Drawing on institutional theory, this study posits that the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reporting of emerging market multinational enterprises (EM-MNEs) can affect their establishment mode when entering foreign markets, specifically by mitigating the liability of origin. Analyzing a sample of publicly listed Chinese multinational enterprises (MNEs) from 2009 to 2023, we find that the quality of EM-MNEs’ ESG reports is positively related to the likelihood of selecting greenfield investment as the establishment mode. This relationship is further moderated by international experience and cross-national distances. The findings contribute to the existing literature by first clarifying how ESG reporting can shape establishment mode choice through addressing the challenges of liability of origin.

This study investigates the influence of national culture on corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices across countries from a stakeholder perspective. Building on the national culture literature, we develop a theoretical framework in which cultural values influence CSR by shaping stakeholders' expectations regarding CSR. We focus on four core cultural dimensions: power distance, individualism, masculinity, and uncertainty avoidance, and hypothesize that the first three are negatively associated with CSR, whereas uncertainty avoidance is positively related to CSR. Furthermore, we examine the moderate role of economic development, suggesting that it amplifies the effects of cultural dimensions on CSR. Employing a longitudinal dataset comprising 11,166 companies from 63 countries over an 11-year period, our findings provide robust empirical support for these arguments and offer new insights into how culture and economic context jointly shape CSR practices globally.

Against the backdrop of the deepening development of the knowledge-based economy, the traditional perspective focusing on knowledge stock struggles to explain the significant disparities in entrepreneurial vitality across cities with similar knowledge endowments, and the mechanisms through which knowledge complexity affects entrepreneurial activity urgently need to be clarified. Using data from 284 prefecture-level cities in China spanning 2000 to 2020 as the sample, this paper employs the GENEPY method to measure urban knowledge complexity, and empirically examines its impact on regional entrepreneurial activity, underlying mechanisms, and heterogeneous characteristics. The study finds that: knowledge complexity exerts a significant positive driving effect on urban entrepreneurial vitality; technological innovation and talent agglomeration are the core mediating channels through which knowledge complexity exerts its effects; there is pronounced spatial and industrial heterogeneity in this impact, with the promotional effect presenting a gradient pattern of “Eastern China > Central China > Western China”. Specifically, knowledge complexity has a prominent empowering effect on entrepreneurship in strategic emerging industries and productive services, while it exhibits a significant crowding-out effect on consumer services in the eastern region. This study extends the application boundaries of knowledge complexity theory and provides empirical evidence and theoretical support for the implementation of the innovation-driven development strategy.

Building upon the attribution theory, this study investigates how post-crisis ESG feedback relates to organizational resilience after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using cross-sectional data from 1846 Chinese public firms (2021 to 2022), we assess the linkage of the discrepancy between actual ESG performance and stakeholder expectations with firms' stability and recovery. Our results indicate that only positive post-crisis ESG performance feedback significantly enhances organizational resilience, highlighting the critical role of stakeholder expectations in evaluating ESG effectiveness during crises.

This study aims to elucidate the factors that influence the choice of hotel booking mode, assess the impact of socio-demographic factors on categorization, and the influence of trip-related characteristics on preferences for booking channels. We investigate tourist preferences for hotel booking modes based on a sample of 11,861 tourists who visited the Maldives. Using a Finite Mixture Multinomial Logit Model (FMMNL), we identify two distinct classes of tourists. Our results indicate that first-time visitors from nearby markets who are interested in short stays are more inclined to book hotels through travel agencies (class 1), while first-time visitors from nearby countries who prefer to avoid luxury hotels for short stays are more likely to use the internet (class 2). Furthermore, tourists from long-haul destinations in class 1 and repeat visitors from short-haul destinations in class 2 tend to use the telephone for hotel bookings. Repeat visitors from nearby countries in class 1, and those traveling for other purposes in class 2, tend to prefer intermediaries. Our study provides a novel contribution to FMMNL model research and offers practical implications for hoteliers.

