In this issue we continue our editorial series and publish Yue and Raynard’s (2025) essay on the data frontier for Chinese management research. As data fundamentally shapes the questions we ask and the theories we advance, the authors encourage scholars to diversify empirical attention to include a wider variety of organizational forms, to leverage emerging computational methods, digital trace data, and AI-enabled technologies, and to develop novel datasets to generate more nuanced insights and better capture the complexity and distinctiveness of Chinese organizational life.
Following the editorial essay is an insightful review paper by Sun, Wang, and Zhao (2025), who explain the multifaceted nature of Intellectual Property (IP) in China: IP is a legal asset and IP is a value appropriation mechanism in market competition. This paper brings the various streams of literature on IP into a structured framework, including a side-by-side comparison with research based in the United States and suggestions for future research directions that can potentially speak to a broad audience in innovation, competition, and nonmarket strategies.
This issue also includes five research articles that offer unique insights into several important phenomena. For example, how might digital technology help overcome status-authority asymmetry (e.g., doctor–pharmacist) in cross-functional coordination? Xie, Ye, Hu, He, and Dai (2025) conducted a 17-month ethnographic study in a Chinese hospital and discovered that in the prescription review process, contingent exploitation such as strategically restricting utilization of digital technology, was an effective strategy to enable the low-status pharmacists to exert functional authority without evoking fierce resistance from the high-status doctors. Another example is the effects of social sharing among colleagues. While research suggests that social sharing often leads to positive outcomes, Xu, Ouyang, Huang, Shaw and Lam (2025) demonstrated that when the shared content was the experience of customer mistreatment, it could actually evoke heightened moral disengagement among those who did not experience mistreatment firsthand, which in turn leads to service sabotage. Moreover, Zhang, Zhang, Zeng, and Chen (2025) examined how CEO’s superstition associated with the Chinese zodiac year – a belief linked to bad luck – would influence firms’ charitable donations. The authors found a positive relationship based on data from Chinese listed firms from 2008 to 2020, as well as two moderators that function in the opposite direction: CEO’s overconfidence weakened the relationship whereas negative media coverage of CEOs during zodiac years amplified such relationship.
Finally, in the Dialogue, Debate, and Discussion section, we continue the discourse on the publishing paradigm in management research (Zhang & Chen, 2024) with commentaries by Barnett (2025), who emphasizes relevance, and Cornelissen, Werner, De Schutter, and Solinger (2025), who advocate for pluralism. I hope their commentaries add both depth and width to this important topic, and will help reshape the management research publication paradigm.
