Previous studies have suggested that state ownership has mixed impacts on SOE's innovations. We highlight one potential reason for the inconsistency in previous findings by uncovering the heterogeneity within state ownership. Specifically, we suggest that central government ownership provides SOEs with more resources and makes the firms' strategies closely aligned with the government's strategic priorities than other state ownership, leading to better innovation performance. However, we demonstrate that this positive effect will diminish as the geographic distance between the SOE and the central government increases due to increased information asymmetry. Our findings suggest that this negative impact of geographic distance might be mitigated by CEOs' perceptions of the value associated with developing innovations, resulting from their technology human capital and equity ownership. Using data collected from listed Chinese SOEs, we find robust evidence supporting our theory.

Purpose A shared cognitive schema is the fundamental source of tacit understanding within a team. This study aims to address how such a shared cognitive schema emerges and evolves in an interdisciplinary research team. Design/methodology/approach This study uses an exploratory single case study to analyze the emergence and evolution of a shared cognitive schema in an interdisciplinary research team systematically. The authors spent more than two years collecting data from the IAM team via semistructured interviews, archival data and observation. Subsequently, a framework for the resulting mechanism model was developed by analyzing the data using a three-step process. Findings This study shows that as the interdisciplinary research team develops, the shared cognitive schema passes through three stages: overlapping cognitive schema, complementary cognitive schema and synergetic cognitive schema. The mechanisms of overlap, complement and synergy play important roles. The convergent roles of partner-based recruiting, knowledge categorization and following the existing institution facilitate the overlapping of knowledge structures. Complementary cognitive schema sharing is facilitated by interdisciplinary member selection, knowledge stock expansion and the effects of accomplished mentors. The synergetic behaviors of group voice, interactive cognition and adaptive learning facilitate synergetic cognitive schema sharing. Originality/value This study is the first to discuss the emergence and evolution of a shared cognitive schema at the microlevel of knowledge structure and belief structure. It offers a new theoretical perspective on the development rules of scientific research teams and provides practical enlightenment regarding the establishment and operation of interdisciplinary research teams.

Poverty alleviation resettlement (PAR) programme is the largest-scale poverty alleviation relocation in human history, but its impact on urbanization has received little academic attention. To fill this important gap, this study first proposed a theoretical framework of the "pressure-state-response-effect" (PSRE) of PAR promoting urbanization. Then, we regarded PAR as a quasi-natural experiment and used the PSM-DID model to assess the impact of PAR on urbanization based on the panel data of 2,081 counties in China from 2013 to 2020. Results showed that PAR had a significant positive impact on the urbanization rate of these counties, with a growth rate of 0.64%. Further mechanism analysis showed that industrial upgrading could expand the impact of PAR implementation on promoting urbanization. Additionally, PAR in the eastern and western, hilly and mountainous counties could improve the urbanization level more than that in the central and plain counties. The effectiveness of PAR varied across regions, requiring consideration of local socioeconomic complexity rather than a one-size-fits-all approach. Our findings would have important reference value for other developing countries to formulate their anti-poverty strategies to achieve the 2030 UN Sustainable Development Goals.

In literature of work-related values and attitudes, it is often argued that different work attitudes could be attributed to different ethnic origins and cultural backgrounds. This perspective article argues that we should avoid a deterministic argument of cultural essentialism and explore how ethnic differences in work values were formed in specifical socioeconomic and cultural contexts. To support this argument, this research conducted in-depth interviews to explore the mechanisms underlying the formation of British and Chinese immigrant engineers’ work values in three dimensions: intrinsic-extrinsic, masculine-feminine, uncertainty avoidance-entrepreneurial risk. The main finding in this paper is that the different social and cultural milieus where both ethnic groups grew up to a large extent contributed to their different work habitus, which further resulted in their different work values. To conclude, this paper contributes to the literature by rejecting the cultural essentialism, which links individual work attitudes with their ethnic/cultural backgrounds in a “deterministic” way.

