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The purpose of this paper is to focus on the cultural cognition of Chinese Zhong-yong thinking, which is deeply rooted in Chinese Confucius culture, and to examine how entrepreneurs’ Zhong-yong thinking is related to new venture performance through guanxi network, and also examine how environmental turbulence affects the influencing mechanism.

This paper follows an empirical design. Data are collected from a survey administered to entrepreneurs in new ventures of China. Regression analysis is used to test the hypothesis.

Results show that entrepreneurs’ Zhong-yong thinking is positively related to guanxi and new venture performance, and guanxi mediates the relationship between entrepreneurs’ Zhong-yong thinking and new venture performance. In addition, environmental turbulence moderates the relationship between entrepreneurs’ Zhong-yong thinking and guanxi such that the relationship is stronger under higher technological turbulence or lower market turbulence.

This research uses cross-sectional data, so causal conclusions cannot be made. In addition, more moderators should be considered.

The present study enriches the understanding of how entrepreneurs’ Zhong-yong thinking affects new ventures, which helps entrepreneur understand how to strategize according to external environment and develop what kind of cognitive style to deal with complex situation of their own venture.

This study is a pioneer in exploring non-Western cognitive style–Zhong-yong thinking in entrepreneurial context. It not only enriches the understanding of how Chinese wisdom affects organizational strategy and organizational performance but also advances the cognition research in the field of entrepreneurship.

The purpose of this paper is to find out how corporate social responsibility (CSR) is viewed in the Chinese situation. The paper views CSR as an endogenous motivation for corporate social behaviour. The intended contributions of this paper are twofold. On the one hand, the authors intend to collect first‐hand data to understand the current status of Chinese managers' cognitions of CSR. On the other hand the paper intends to analyse the differences which exist in managers' cognitions on CSR among different kinds of firms in a Chinese context.

A random survey was conducted among 157 businessmen using the force‐choice questionnaire, based on the four‐part construct proposed by Carroll. The confirmatory factor analysis was utilized to test the construct validity of Carroll's conceptual model with the data sample drawn from Chinese situation. Then correlation, six pairwise t‐tests and MANOVA test were conducted for the purpose of this study.

Chinese managers' cognition of CSR is found to be consistent with the four‐component construct. A relatively strong preference toward economic component has been examined. The results present a significant negative correlation between economic cognition and all three of its non‐economic counterparts. No significant cognitive differences have been verified between firms with different characteristics.

This paper initially examined the cognition of Chinese managers toward CSR. Chinese managers are viewed as having an important role in decision making on social issues. However, how to promote the managers' cognition of CSR is needed for future research which will also examine the internal driving mechanism of CSR.

There has not been a great deal of empirical research done in the field of social responsibility in China. This study is a starting point for those who seek to understand the economic and sociological aspects of mainland Chinese business.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between firm size, the nature of ownership and corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance in China and to figure out the reason that state-owned enterprises (SOEs) usually perform better in CSR activities than private enterprises.

The authors conducted two studies of CSR in China. In the first study, the authors developed and assessed a CSR measure; second study was to investigate the difference of CSR behavioral performance between SOEs and private enterprises.

The authors found that the differences in CSR performances between SOEs and private enterprises were not caused by the nature of ownership as most Chinese scholars used to believe. Actually, the differences came from the differences of firm size, which had been ignored in prior studies on factors influencing CSR performance. The size of SOEs is usually much larger than private enterprises, and larger enterprises often perform better in the field of CSR. In a word, the size rather than the nature of ownership is the main reason that CSR performances of SOEs are better than private enterprises.

Though many papers in China suggested that SOEs performed much better than private enterprises in CSR activities, the authors proved that this belief was a misunderstanding. It was found that SOEs were usually larger than private enterprises, which might have confused their efforts to find the real reason that SOEs and private enterprises perform differently in CSR. The authors also developed a measuring tool of CSR based on the Stakeholder Theory, which would be a new measurement tool for future studies, especially for emerging market economies and unlisted companies.