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The purpose of this study is to identify the structural determinants of e-returns service interactions, examine their impact on online shoppers' loyalty and propose returns service interventions from an interactive marketing perspective to facilitate consumer interaction and repeat purchase intentions with e-retailers.

This study empirically tests the research hypotheses based on cross-sectional survey data collected from Chinese online consumers who experienced interactions during the product returns process.

E-return service interaction includes three determinants: access support, friendly interaction and communication support. These interactions positively impact ease of return, returns satisfaction and customer loyalty. Returns satisfaction is a key mediator in the relationship between return service interaction and loyalty. Access support and friendly interaction have both direct and indirect effects on loyalty, while communication support has only an indirect effect.

This study contributes to understanding e-returns service interaction by analyzing its structural determinants, providing a robust scale foundation and analytical framework for future empirical research. Additionally, this study explores the driving role of e-returns service interaction in forming e-customer loyalty, offering a theoretical basis for the service recovery function of e-returns service interaction. It enriches the application of service recovery theory and relationship marketing theory in the field of interactive marketing.

This issue marks a clear transition issue for this journal: This transition will, we hope, provide new directions which aid the development of the journal into a more recognized and used journal. These changes include a name change; a new group of editors; the re‐establishment of the journal's time‐line for publication; changes in the editorial board; and some information on new directions in the journal. We would like to describe some of these developments and provide you with information on the new directions for the journal in this year and upcoming years.

Innovation is at the heart of firm success in today's competitive environment. Those factors contributing to successful innovation efforts should be important topics of research. In this study we formulated hypotheses linking the interaction between environmental dynamism and capital structure with firm innovation. Using U.S. firms as our research setting, we show that for firms in environments characterized as highly dynamic, high levels of debt are negatively related to innovation, and in stable environments, high levels of debt are positively related to innovation. Contributions, practical implications, and future extensions are considered.

Firm internationalization or the degree of internationalization (DOI) has both been viewed as a critical dimension of company strategy and linked with enhanced firm performance. This research reports a theoretical postulation based on a conceptual synthesis and an empirical assessment, of this relationship among Chinese firms. Based on the economies of scale, market seeking, risk reduction and experiential learning benefits and possible threshold effects due to learning and accumulation, it is hypothesized that there is a curvilinear relationship between DOI and firm performance and furthermore firms in open or more marketized regions of China will benefit more from their internationalization efforts because of the supportive institutional environment. Multiple regression models employing a large data set of Chinese firms provided supportive empirical evidence. Theoretical and practical implications and research directions are considered.

Strategic change is critical for firms suffering greater environmental uncertainty, but how can firms change their strategies quickly? The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of entrepreneurial orientation (EO) on the speed of strategic change (SSC) together with the moderating effect of strategic flexibility (composed of resource flexibility (RF) and coordination flexibility (CF)).

A survey instrument of 351 Chinese firms obtained through the face‐to‐face interview method is used to empirically test the hypotheses.

This study finds that EO has a positive impact on the SSC. In addition, the moderating effect of RF on the relationship between EO and the SSC is inverse U‐shaped, while that of CF is positive. The findings indicate that both EO and strategic flexibility are important antecedents of the SSC.

This study adds an in‐depth understanding on the roles of EO and strategic flexibility as the antecedents of the SSC.

University–industry technology transfer is growing at a rapid rate in China, involving both multinational and domestic companies. This chapter describes unique characteristics of Chinese National Technology Transfer Centers (NTTCs) and examines whether they can function as an effective policy instrument in promoting the commercialization of university research findings. Our qualitative and quantitative study finds that NTTCs are not by themselves an effective policy tool in accelerating the commercialization of university inventions. We found that universities without NTTCs can achieve the same or even greater success than those with NTTCs. We suggest that Chinese universities should mimic the Western approach by providing an attractive reward system and autonomy to technology management programs that stimulate their efforts in marketing patented technology.

This study explores the role of procedural and distributive justice in influencing supervisory trust, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment. Past work in U.S. settings has shown the differential effects of procedural and distributive justice on job attitudes while other work supports the relationship between both procedural and distributive justice with trust. This study attempts to replicate the US findings and extend them to samples from India, Germany, and China (Hong Kong). A theoretical model was tested via structural equation analysis. Organizational justice was found to be an important predictor of trust in all the samples, indicating the importance of these concepts in organizational life in different cultures. The implications of these results for future research are discussed.