This study takes a mutual gains perspective to investigate how a labour‒management partnership (LMP) impacts organisational occupational and health safety (OHS) performance and creates a safe workplace. It develops a model linking employee psychological safety with a collaborative industrial relations (IR) climate and ultimately organisational OHS performance. The research context is China ‒ where LMP is driven by the Party-state in managing labour relations. To test the proposed linkage model, multi-level structural equation modelling is conducted, using matched employer‒employee data from 205 companies and 7229 employees in an industrial park in the Yangtze River Delta. The results support the use of the linkage model, demonstrating that partnership decision-making increases psychological safety, in turn developing a collaborative IR climate, ultimately reducing the number of accidents. This study contributes to partnership research by exploring the underlying mechanisms of how a partnership arising from the logic of neo-pluralism successfully delivers mutual gains for employees and employers in a non-pluralist context. It has wider implications for collaborative management and OHS management in a developing country.

In the platform era the informal employment in China is tremendously huge in quantities. This paper sets out the changes of traditional regulatory rules status, the new web of rules and, with a particular focus on, the impacts of main actors’ interacts, from an industrial relations ‘web of rule’ perspective. The subjects involved in this paper are multiple, including labour law, collective labour relations institution, enterprise human resources management, CSRs and NGOs in production supply chains. It argues the inappropriate impacts on the perseverance of right and interests of workers are consequences of the current national labour law and collective labour relations institutions. It witnesses the emerging innovative methods, employment relations system in a self-dependent economic transaction, the rule of production supply chain in a multi-stake-holder context and the new intervening method of NGOs. It is in scrutiny of the commence of such a transformation in China, nevertheless, transforming from the authoritarian regime to a more fair market establishing via the intervention of multiple social forces, and consequently the transformation from informal employments to formal ones in a comprehensively complex domestic and global context.

The year 2022 marks the 10th anniversary of the adoption of democratic management (DM) provisions in China. DM, once predominant in state-owned enterprises, has now been extended to all enterprises. Democratising workplaces in China represents institutional experimentation. Both DM-related research and practice thus require updating. Ten years on, a social consensus on DM's orientation and legitimacy remains elusive. Can expanding DM inspire industrial democracy or strengthen Party control over market-oriented workplaces? Or is DM merely window dressing as previous studies suggest? This article aims to uncover the type of workplace democracy that DM can achieve in China. A triangle of DM is established and integrated with institutional theory as an analytical framework to explore the causes and characteristics of DM in six case companies.

Government, an important institutional force in emerging economies, has been recognized as a key factor influencing firm innovation. However, this influence is mainly treated as monolithic. Less is known about the independent and joint influences of institutional pressures from different level of governments on firm innovation outcomes, especially distinguishing the quantity and novelty of innovation. This paper focused on the potential inconsistent demands from central government and local governments in developing innovation and examined how the institutional complexity affect inefficient deployment of resources among quantity and novelty of innovation. Using the data of Chinese listed state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and difference-in-difference estimates, we found that the institutional linkage to central government exhibited a positive differential effect on the quantity of innovation. In provinces where provided more support for innovation, SOEs produced a larger post-policy increase in the quantity of innovation, while a smaller post-policy increase in the proportion of novel innovation. Moreover, we found the combined effect of central and local government on the quantity and novelty of innovation were both positive, that is, the agency risk that pursing quantity at expense of novelty were intensified when the demands for innovation from central and local government were more consistent. This study contributes to the research on firm innovation by unpacking the influence of different level of governments, and enriches the literatures on institutional complexity by identifying the response in the tradeoff between quantity and novelty of innovation.

This article introduces the current scale and development of Chinese state-owned assets; the situation about separating government functions from State-Owned Enterprise management and state-owned capital in China; modern corporate system construction and improvement in SOEs, as well as the shortages in the process; comprehensive and deep mixed ownership reform and equity diversification reform at SOEs and for state-owned assets; enhancement of Chinese Communist Party construction in SOEs; SOEs’ great effort on innovation promotion; institutions and governments’ assets management; and the situation of state-owned assets’ concentration.

