This issue of MOR features a guest editorial by deputy editor Professor Klaus Meyer on the role of ‘Context in Management Research in Emerging Economies’ and a Perspective paper co-authored by Yadong Luo and John Child on ‘The Growth of Emerging Economy Enterprises: A Composition-Based View’, followed by two commentaries. The first, ‘Extraordinary Survival from Ordinary Resources – How So?’, is by Richard Burton and the second, ‘Reframing the Compositional Capability’ is by Henk Volberda and Emre Karali.

A memorial to celebrate the life and legacy of Kwok Leung is planned at the 2015 Academy of Management Meeting in Vancouver. It will be held at the convention center on Sunday 9 August from 4pm–5pm. Kwok's wife, Yumi, is planning to attend. As Kwok's close colleague Ray Friedman has said, ‘Having [Yumi] there will help us feel closer to Kwok. And we want [her] to hear firsthand how much he meant to all of us’. To share your memories of Kwok, please also visit the IACMR website message board (www.iacmr.org/2015KwokLeung/ENMessageBoard/).

With the first issue of volume eleven, Management and Organization Review turns a new leaf by welcoming Cambridge University Press as the new publisher. I am very pleased to note that the complex and extensive transition from Wiley to Cambridge University Press, which involved a very demanding and detailed process, has been accomplished on time and almost without any crisis. I would like to take this opportunity to express my deep appreciation to Tina Minchella, MOR Managing Editor, for overseeing and supporting the transition process, Zhijun Yao, Executive Director of IACMR in Beijing, for her tireless support, and to Rebecca O’Rourke, Senior Commissioning Editor, Social Science Journals Cambridge University Press, and her team for making the transition as seamless as possible. We look forward to an active partnership with CUP which will elevate the awareness of MOR in every region of the world and grow recognition of MOR from leading libraries around the world. We also look forward to a new proactive, multifaceted marketing and media strategy under the leadership of Professor Sheen Levine, the new Deputy Editor-in-Chief for Research Outreach, which will draw attention to MOR's expanded editorial coverage and increase high quality submission of manuscripts.

This issue of MOR closes out volume 11, which has witnessed the transition of the journal's domain to attract and publish social science research underlying an across-the-board range of themes in management, organizations, strategy, and public policy in the context of China and all transforming economies. The challenge for MOR is to be open to indigenous theories of management, organization, entrepreneurship, innovation, and economic development. However, this is not about contradicting the accumulated body of extant management and international business scholarship. At its core the intellectual challenge is to recognize that history, stage of economic development, institutional configuration, cultural differences, and national ambitions have the potential to give rise to new forms of organization and management. The challenge for MOR is to encourage and publish such research that meets the state-of-the-art scholarship criteria of the social sciences.

As many readers of MOR and IACMR members know, Kwok Leung, Deputy Editor in Chief of MOR, passed away on May 25th, 2015. He was hospitalized at the Prince of Wales Hospital in Hong Kong for more than two and half months, battling a very rare case of autoimmune disease. He celebrated his 57th birthday in the hospital. Kwok was one of the few mainstream social psychology scholars who made important scholarly contributions to cross-cultural management research, including the AIB community, where I first worked with him, the IACMR, and MOR. I have lost a friend, a partner, and a mentor. On behalf of MOR I extend my condolences to his family.

This introduction traces the disappearance of Chinese family businesses from 1949 to 1978, their revival since then, and their future challenges. It then summarizes the three papers included in this Special Issue and proposes an agenda for family business studies in China. The article first focuses on the nonmarket social and political network strategies that these family-centered business organizations have had to adopt in order to overcome the difficulties they faced in accessing opportunities and resources as a result of Chinese culture's traditional low esteem for merchants and the government's continuing preference for a state-dominated economy. Family firms have so far been able to grow disproportionately rapidly in China's economy because, by leveraging the shared interests and dedication of immediate and extended family members, they have been able to achieve lower cost and higher efficiency, respond quickly to market changes, and expand social and political networks. These nonmarket strategies, however, also have a dark side. Furthermore, as the liberalization of China's economy deepens, competition must rely critically on market strategies such as innovation, alliances, and internationalization. The proposed research agenda addresses these future challenges as well as some research questions unique to Chinese family businesses.

