This new issue is full of exciting papers. First is a theoretical paper on the process of leadership (Yue, Persson, & Wasieleski, 2023), which integrates the Chinese notion of shi 勢 (propensity of things) as a leading force encompassing human agency to achieve organization goals. This paper challenges the worldview of Western tradition and opens a new avenue of research on leadership.
Second, there are a few papers reporting new findings that illustrate how Chinese firms make decisions in investment and innovation, and how Chinese workers respond to environmental changes. Specifically, Shi, Cai, Wajda, and Jiang (2023) examined Chinese non-real-estate firms’ diversification investment in real estate, and found that such investment decisions were more likely to occur when the firm engaged in opportunistic diversification, that is, comparing with peer firms based on business segment performance when the performance of a firm's main business relative to its peer firms’ high-profitability business segment falls short of their aspirations. Sullivan, Mao, and Wang (2023) studied how firm-specific knowledge affected a firm's exploratory innovation and the role of government support in this process. The authors found that paying narrow attention to firm-specific knowledge explained why it was negatively associated with innovation output, and how firm state ownership and state financial support mitigated the negative association. Moreover, Li, Zhang, and Mao (2023) reported that the on-set of COVID-19 created an immediate decrease in job knowledge characteristics, which gradually increased over time in the post-onset period because of employees’ coping with the pandemic via a 6-month, six-wave longitudinal survey of 235 employees in Macau. They also showed that the changes in job knowledge characteristics produced changes in job stress, but job security weakened its effect.
More excitingly, this issue also includes a set of provocative Dialogue, Debate, and Discussion papers on institutional logics or, more specifically, how the institutional logics that guide Chinese firms have been transformed in the wake of economic transition. Haveman, Joseph-Goteiner, and Li (2023) discussed the state logic – emphasizing equality, national community, and political stability, and the Chinese version of market logic – valorizing the central role that the state and the Communist Party continue to play in economic life. The authors argue that such market logic tempers efficiency, competition, and property rights by a continued concern for political stability. Three commentaries follow this perspective paper (Lounsbury & Wang, 2023; Raynard & Greenwood, 2023; Redding, 2023), providing intriguing alternative views to explain the changes in Chinese society and economy over the past four decades.
As 2023 is coming to an end, I am hopeful that more exciting papers with ground-breaking insights into Chinese organizations and management will appear in 2024 – the year of dragon – when we celebrate the 20th anniversary of MOR!
With gratitude,