This paper explores the dynamics of settling strikes in China since the 1990s within the current constraints of political resources and industrial-relations institutions. The regulation of labour relations in China has been strengthened, and the priorities of the party-state have shifted from stressing capital attraction to social stability. Labour shortages have tilted the power balance to be more in favour of workers. Employers can no longer rely solely on the endorsement of the local government in settling the strikes as they did in the 1990s. We conduct the case studies of strikes in two wholly foreign-owned enterprises and investigate how the two companies prevented and resolved the collective disputes of workers. We compare three waves of strikes in each of the two locations that occurred between 1994 and 2012. In both locations, employer responses have swung from passive to proactive coping and building trust. These inputs have played a decisive role in both the prevention and final resolution of conflicts over time. Our study revealed the complementary interactions between collective negotiation and HRM as an emerging effective approach in preventing and settling the strikes. Our study supports the current view that China's dispute-resolution system has evolved in the last two decades towards greater formalisation and institutionalisation.

Human resource management (HRM) is a major mechanism to realise decent work and achieve employee well-being in China. Key questions concern how and when HRM is mutually beneficial for employers and employees, particularly how well HRM works with trade unions in achieving decent work. This study examines the effect of high-performance work systems and trade unions on employee engagement, paying particular attention to the role of industrial relations (IR) climate in facilitating this relationship. Hypotheses were tested via unique cross-sectional survey data from a large employer–employee matched dataset collected from 264 manufacturing firms and 6921 workers in China. The findings highlight that HPWS are a key mechanism for realising decent work. We also find positive evidence for the mutual gains of decent work illustrating the combined impact of HPWS and trade unions in achieving higher levels of employee engagement. Notably, a co-operative (as opposed to adversarial) IR climate is seen to reinforce this relationship, indicating the significance of the quality of relationships among management, employees, and unions in shaping employee outcomes. Overall, these findings advance understanding of the realisation of decent work and ‘mutual gains’ in a Chinese context.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to review "institutional experimentation" for protecting workers in response to the contraction of the standard employment relationship and the corresponding rise of "non-standard" forms of paid work. Design/methodology/approach The paper draws on the existing research and knowledge base of the authors as well as a thorough review of the extant literature relating to: non-standard employment contracts; sources of labour supply engaging in non-standard work; exogenous pressures on the employment relationship; intermediaries that separate the management from the control of labour; and entities that subvert the employment relationship. Findings Post-war industrial relations scholars characterised the traditional regulatory model of collective bargaining and the standard employment contract as a "web of rules". As work relations have become more market mediated, new institutional arrangements have developed to govern these relations and regulate the terms of engagement. The paper argues that these are indicative of an emergent "patchwork of rules" which are instructive for scholars, policymakers, workers' representatives and employers seeking solutions to the contraction of the traditional regulatory model. Originality/value The paper addresses calls to examine the "institutional intersections" that have informed the changing ways that work is conducted and regulated. These intersections transcend international, national, sectoral and local units of analysis, as well as supply chains, fissured organisational dynamics, intermediaries and online platforms. The analysis also encompasses the broad range of stakeholders including businesses, labour and community groups, nongovernmental organisations and online communities that have influenced changing institutional approaches to employment protection.

