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This study aims to explore the internationalization of multinational enterprises (MNEs) from China and aims to examine the relationship between Chinese MNEs’ duration of internationalization and export intensity, and the contingent roles of the home country government.

By extending the springboard theory with institutional and cost-benefit analyses, the authors elaborate a two-phase framework of internationalization to explain how Chinese MNEs develop their international business under the influences of the home country government. Furthermore, the authors apply the Heckman two-stage method based on a panel data set of 19,994 firm-year observations of Chinese listed firms in 2008–2018 to test the hypotheses.

The research findings demonstrate an inverted U-shape relationship between the duration of internationalization and the export intensity of MNEs from China. The export intensity of MNEs from China increases during the initial phase of internationalization, and decreases during the subsequent. A further study reveals that the inverted U-shape of Chinese non-SOEs is steeper than that of SOEs, and this moderating effect is more salient after the Belt and Road Initiative. These results highlight the influence of the home government through state ownership and policies on the inverted U-shaped relationship.

This study helps to refine the understanding of Chinese MNEs’ global expansion by addressing time as an explicit dimension and revealing the mechanism of state ownership and the home country governmental policy in the dynamic internationalization process.

The purpose of this study is to identify the factors determining collaborative innovation effect of manufacturing firms in emerging economies.

Based on a survey of 1,206 Chinese manufacturing firms and using structural equation modelling, this study explores the factors determining the effect of collaborative innovation among manufacturing firms (namely, internal capabilities, government policies, collaboration mechanisms and social networks) and examines the relationship between collaborative innovation effect and innovation performance.

The study finds that there are significantly positive relationships between firms’ internal capabilities, government policies, collaboration mechanisms and social networks and collaborative innovation effect among firms.

These findings reveal that policymakers should create an effective institutional culture and market environment to facilitate firms’ collaborative innovation.

This paper draws on the resource-based view of firms and contributes to understanding of how the development of factors determining firms’ collaborative innovation effect can improve innovation performance. This study extends established frameworks on collaborative innovation in relation to four dimensions, namely, firms’ internal capabilities, government policies, collaboration mechanisms and social networks, uniquely identifying the limits of specific dimensions. Moreover, this study addresses government policies and “Guanxi culture” specific to China that provide new insights into how firms’ collaborative innovation is improved from the perspectives of business–governmental relations and social networks.

This study aims to investigate the antecedents of corporate social responsibility (CSR) from the perspective of competitive dynamics and proposes a correlation of CSR between competing firms because rival firms’ engagement in CSR induces the focal firm’s catch-up to keep pace with them.

Using a sample of Chinese listed companies through the lens of firm dyads, and drawing on the awareness-motivation-capability (AMC) framework, a set of contingencies of firms’ competitive catch-up in CSR are examined, including the visibility of its competitors, the interdependence between the focal firm and its competitors and the focal firm’s resource slack.

The empirical results reveal that a focal firm’s CSR is in a positive relationship with that of its competitors, which is strengthened by the visibility of its competitors, the interdependence between the focal firm and its competitors, and is affected by the focal firm’s resource slack.

These findings uncover the interplay of CSR among competitors, enriching our understanding of its antecedents by extending the AMC framework to the CSR context.

This study aims to examine the corporate donations in response to the intensive outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in China in 2020 and proposes that the local spread of COVID-19 is negatively associated with corporate donations due to the non-trivial costs, but meanwhile, strong institutional pressures based on institutional theory are put on firms to donate, which thus creates a dilemma for firms. This study further argues that the dilemma is heterogeneous across different institutional fields.

Using a sample of Chinese listed companies during the intensive outbreak of this pandemic, a two-stage Heckman selection model is conducted to address the potential sample selection bias.

This study reveals a negative relationship between the local spread of COVID-19 and corporate donations, confirms the driving effect of various types of institutional pressure and finds that the intensity of the COVID-19 pandemic strengthens the effect of coercive pressure and mimetic pressure on philanthropic giving but weakens the effect of normative pressure.

This study extends the knowledge on firms’ philanthropic response to natural crises, as the COVID-19 pandemic has not only led to a public health crisis but also to a global economic crisis, and how the effects of institutional pressures are affected by a situational crisis. This work enriches the literature on corporate philanthropy and crisis management and has some implications for both policymakers and business practitioners.

