Institutional Transformation and Changing Networking Patterns in China

Institutions and Firms’ Performance: A Bibliometric Analysis and Future Research Avenues

International business scholars have recognized the importance of the contextual embeddedness of firms. However, how they matter remains a contested question. Although recent efforts have been made to review the field, it remains unclear how institutions affect firms’ performance. We aim at answering the following research question: How is the intellectual and the conceptual structure of the institutions and firms’ performance field defined? We searched in the WoS and Scopus databases with pre-determined keywords, and we obtained a sample of 1063 articles that we analyzed by conducting the citation and co-citation analyses, keyword co-occurrence analysis, and thematic map analysis. Our bibliometric results portrayed how the intellectual and conceptual structure of the field has evolved. We contribute to the international business literature by providing a one-stop overview of the field, thus identifying current accomplishments and future research avenues on the relationship between institutions and firms’ performance. By analyzing the articles included on the Emerging and Niche clusters, we discuss future research avenues on the topics of sustainability, entrepreneurship, political ties, and institutional quality.

Formal and Informal Institutions: The Independent and Joint Impacts on Firm Innovation

We study the impact of formal and informal institutions perceived and experienced by firms on their innovation using the 2012 World Bank Enterprise Survey data in China. We propose a framework to identify different innovator types of firms. Our analysis shows that (1) perceived constraints from the governmental system make firms more likely to be innovators than non-innovators; (2) perceived constraints from the legal system make firms more likely to be imitators than innovators; (3) lack of formal finance makes firms more likely to be non-innovators than innovators; (4) prevalence of bribery makes firms more likely to be non-innovators than innovators but less likely to be innovation pretenders than innovators. Our study enriches institutional theory and innovation research by establishing a framework that encompasses multiple dimensions of formal and informal institutions perceived and experienced by firms and the impacts of such perception and experience on firms’ propensity to become certain type of innovator.

Wining and Dining Government Officials: What Drives Political Networking in Chinese Private Ventures?

Managerial networking with political actors has long been recognized as a crucial co-option strategy to navigate the challenging institutional environment in emerging economies. However, we know much less about what drives the variation of political networking investment by private ventures. Drawing on resource dependence theory, we unpack the dyadic business-government relations and identify the key organizational and environmental factors that shape the power dependence relationships between private ventures and the government. By examining power imbalance and mutual dependence in this dyadic relationship and considering both the necessity and the capability of political networking, we develop hypotheses regarding the ways in which size-, connection-, and location-based dependencies affect firms’ political networking intensity. These hypotheses are tested through a unique survey of Chinese private ventures. Our study finds that political networking intensity (1) has an inverted U-shaped relationship with firm size, (2) is negatively associated with the presence of embedded political ties while positively associated with that of achieved political connections, and (3) is smaller when the focal firm is located in business development zones. This research bears rich implications for our understanding of corporate political activity in emerging economies from a resource dependence lens.