The challenge of integrating context when theorizing is not unique to research on management in emerging economies (MEE). Principally, all management scholars aspiring a theoretical contribution should be concerned about context, as emphasized by Whetten (1989: 492) in his oft-cited guidelines.

As a scholarly field matures, theories emerge that guide paradigms and shape consensus in academic discourse. Management theories reflect a shared consensus on how individual behaviors or organizational actions result in a certain set of outcomes and under specific conditions. Clearly, theory is paramount to guiding whether models of potential relationships bear out and how and why we would expect a relationship or specific outcome. Yet much of this theory is derived from cumulative empirical evidence from a ‘context’ that has remained a silent partner in our quest for a theoretical contribution. A growing number of papers emphasize the theoretical contribution as disembodied from the context in which the empirical evidence of a causal relationship was gleaned. As an applied field, the emphasis on theory with disregard to the context of management practice presents a challenge for progress both as a scholarly domain and for credibility in what we teach and how we consult, or how we effect positive social change. This guest editorial joins a chorus of recent editorials in this journal (e.g., Tsui, 2013) and elsewhere (e.g., George, 2014) that suggest we rethink management scholarship, rejuvenate our ideas for research, and embed a nugget of practice in scholarly discourse.

Loan guarantees to related parties by affiliated subsidiaries within family controlled pyramids form a means by which the controlling family expropriates value from minority shareholders. The controlling family, however, will attempt to escape blame for the behavior. Using a sample of 1785 listed Chinese firms affiliated with family-controlled business groups, we explore how family governance structure affects the use of related party loan guarantees. As hypothesized, we find that affiliates with non-family chairmen, but with family directors or senior executives, issue larger volumes of loan guarantees to related parties, whereas affiliates with family chairmen and those with non-family interlocking chairmen do not. The behavior is moderated by regional institutional development.

I am honored to join the MOR editorial team as the editor for Dialogue, Debate, and Discussion. My commitment is to facilitate dialogue, debate, and discussion on management and organization theory that is rooted in practice in emerging economies yet has implications beyond. Let us learn ‘slowly’ (cf. Levinthal & March, 1993) and resist too fast convergence to Western management methods before we have a chance to better understand and assimilate the divergence around the world.

I feel very fortunate to be able to open the MOR Dialogue, Debate, and Discussion editorial section with a striking perspective advanced by Shawn Pope and John W. Meyer of Stanford University. They point to the rise of a global corporate organization that is shedding its national distinctiveness and any remaining local rooting. Instead, they envision global standardization as no longer related to national origins and as managed according to abstract, universalistic principles. The global standard is furthermore run by managers who graduated from the same homogenous business programs, who gain advice from like-minded consultants, and who, of course, go to the same Davos meetings. The new standard, the universal corporation, seeks to convey its socially responsible character by confirming, sometimes voluntarily, to the standards of excellence as decreed by other organizations perhaps increasingly like itself. This provocative perspective invites debate – refutations and support alike – in future MOR issues and blogs. Where does your research lead you to take a stand?

This article presents a composition-based view (CBV), which explicates the growth of enterprises that compete and develop without the benefit of resource advantages, core technology, or market power. The CBV emphasizes how ordinary firms with ordinary resources may generate extraordinary results through their creative use of open resources and unique integrating capabilities, resulting in an enhanced speed and a price-value ratio that are well suited to large numbers of mass market consumers. In addition to defining the CBV, this article explains the key elements of composition-based strategy and the distinctive processes of composition. Although CBV logic can apply to any firm endeavoring to catch up with better endowed competitors, it aligns well with the case of emerging economy enterprises (EEEs), and Chinese ones in particular. Nonetheless, the advantages of adopting composition-based strategy are temporary in nature and will decline over time, especially after the firm passes the imitative or catch-up stage. We also propose an agenda for future research.

