such low moral awareness has to be genuine. The best way to promote product innovation in the long run is to create an organizational culture of ethical behavior rather than to ignore moral issues in decision-making.

This study challenges the assumption that moral awareness and ethical behavior are always consistent. It takes an initial step to resolve the contradiction in the current literature regarding the relationship between the ethical levels of entrepreneurs and product innovation in the context of founders and founding teams in new ventures.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how customer socialization strategies can help social enterprises (SEs) to establish different types of organizational legitimacy and how different types of organizational legitimacy in turn can encourage customers' positive in-role behavior (such as repurchasing) and extra-role citizenship behavior (such as referral, feedback and forgiveness of quality problems).

A survey of 381 customers in Chinese SEs is used to examine the research questions. The paper uses structural equation modeling and bootstrap method to analyze the hypothesized relationships among customer socialization strategies, organizational legitimacy and customers' in-role and extra-role behaviors.

This study finds that various customer socialization strategies can differentially enhance different types of organizational legitimacy of a SE, which in turn positively affects customers' in-role repeated purchase behavior and extra-role citizenship behavior. The study also finds that three types of organizational legitimacy are highly accumulative; gaining relational and market legitimacy might be a precondition for obtaining social legitimacy for SEs.

This study is one of the first to empirically investigate the important role of customer socialization strategies in the acquisition of different types of organizational legitimacy in the context of SEs. It also shows how different types of organizational legitimacy, in turn, can positively affect customers' in-role and extra-role behaviors. In addition, this is one of the first empirical studies to investigate the accumulative nature of three types of organizational legitimacy in SEs: relational legitimacy, market legitimacy and social legitimacy.

This paper aims to study the effects of various compatibilisers (maleic anhydride (MAH), methyl methacrylate/butyl acrylate emulsion lattice, and adhesion system (HRH)) on properties of carbon black (CB) filled with natural rubber (NR)/styrene-butadiene rubber (SBR)/ nitrile butadiene rubber (NBR) blends). A series of NR/SBR/NBR blends at a 30/30/40 blend ratio reinforced with 45 phr of CB was prepared using the master-batch method.

The tensile properties such as the tensile strength, stress at 100, 200 and 300% elongations, and elongation at break (EB)% were studied. Additionally, the morphological properties of compatibilised and uncompatibilised composites were compared to determine the optimal compatibiliser content.

The influence of compatibilisers appeared on all the properties studied. The properties of the blends compatibilised with prepared emulsion are very distinct from those of blends compatibilised with MAH and adhesion systems.

Interactions among the different components of blends at the interfaces have a high impact on the interfacial properties of the rubber blend.

Compatibilisers significantly improve the physicomechanical properties of the resulting composites with the loading of investigated compatibilisers because of the uniform dispersion of CB in the rubber matrix.

Using blends in the rubber industry leads to high-efficiency production of low-cost products.

The rubber blending has a significant positive effect on a wide range of applications such as structural applications, aerospace, military, packaging, tires and biomedical. Hence, improving the compatibility of blends will make new materials suitable for new applications.

This paper seeks to make people aware of the condition of Chinese cultural information resources sharing through the case of the National Cultural Information Resources Sharing Project (NCIRSP). The paper seeks to provide an overview of NCIRSP, and summarize its achievements.

This paper first indicates that cultural information resources sharing is a kind of special resources sharing, and NCIRSP in China is a good example of the realization of this kind of resources sharing. The author introduces NCIRSP in general, and analyzes the operation and its achievements. The author considers that there are some problems which exist in the practice of NCIRSP which will hinder its development and proposes measures to solve those problems.

NCIRSP is a project which is advanced by the Chinese government as well as governments at other levels, which means the project has a strong organization and powerful support. The operation of NCIRSP is made up by four aspects: the network, the construction of digital resources, the implementation of technology, and the websites of services. These four aspects determine the effective operation of NCIRSP and promote the project to make great achievements. Meanwhile, there are problems which hinder NCIRSP from developing further, including the unbalanced collection of cultural information resources in various areas, the scattered storage of resources, and the absence of a sophisticated training mechanism for professionals engaged in the project. Measures to solve the problems are suggested.

NCIRSP is an innovative project supported by the Government of China, even though it is rarely known about by people outside China. This paper introduces NCIRSP in detail, and makes people aware of the situation of cultural information resources sharing in China.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive review and critique of what we already know about pay systems in Chinese state‐owned enterprises, to identify the gaps in the literature and to stimulate more research in this area.

The paper first describes the policy issues at the macro‐level (government policies) in order to put micro‐level pay practices in a pertinent context. Then the paper provides a detailed review and critique on current empirical studies on pay practices in Chinese enterprises, their antecedents and consequences. Finally, the paper identifies potential research questions and provides some directions for future research.

The paper concludes from the extensive review of the current literature that the following research areas merit attention: Why do some firms pay their employees more than other firms? Why do we observe different types of internal pay structures among firms? What are the consequences of these different structures? Why is the link between pay and performance weak in some firms but strong in others? Under what conditions pay‐for‐performance enhances firm performance?

The paper is one of the most comprehensive reviews of the literature on compensation practices of Chinese companies.

Purpose/approach – This introduction sets forth the main themes of the volume, reviews the methods employed by its contributors, and demonstrates the relationships among the chapters.

Research implications – The introduction demonstrates the ways gender research engages topics of current social, economic, and political importance and the ways in which focus on these topics advances an intersectional approach to gender research.

Practical and social implications – Drawing on each of the chapters, the authors point to the ways in which the global movement of people, media, and ideas foster changes in self-concepts, behavior, and social policy.

Value of the chapter – The essay serves as an overall introduction to the volume.

Purpose – Informed by Chinese mothers from four villages, the purpose of this chapter is to address the old issue of feminization of family survival, but situated within the landscape of neoliberalism. This study investigates the interplay between Chinese patriarchal values and neoliberal ideas that have shaped the Happiness Project – Action to Aid Impoverished Mothers – an official population control program that has been combined with poverty reduction “Action.”

Methodology – This research began in 2001 in Sichuan Province, Southwest China. Over a period of three years I interviewed 48 women who were participants in the Happiness Project.

Findings – The goal of the Happiness Project is to bring “happiness” to poor mothers through the introduction of microcredit, literacy programs, and the improvement of reproductive health. Three maternal aspects of the Happiness Project, as the study indicates, coincide with three particular patriarchal values. These include an official construction of a good mother image, targeting women's bodies as objects of the state's population control, and reinforcing gender stereotypes through market activity. The findings of this research suggest that feminization of family survival coincided with achieving the goal of the Project. Mothers thus have carried a double burden on behalf of the Chinese state and their families: the goals of declining fertility and increasing family prosperity.

Social implications – Based on this outcome, the study not only calls for reevaluating this “women-only” economic development model, but also calls into question whether bringing Chinese women into public production/market activity is a path to women's emancipation under neoliberalism.

This chapter examines the factors that may influence the total value created in a joint venture (JV) and also the relative value appropriated by each partner in the venture. We look at the effects of both partners’ embeddedness in prior networks of relationships and the asymmetry of business relatedness of two partners with the JV on these two important outcomes. Results of an event study of stock market reaction to JV announcements by the largest U.S. firms during 1987–1996 suggest that both network embeddedness of partners and the asymmetry of business relatedness of two firms with the JV affect the total value creation of all partners but not the relative value appropriation between the partners.