Solving Paradox by Increasing Technological Capacity: A Critique of the Concept of Business Model Innovation at TikTok

ABSTRACT This paper comments on Yulun Ma and Yue Hu's (2021) recent article ‘Business Model Innovation and Experimentation in Transforming Economies: ByteDance and TikTok’. It argues that TikTok's international success is not due to so-called business model innovation; instead, it is because ByteDance has overcome three major hurdles facing emerging market firms pursuing internationalization. It also posits that the case of TikTok offers inspiration for theorizing paradox, namely, individuals and organizations can solve paradoxical tensions by increasing capacity through the use of advanced technologies.

Perceived Parental Care and Next-Generation Family Members’ Succession Intentions: The Sequential-Mediating Role of General Self-Efficacy and Perceived Person-Job Fit

ABSTRACT Whereas the existing literature on the relationship between parental behavior and family business succession mainly focuses on parental behavior in the business domain, we highlight the importance of parental behavior in the family domain. Integrating attachment theory, the family business succession literature, and person-job fit literature, our study proposes a theoretical framework hypothesizing that general self-efficacy and perceived person-job fit mediate the association between perceived parental care (an underrepresented family-domain-specific parental behavior) and next-generation family members’ succession intentions. This framework is tested by data from two surveys and further verified by qualitative interviews of next-generation family members. Multivariate analysis results suggest that next-generation family members’ general self-efficacy and perceived person-job fit played a sequential-mediating role in the relationship between perceived parental care and next-generation family members’ succession intentions. Our interviews not only confirm these results but also reveal new insights, particularly into the specific Chinese context in the study of family business succession.

Utilizing the Chinese Diaspora by Russian Firms: Capabilities and Legitimacy Implications

ABSTRACT This article examines the impact of foreign diasporas on host country firms. It contributes to diaspora research by focusing on the context of emerging market host countries and the specific case of Chinese diaspora in Russia. Drawing on the concepts of organizational capabilities and organizational legitimacy, we explain how the Chinese diaspora can be beneficial for the competitiveness of Russian firms, and how Russian firms can uniquely leverage these potential benefits through engagement with individual Chinese diasporans and diaspora institutions. Our article adds to the diaspora literature in several ways. First, unlike the majority of past research, which tends to focus on the benefits for the diaspora's home country, we highlight the potential impact on host country firms, specifically their capabilities and legitimacy at home and abroad. Second, our model can be viewed as a direct response to the many calls in the literature to study the microfoundations of firms’ capabilities. Third, we add to the legitimacy literature by proposing that engagement with a foreign diaspora can help host country firms establish and maintain their legitimacy both at home and on a global scale. Although our framework is informed by the Chinese diaspora in Russia, we discuss its generalizability to other contexts.

A Far-Reaching Parental Love? Co-Governance of Intergenerational Succession and Innovation Activities in Chinese Family Firms

ABSTRACT Motivated by the research gap on intergenerational succession dynamics of family firms, this study examines the effects of initiating intergenerational succession on firms' innovation activities. We propose that initiation of intra-family succession can result in founder–successor co-governance that represents a strategic transition to the succession and incorporates the two conflicting yet complementary directions of change and continuity. Grounded in the theory of altruism, we suggest that co-governance will positively affect firms' innovation activities and that this positive link is contingent on the idiosyncratic intra-family relationships of kinship type, age difference, and gender difference between the founder and the successor. Furthermore, we posit that co-governance will lead to a flow of resources to low risk, rather than more inventive but higher risk, innovations. Based on the unbalanced panel data of 4,694 firm-year observations in our sample from listed Chinese family firms during the 2006–2015 period, empirical analysis supports our hypotheses and confirms that when examining family firms' innovation, there is a need to take the heterogeneity of the intra-family governance structure more fully into consideration.

The Match Between Structural Attributes and Content-Based Orientation of Managerial Cognition: An Exploratory fsQCA Study of ‘Hidden Champions’

ABSTRACT Strategic decision makers interpret information and translate it into organizational action through the lens of strategic schemas. How should firms realize high performance with various strategic schemas? Cognitive content and structure have been shown to underlie strategic schemas, but few studies have considered them together. This study employs aggregation analysis to clarify the interaction between cognitive content (technology orientation, market orientation) and structure (complexity, centrality) in affecting the firm performance (FP) of ‘hidden champion’ companies, identified by the Economy and Information Technology Department of Zhejiang Province, China. The empirical method applies fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to generate strategic schema profiles for high FP. This exploratory study fills a gap in the literature on managerial cognition and provides key lessons from ‘hidden champion’ companies in China and their paths for small- and medium-sized enterprises to grow.