Open innovation enables firms to incorporate external expertise and resources into their innovations. However, it is far from easy to obtain sufficient support from external contributors due to potential concerns about the risks of opportunism and appropriation. This paper aims to investigate whether firms’ engagement in corporate social responsibility (CSR) contributes to their open innovation, considering the contingency factors of technological capability, environmental dynamism and state ownership based on capability and motivation perspectives.

Using a sample of Chinese listed firms covering the period from 2009 to 2018, instrumental variable and propensity score matching approaches were used to address the endogenous problems.

This paper obtains empirical results showing that firms engaged in higher levels of CSR produce more joint outputs (co-owned patents) and that this effect is strengthened by technological capability and environmental dynamism. Among state-owned enterprises, CSR engagement is less impactful with regard to open innovation. It is further shown that open innovation is a primary channel through which CSR engagement enhances innovative efficiency.

This study enriches the knowledge of the antecedents of open innovation and contributes to the debate regarding the relationship between CSR and innovation by establishing a relationship between CSR and open innovation, whereas most prior studies focus on how the input and output of innovation are affected by CSR initiatives.

Threats from the informal sector have become an important concern among formal firms. As a response to these threats, formal firms can adopt product innovation (PI) and marketing innovation (MI) strategies to differentiate themselves. The purpose of this paper is to examine how firm-level technical capability and external institutional quality affect firms’ reactions to the threats from informal firms by adopting innovative activities.

Based on attention-based view (ABV), an empirical study is conducted by using firm-level data from the World Bank Enterprise Survey in 2013.

The findings indicate that when faced with competition from informal firms, formal firms will intensify their innovation activities in both MI and PI, and their technical capability mitigates the competitive threats from informal sectors and thus weakens the impact of informal competitors on the level of product and marketing innovations. Moreover, it is found that the improvement of institutional quality reduces formal firms’ urgency to introduce new products when facing informal competitors. However, this improvement strengthens the impact of informal rivalry on formal firms’ innovation in marketing methods.

Previous studies that investigate the influence of informal threats are focused on technological innovation (e.g., PI and process innovation) strategies, but little knowledge is provided on non-technological innovative strategies, such as marketing strategies (e.g., MI and organizational innovation). This study contributes to the innovation literature by delving into the circumstances under which PI and/or MI is adopted to counter informal rivals. The findings enrich ABV by investigating how inter-firm resource similarity and marketing commonality strengthen top managers' attention to competition from informal firms.

This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting-edge research and case studies.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) provides a means to strengthen a firm's competitive position. Companies are able to achieve this through imitating the CSR activities of close rivals within their industry. Visibility of the competitive interconnection between focal and peer firm and resource ability are factors that determine the validity of this approach.

The briefing saves busy executives, strategists and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy-to-digest format.

This research aims to empirically investigate the influence of stakeholders on the corporate decision of ISO 9001, ISO 14001, and OHSAS 18001 certifications and how that influence differs across different certification types.

The paper utilizes a survey of 1,268 industrial enterprises in China, using logistic regressions to analyze corporate decision towards management standards use.

The results show that stakeholder influence varies across different management standard certifications. Foreign customers and neighboring community are significant drivers for ISO 9001 certification. Foreign investors, being publicly listed, and neighboring community each demonstrate a significant impact on ISO 14001 certification. Only being publicly listed shows significant explanatory power for certifying with OHSAS 18001.

This study does not touch upon performance issues. The relationship between stakeholder pressure, certifications, and performance would be interesting to explore.

Information disclosure may be an effective tool to motivate firms to be more responsible for environment and society. Furthermore, measures should be taken to raise stakeholder awareness of corporate occupational health and safety (OH&S).

Although sustainability management demands attention to the three pillars of sustainability, empirical research tends to focus on only one aspect of it when studying standardized management practices use. This study investigates all three pillars using a unified framework. Furthermore, existing studies have focused predominantly on developed countries. The paper conducts research in China, one of the major developing economies. Lastly, the paper utilizes firm-level data on corporate sustainability management, which is hard to obtain in China.

This paper aims to analyze the publication structure of academic research on green innovation (GI) between 2000 and 2019.

Bibliographic data on GI are extracted from the Scopus database, and then they were analyzed through VOSviewer software.

This paper analyzes 653 publications on GI from 2000 to 2019. For so doing, the study identifies the most productive countries, universities, authors, journals and the most prolific publications in GI. Besides, the study uses VOSviewer software to visualize the mapping based on co-citation, bibliographic coupling (BC) and co-occurrence of keywords.

The main contribution of the study is that it provides an overview of the trends and trajectories of GI, which may help the researchers and the practitioners to comprehend the trends and future research directions.