How do perceived environmental, social, and governance (ESG) practices jointly shape employee outcomes? Drawing on Self-Determination Theory, this study examines the independent and synergistic effects of ESG practices on employee psychological well-being and creativity. We argue that while each ESG dimension can partially satisfy employees’ psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness, holistic ESG integration more fully fulfils these needs, thereby generating amplified motivational benefits. We test this framework using a 2 × 2 × 2 between-subjects experiment with 833 Indonesian employees, in which descriptions of environmental, social, and governance practices are systematically manipulated through organizational scenarios to capture employees’ perceptions. Results show that each ESG dimension independently enhances employee psychological well-being and creativity, with governance practices exerting the strongest main effects. More importantly, organizations that simultaneously implement environmental, social, and governance practices achieved significantly higher levels of employee psychological well-being and creativity than those adopting fragmented or partial ESG approaches, indicating strong synergistic effects. These findings suggest that ESG practices function as a mutually reinforcing system rather than isolated initiatives. By demonstrating the motivational and creative advantages of integrated ESG strategies in an emerging-economy context, this study advances micro-level ESG research and highlights the importance of comprehensive ESG architectures for fostering sustainable human capital and organizational resilience in Asia-Pacific firms.

Despite the widespread belief that spirituality has a favorable influence on morals and ethics, research has yielded varied results. There is also a dearth of cross-cultural studies examining spirituality, Perceived Role of Ethics and Social Responsibility (PRESOR), and their relationship. This study examines the relationship between spirituality and the PRESOR in Pakistan and China, two culturally and religiously distinct nations, using a sample of managers enrolled in part-time MBA programs. Our findings indicate that spirituality positively affects PRESOR responses after controlling the effects of national differences. However, if adopting sub-samples in two countries, the relationship between spirituality and PRESOR responses is still positive in Pakistan but insignificant in China. This study contributes to the exploration of the context sensitivity of spirituality, PRESOR and their relationship, which expands the knowledge of them in Pakistan and China.

Purpose This study aims to investigate how social entrepreneurship emerges from the combinations of entrepreneurial and prosocial drivers across multiple levels. It adopts a configurational approach to capture the hybrid and multilevel nature of social entrepreneurship, addressing the gap in research that has traditionally relied on linear, net-effect models. Design/methodology/approach Using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis, this study analyzes data from the 2015 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, which includes a dedicated module on social entrepreneurship, covering 26 countries across five stages of economic development. Six condition variables are selected to reflect the hybrid (entrepreneurial and prosocial) and multilevel (individual, organizational and institutional) structure of social entrepreneurship. Findings This study identifies two distinct configurations of conditions that lead to high levels of social entrepreneurship. Intrapreneurship and entrepreneurial self-perception consistently emerge as core conditions, while postmaterialism and societal equality preference function as interchangeable prosocial elements. The findings also highlight important differences between social and commercial entrepreneurship and show how these conditions vary across stages of economic development. Originality/value This study contributes to the literature by explaining the emergence of social entrepreneurship through a configurational lens that incorporates hybrid logics and multilevel conditions. It extends prior research by providing empirical evidence on how different combinations of factors work together to foster social entrepreneurship, and how these patterns differ from commercial entrepreneurship and across national contexts. The findings offer practical implications for policymakers and organizations in designing enabling ecosystems and context-sensitive, as well as societal implications for fostering inclusive, value-aligned environments that support social entrepreneurship.

This study investigates how the congruence between patriotism-themed advertising and a brand's philanthropic contribution influences consumers' attitudes and emotional attachment to the brand. Using a moderated mediation model, we conducted two studies in Vietnam: an online survey and a laboratory experiment. Results show that when patriotism-themed advertising aligns with a company's philanthropic actions supporting local community during COVID-19, it can strengthen national spirit among Vietnamese consumers, fostering positive attitudes and brand love. This research offers a new congruity perspective on patriotic marketing and provides insights applicable to Asia-Pacific markets where collectivism, nationalism, and patriotic sentiments shape consumer perceptions and decision-making.

