In honouring John Child receiving the 2012 IACMR Lifetime Contribution Award, we present this Editors’ Forum to showcase his research into the influence of country context on organizations. The forum starts with an invited paper by Child and Marinova that analyzes the challenges faced by Chinese firms in their outward foreign investment. This is followed by four commentaries from Klaus Meyer, Peter Murmann, Kwok Leung, and Gordon Redding. The forum concludes with some reflections by Child and Marinova on the commentaries. Collectively, these six papers provide rich and inspiring insights into John Child’s approach to research and how we can learn from it. Five general observations are offered as suggestions for improving current research practice, including: (1) deepening contextual understanding; (2) theorizing across disciplines; (3) respecting the phenomenon; (4) recognizing cultural contingencies; and (5) rebalancing research criteria.

This paper argues that it is crucial to take account of both home and host country contexts in order, adequately, to understand their implications for Chinese enterprises investing into foreign countries. This calls for an analysis that is sensitive to both home and host country contexts, and that takes into account how the institutions and political systems in those contexts establish institutional and resource capital needs for the overseas-investing firm. We discuss and illustrate three different combinations of Chinese and host country characteristics, and the firm-level learning and adaptation required in the light of the relevant capitals likely to be available to Chinese firms. The analysis draws upon insights from resource-based, institutional, and political perspectives. While it is developed with specific reference to China, we also suggest that this form of analysis can be applied more generally to the implementation of outward foreign direct investment from any country.

In this article, I argue that it is misleading to dichotomize the West as being either/or and the East as being both/and. The West has thought dialectically since ancient Greece. I offer a typology to compare and contrast three dialectical or non-either/or logical systems or ways of thinking: Chinese Yin-Yang philosophy, Hegel's dialectic, and Niels Bohr's complementarity principle, as well as Aristotle's formal (either/or) logic. I show that the four logical systems have differences and similarities and show that Westerners can and do think dialectically. I also argue that Chinese Yin-Yang philosophy, while useful and powerful in some situations, is not always superior to the other logical systems and philosophies. My purpose is to alert Chinese management scholars to the dangers of overconfidence and to stimulate discussion and debate on the true value of Yin-Yang in particular and the promotion of Chinese indigenous management research in general. To that end, I present my opinion on the merits and drawbacks of Yin-Yang and posit that it may inspire but cannot guide Chinese indigenous management research because Chinese philosophy lacks a well-defined methodology and operationalizable methods.

Using Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between foxes and hedgehogs, John Child’s approach to management research has been described as a fox in a community dominated by hedgehogs. I thus explore Child’s approach to conducting research on China-related phenomena, and place his new work into this trajectory. In doing so, I offer insights into the opportunities and limitations of developing research agendas and generating new theoretical insights from research that is deeply contextualized.

Although researchers often do it subconsciously, every explanation involves choosing a level of abstraction at which the argument proceeds. The dominant North American style of research in Organization Theory, Strategy, and International Business encourages researchers to frame their explanations at the highest level of abstraction where country-level contextual factors are suppressed or ignored. Yet to provide powerful explanations for recent developments in China, researchers are drawn to a greater level of context specificity. This tension is evident in the Child and Marinova (2014) paper. One way to reduce the tension is to identify general causal mechanisms that combine in different ways to produce different results depending on context. This research strategy is more effective than seeking invariant, general patterns of development across all times and places.

The Chinese cultural logics of change offer a rich understanding of organizational change. We address three key aspects of the Chinese yin-yang view of change: context, process, and actions. A case study of Chengdu Bus Group CBG enables us to develop a conceptual model that examines organizational change in a Chinese indigenous context. The model reflects the key functions of shi (situational momentum, 势), the action strategies of ying-shi (leveraging momentum, 应势)and zao-shi (building momentum, 造势), and the dialectics of nonaction (无为). Our findings will help researchers and practitioners better understand organizational change from a unique yin-yang perspective, and will also contribute general knowledge to process theories of organizational change.

Social entrepreneurship plays an important role in local development in emerging economies, but scholars have paid little attention to this emerging phenomenon. Under the theory of moral sentiments, we posit that some entrepreneurs are altruistically motivated to promote a morally effective economic system by engaging in social entrepreneurial activities. Focusing on China's Guangcai (Glorious) Program, a social entrepreneurship program initiated by China's private entrepreneurs to combat poverty and contribute to regional development, we find that private entrepreneurs are motivated to participate in such programs if they have more past distressing experiences, including limited educational opportunities, unemployment experience, rural poverty experience, and startup location hardship. Their perceived social status further strengthens these relationships. Our study contributes to the social entrepreneurship literature by offering a moral sentiment perspective that explains why some entrepreneurs voluntarily join a social entrepreneurship program to mitigate poverty in society.