Drawing on expectancy theory and the socioemotional wealth (SEW) perspective, we propose that family owners with intrafamily succession intention are more motivated to accumulate or preserve SEW. As corporate philanthropy is a critical way for family-controlled firms to accumulate or maintain SEW, family owners with intrafamily succession intention are more likely to engage in corporate philanthropic activities. Data on a nationally representative sample of family-controlled firms in China support our prediction. We also find that the relationship between intrafamily succession intention and corporate philanthropy is moderated by family owners’ social status and religiosity. The findings contribute to our understanding about family businesses, in general, and those in China, in particular, as well as the SEW perspective.

Issues of ethics, justice, and social responsibility are as fundamental to organizational behavior as they are to society at large. As contracts are forged, individuals employed, and power differentials created, opportunities for exploitation, oppression, and victimization emerge. In contrast, as social structures evolve, coordinated opportunities arise for imparting positive social change at the community, environmental, and societal levels. Inherent to all of these phenomena is the application of norms surrounding moral behavior. Norms about what is considered fair and ethical underlie how individuals perceive and evaluate the behaviors and decisions of others; how groups and societies define acceptable behavior; and how individuals, groups, and societies evaluate the decisions and actions of organizations. In addition to defining standards, these norms also drive the reactions (or sanctions) against those who violate them.

With this perspective paper, we seek to help open up an additional and, we believe, especially promising avenue for indigenous management research. We explore the potential for progress through the investigation of executive rationale, an institutional logic guiding managerial action and enabling strategies, structures, and formal integration mechanisms. Drawing on interviews with an elite group of executives including some of the world's most powerful managers, we illustrate variance in executive rationale across five major economies – Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, and the United States – and suggest that action and structures in these economies are broadly aligned with the respective expressions of executive rationale. We consequently hold that indigenous management research may benefit from a focus on executive rationale in particular, and we propose a concrete research agenda.

This commentary targets the core ideas of the composition-based view (CBV). First, we argue that the deployment of compositional capabilities (CCs) to combine ordinary resources fits the resource-based view (RBV) and that there is therefore no need for a CBV. Second, we argue that the CCs should be presented as a specific type of dynamic capability (DC). We show that even where ordinary resources are being combined, superior combinatory capabilities are needed as competitive advantage cannot otherwise be achieved. Third, we argue that Luo and Child (2015) focused too much on the emerging economy enterprises (EEEs) as the conceptual setting. We conclude with a future research agenda to prepare the ground for research on compositional capabilities within the composition-based view of the firm.

This study investigates the differential effects of internationalization on two dimensions of family firms’ performance: growth and profitability. Drawing on the contingency theory, we argue that the successful implementation of internationalization strategy requires an appropriate organization structure, which is usually absent in Chinese family firms. To the extent that such a structure is established, these firms can realize greater benefits from internationalization. From a sample of 225 family firms in China, our predictions receive empirical support. We find that internationalization has a positive impact on growth but a negative impact on profitability. The negative internationalization–firm profitability relationship highlights the challenges internationalizing Chinese family firms face. The positive moderating effect of corporate governance, a critical component of organization structure, underscores the need for appropriate corporate governance to support the implementation of strategy. The findings have important practical implications for the internationalization of Chinese family firms.

Through examining executive rationale on why firms exist, Redding and Witt's (2015) paper serves as a window through which we can view varieties of capitalism and management models in several societies. However, though rationales are the socially constructed, historical patterns of material practices, they are after all ideational factors. The economic action and organizational practices, as Redding and Witt acknowledge, are often the result of the interplay of the material and ideational forces in society. Meanwhile, as the studied five economies are all relatively mature economies, executive rationales are rather stable, which is not the case for China. This commentary thus examines the evolution of Chinese management along with the shift of political economic parameters.

Studies on the relationship between corporate social responsibilities (CSR) and firm performance have mostly looked at large public firms in developed countries. In this study, we analyze this relationship using a sample of privately owned firms in China, a developing economy context. We hypothesize a negative relationship between commitment to CSR and average sales growth for privately-owned firms operating in weak institutional environments. Further, we hypothesize that smaller firms will show a stronger negative relationship than larger firms. CEO survey data from a sample of 630 Chinese private firms confirm the moderating role of firm size. However, the results are not entirely as expected. The negative relationship is observed in small firms (100 or fewer employees), but the relationship is positive for large firms (greater than 1000 employees), consistent with the literature. We discuss implications for public policy and future research.