This study investigates the relationship between Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) performance and the financial performance of startups in emerging economies. We posit that strong ESG practices serve as a critical signal of quality and legitimacy, helping to alleviate the liability of newness by mitigating information asymmetries for external stakeholders. Analyzing a longitudinal dataset of startups, we find a positive main effect of ESG on financial performance. Further, we demonstrate that this relationship is contingent on factors at multiple levels. The positive effect of ESG is weakened in contexts of high firm digitalization, greater analyst coverage, and developed regional institutions, as these factors act as substitutes by providing alternative sources of credible information, thereby reducing the unique signaling value of ESG. Conversely, intense industry competition amplifies the ESG advantage, as the signal becomes more critical for differentiation. Our findings contribute by shifting the ESG discourse to the entrepreneurial context and offering a nuanced, multi-level understanding of when a firm’s sustainable investment is most pivotal as a strategic asset for startups navigating institutional voids.

Centralized drug procurement is a common practice worldwide to relieve the healthcare burden and promote high-quality development in the pharmaceutical industry. However, scholars have not yet reached an agreement on whether centralized procurement can facilitate the innovation activities of pharmaceutical firms. China's centralized volume-based procurement (CVBP) implemented in 2018 provides an ideal quasi-natural experiment to evaluate the effect of centralized procurement on the R&D investment of the firms. Drawing data from listed manufacturing firms in China's A-share market (2015-2020), the results from a difference-in-differences analysis with different model specifications indicate that the CVBP significantly promotes the pharmaceutical manufacturing firms' R&D investment. Moreover, the positive effect of the CVBP on R&D investment is stronger in pharmaceutical manufacturing firms with high marketing expenses. A series of robustness tests including the parallel trend test, placebo test, and the PSM-DID analysis show that our findings are solid. This paper advances our understanding of centralized procurement in emerging markets and provides new insights into how governments and pharmaceutical manufacturing firms can strengthen innovation.

This study investigates the impact of top management team (TMT) foreignness on corporate greenwashing. Drawing on social identity theory, we argue that foreign TMT members, suffering more from individual liability of foreignness (LOF), adopt a more cautious approach to uncertain environmental disclosures and are more concerned with preventing corporate misbehaviors. These lead foreign TMT members to communicate companies' environmental initiatives in a more honest manner, thereby effectively reducing corporate greenwashing. We further propose that the negative relation between TMT foreignness and greenwashing will be strengthened when a firm faces higher earnings pressure and operates in a less marketized environment, as these conditions exacerbate individual LOF on foreign TMT members. Empirical analysis of a sample of Chinese listed companies from 2010 to 2022 confirms our arguments, suggesting that hiring foreign executives can be an effective strategy for mitigating greenwashing, particularly in contexts where individual LOF is more pronounced.

Based on the Chinese government’s regulation that imposes a pay cap on the CEOs of state-owned enterprises (SOEs), we investigated how a change in institutional conditions affects firms’ green innovation. Drawing on the career concern theory, we suggest that political promotion incentives are likely to substitute for monetary incentives and influence these CEOs’ decisions and actions because the regulation reduces not only their current but also their future monetary incentives. Given that Chinese governments strongly encourage SOEs to engage in green innovation to solve environmental problems, CEOs who are more successful in this respect can demonstrate a higher level of alignment with government objectives and thus have better chances of political promotion. Therefore, we hypothesized that CEOs of SOEs generate more green innovation than CEOs of privately owned firms. We further argued that the positive relationship between the pay cap regulation and SOE green innovation is stronger in the case of CEOs with political connections and weaker in the case of younger CEOs and CEOs of firms in more munificent industries. Difference-in-difference analyses of a panel dataset including 11,061 firm–year observations of 1549 firms provide support for our hypotheses. Our study contributes to the literature on why and how institutional conditions affect firms’ green innovation. Moreover, our results imply the huge potential of the government in encouraging SOEs to promote green technology development, considering the critical incentivizing role of the political promotion concern of CEOs of SOEs.