Mediation is commonly used in settling collective labor disputes. The handling of collective labor disputes in China involves four processes of negotiation, mediation, arbitration, and litigation. The mediation system consists of five mechanisms, grassroots mediation, peoples mediation, administrative mediation, and joint mediation. There is no best mediation mechanism, and each of them has its own advantages and disadvantages. China is on the way to develope a formal and integrated collective labor disputes mediation system.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to review “institutional experimentation” for protecting workers in response to the contraction of the standard employment relationship and the corresponding rise of “non-standard” forms of paid work.Design/methodology/approachThe paper draws on the existing research and knowledge base of the authors as well as a thorough review of the extant literature relating to: non-standard employment contracts; sources of labour supply engaging in non-standard work; exogenous pressures on the employment relationship; intermediaries that separate the management from the control of labour; and entities that subvert the employment relationship.FindingsPost-war industrial relations scholars characterised the traditional regulatory model of collective bargaining and the standard employment contract as a “web of rules”. As work relations have become more market mediated, new institutional arrangements have developed to govern these relations and regulate the terms of engagement. The paper argues that these are indicative of an emergent “patchwork of rules” which are instructive for scholars, policymakers, workers’ representatives and employers seeking solutions to the contraction of the traditional regulatory model.Research limitations/implicationsWhile the review of the institutional experimentation is potentially instructive for developing solutions to gaps in labour regulation, a drawback of this approach is that there are limits to the realisation of policy transfer. Some of the initiatives discussed in the paper may be more effective than others for protecting workers on non-standard contracts, but further research is necessary to test their effectiveness including in different contexts.Social implicationsThe findings indicate that a task ahead for the representatives of government, labour and business is to determine how to adapt the emergent patchwork of rules to protect workers from the new vulnerabilities created by, for example, employer extraction and exploitation of their individual bio data, social media data and, not far off, their personal genome sequence.Originality/valueThe paper addresses calls to examine the “institutional intersections” that have informed the changing ways that work is conducted and regulated. These intersections transcend international, national, sectoral and local units of analysis, as well as supply chains, fissured organisational dynamics, intermediaries and online platforms. The analysis also encompasses the broad range of stakeholders including businesses, labour and community groups, nongovernmental organisations and online communities that have influenced changing institutional approaches to employment protection.

The missing employee voice has become a salient topic in China. This paper aims to document the newest developments relating to the topic by reviewing the recent literature on employment relations and employee voice. The findings of this paper suggest that the purposes of and channels for the employee voice in China have been undergoing significant changes. Different stakeholder groups have approached the issue. ‘Democratic management’ in China, the country’s home-grown concept of employee voice, has been resurrected to encourage more effective employee representation. Apart from this top-down influence from the government and All-China Federation of Trade Unions, this paper also identifies the bottom-up approach driven by the workers, and the external influence from the global corporate social responsibility campaign and nongovernmental labour organizations. Based on the review of the newest developments in workplace democracy and the employee voice in China, this paper proposes a stakeholder framework incorporating these developments. The authors also suggest some directions for future research.

This article explores the changing use of pay systems in China's automotive industry and contextual conditions shaping these changes: China's emerging market economy; and the evolution of collective labour relations. It sets out an integrated framework developed from institutional logics, new economics of personnel and organizational justice theory. The hypotheses derived from this framework are tested using the deductive case study method. The researcher collected the data in two waves of case studies including six Chinese automakers over 10 years. Key findings point to the convergence of pay strategy towards job values, performance and competence, and a wide variation in the use of variable pay and pay plan leverage. Through its exploration of forces underlying this convergence and variance in China's automotive industry, the article contributes to research on Strategic HRM and institutional complexity. The results highlight a variety of tensions among predictions of relevant theories. The outcome is subject to how employers interpret and manage institutional pluralism and complexity. The process by which employers choose response strategies also highlights the importance of responsible behaviours in choices of pay systems, which this article terms Responsible Pay.

Democratic management is a notion of worker democracy unique to China. It has been revived and extended legislatively to enterprises of all types in the past decade. Can democratic management bring about mutually beneficial labour relations in China? Drawing on social exchange theory, this study uses mixed methods to explore employees' current experience and the outcomes of democratic management in Chinese coal-mining firms. An employee survey reports a positive relationship between employees' perceived efficacy of democratic management and wider organizational commitment. It suggests that democratic management has the potential value of creating a harmonious labour relationship. However, the success of such management is subject primarily to the commitment of top managers. The triality of motives for top management to conduct democratic management may undermine employees' organizational commitment when employees perceive that top managers are more committed to an exchange relationship with the higher authorities than one with employees.