This study explores how Chief Executive Officer (CEO) celebrity affects corporate greenwashing. While existing literature emphasizes celebrity CEOs' tendency to engage in conspicuous Corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities, we uncover a more nuanced behavior pattern: their sensitivity to identity threats drives them to avoid greenwashing, as such deceptive environmental practices would undermine their carefully crafted personas. Grounded in identity theory, we develop a defensive identity framework, illustrating how celebrity identity creates self-imposed constraints against deceptive environmental disclosures. We further propose that limited organizational slack and intense market competition could reinforce celebrity CEOs' identity protection motives, leading them to impose stronger constraints on greenwashing. Empirical analysis of the sample of Chinese-listed firms between 2008 and 2021 confirms our propositions, suggesting that leveraging the influence of celebrity CEOs can be an effective strategy to combat greenwashing, providing a valuable practical implication for enhancing corporate sustainability.

PurposeArtificial intelligence (AI) applications pose a potential threat to users' data security and privacy due to their high data-dependence nature. This paper aims to investigate an understudied issue in the literature, namely, how users perceive the threat of and decide to use a threatening AI application. In particular, it examines the influencing factors and the mechanisms that affect an individual's behavioral intention to use facial recognition, a threatening AI.Design/methodology/approachThe authors develop a research model with trust as the key mediating variable by integrating technology threat avoidance theory, the theory of planned behavior and contextual factors related to facial recognition. Then, it is tested through a sequential mixed-methods investigation, including a qualitative study (for model development) of online comments from various platforms and a quantitative study (for model validation) using field survey data.FindingsPerceived threat (triggered by perceived susceptibility and severity) and perceived avoidability (promoted by perceived effectiveness, perceived cost and self-efficacy) have negative and positive relationships, respectively, with an individual's attitude toward facial recognition applications; these relationships are partially mediated by trust. In addition, perceived avoidability is positively related to perceived behavioral control, which along with attitude and subjective norm is positively related to individuals' intentions to use facial recognition applications.Originality/valueThis paper is among the first to examine the factors that affect the acceptance of threatening AI applications and how. The research findings extend the current literature by providing rich and novel insights into the important roles of perceived threat, perceived avoidability, and trust in affecting an individual's attitude and intention regarding using threatening AI applications.

Purpose In today's complex and rapidly changing business environment, cross-boundary growth is increasingly critical to the survival or even success of organizations. The purpose of this study is to examine the forming mechanism of firm’s cross-boundary growth by integrating the two important antecedent factors of performance pressure and managerial discretion into a united framework and theoretically analyze the direct role of performance pressure on firm’s cross-boundary growth as well as reveal the moderating role of managerial discretion. Also, the authors select listed manufacturing companies in China as samples to empirically test the research hypotheses. Design/methodology/approach The authors design a multiple regression model to perform empirical analysis by using a panel of 4,002 year-observations in 1,334 listed manufacturing companies between 2013 and 2016. The sample data sources mainly come from the Wind Database, which is mainland China's leading financial database and software services provider. The hypotheses proposed are tested by adopting a panel data set of the listed manufacturing companies of China. Findings Empirical results show that performance pressure has a positive effect on the cross-industry growth and cross-domestic regional growth but a negative effect on the cross-international regional growth, and managerial discretion has a different moderating effect. Specifically, capital intensity strengthens the positive effect of performance pressure on cross-industry growth but weakens the negative effect of performance pressure on cross-international regional growth. State ownership enhances the positive effect of performance pressure on cross-domestic regional growth but decreases the negative effect of performance pressure on cross-international regional growth. CEO duality increases the negative impact of performance pressure on cross-international regional growth. Practical implications This study provides several implications for top executives, including how to dialectically consider the double-edged effect of performance pressure on cross-boundary growth of firms, create an appropriate environments of managerial discretion and design the types of cross-boundary growth strategies that top executives can follow in the volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity era. Originality/value Although the relevant literature highlights the importance of performance pressure, it has not been related to the cross-boundary growth of firms. This paper makes an incremental contribution to the literature on the forming mechanisms of firm’s cross-boundary growth by providing an important perspective of performance pressure to firm growth determinants and taking into account the moderating role of managerial discretion.