Search

This interdisciplinary study combines insights from attachment theory, services research, and organizational management to investigate how a Chinese restaurant chain creates a strong service climate by satisfying emotional attachment needs of low-skilled employees. Employee attachment has been used extensively to predict employees’ attitudes and behaviors (Wang et al. 2018), which are important for service climate (Hong et al. 2013). Despite the importance of attachment to understand employees’ attitudes, behavior and positive service climate, the use of attachment theory in services research is still recent. Scholars identify the need to understand the antecedents of service climate (Bowen and Schneider 2014). Specifically, how employees bond with co-workers to align their personal goals with those of the organization (Tang et al. 2014), how these bonds relate to social stressors (such as those caused by supervisors or colleagues), and the impact on service climate. This understanding is relevant in the context of low-skilled Chinese workers moving from the countryside to the city, leaving their families behind, and facing adaptation difficulties, which in turn activates their attachment system.

While transforming the investment, trading and infrastructural landscape in Africa, Chinese firms are also generating much-publicised controversy about their real motives. Many of the large Chinese firms operating in Africa focus mostly but not exclusively on engineering, infrastructural projects and mining. This Africa–China engagement has only recently begun to receive critical attention in the area of management and organisation studies. With reference to Kenya, we found that this phenomenon is characterised by four key themes: the unique yet diverse motivations of investors, the challenge of reconciling cross-cultural differences, the impact of low-cost strategies and the boundary-spanning role of managers. This paper also considers the extent to which post-colonial theory might serve as an analytical lens for examining the perceptions and attitudes of Chinese managers as well as the experiences of the Africans who work for them.

This paper provides a critique of the emergent theories of human resource management in China with a view to generating new theoretical insights with particular reference to Pierre Bourdieu’s social theory. It re-assesses the relevance of the orthodox critique of ethnocentricity and the coherence of approaches embedded in Chinese culture. With reference to six case studies of the largest retail firms, we identify two key challenges: the reliance on headquarter human resource practices that reflect an ethnocentric ethos, i.e. country-of-origin bias, and the failure to empower local managers and the problems this creates for managers expected to implement ethnocentric practices. We examine how Bourdieu’s social theory sheds light on the processes by which these firms realise their strategic objectives through the complicity of local managers whose scope for resistance is constrained by the use of normative control and in part through attractive remuneration and career prospects that generate Bourdieusian capital for these managers. We conclude with some suggestions for further research.

This longitudinal case study evaluates the strategic responses of Western retail transnational corporations (TNCs) to China’s business environment. It explicates how hybridization helps adapt and ultimately alter local institutional settings. Two-fold findings are discussed: the hybrid practices impacting on host market institutions, This longitudinal case study evaluates the strategic responses of Western retail transnational corporations (TNCs) to China’s business environment. It explicates how hybridization helps adapt and ultimately alter local institutional settings. Two-fold findings are discussed: the hybrid practices impacting on host market institutions, involving laws and regulations, fair competition, business networks, empowerment, corporate social responsibility, employee retention and quality control; and those impacting on consumption patterns, involving tailored offerings, targeting, new market ideology, store location, price and cost leadership. By doing so, the TNCs create new competitive pressures on China’s retail market. The findings show the transfer of management practices that do not align with a host market may subtly alter its norms and practices. To sustain competitive advantage and enhance territorial embeddedness, the TNCs switch their key stakeholders from the governments to their businesses, the society and the consumers over time. However, their long-term legitimacy remains uncertain in China.

Purpose – This paper aims to examine the important factors that influence foreign retailers' expansion in China. By doing so the paper proposes business strategies for foreign retailers to be successful in China and other emerging economies.Design/methodology/approach – A case study approach is employed to build theory. Five case studies were chosen, including the world's four largest retail firms: Wal‐Mart, Carrefour, Metro and Tesco, as well as the Japanese department store Heivado.Findings – The paper identifies six important activities in successful retail expansion: adaptation to the external environment; responses to psychic distance; establishment of business networking; localization; entry strategies into new areas; and the role of local management team. A new framework articulates the interdependent relationships between various factors embedded in retail internationalization, including external environment, internal drivers, psychic distance, and expansion strategies.Practical implications – The...

Purpose\ud The purpose of this article is to introduce the special issue which considers some of the contemporary debates in managing people in Africa. Design/methodology/approach\ud The papers that constitute this special issue were selected from submissions to various events hosted by the Africa Research Group, a community of scholars committed to researching Africa, and from a more general call for submissions. Findings\ud The papers highlight the changing picture of the African organisational landscape and provide both theoretical and empirical insights about the opportunities and challenges of managing people in a culturally complex continent. Originality/value\ud Taken together, the papers make an important contribution by engaging current debates and demonstrating potential new areas for further research.

Recent developments in control hold that professionals are best managed through normative and concertive as opposed to bureaucratic and coercive mechanisms. This post-structuralist approach appeals to the notion of congruent values and norms and acknowledges the role of individuals’ subjectivity in sustaining professional autonomy. Yet, there remains a risk of over-simplifying the manifestations of such control initiatives. By means of an in-depth case study, this article considers the challenge of implementing a knowledge-sharing portal for a community of R&D scientists through management control initiatives that relied on a blend of presumed ‘peer pressure’ and the rhetoric of ‘facilitation’. Arguing that traditional approaches such as normative/concertive control and soft bureaucracy only partially explain this phenomenon, we draw from Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of ‘symbolic violence’ to interpret a managerial initiative to appropriate knowledge and affirm the structure of social relations through the complicity of R&D scientists. We also examine how the scientists channelled resistance by reconstituting compliance in line with their sense of identity as creators of knowledge.

Through exploring factors influencing effective retail positioning strategies in an emerging market environment, this paper challenges the role of isolation mechanism and heterogeneous idiosyncrasy argued by the resource-based view theory. By drawing on a sample of 11,577 customers from hypermarkets, electronic appliance specialty stores and department stores in major Chinese cities, we set up ten hypotheses and confirm a nine-item model for customeroriented retail positioning (perceived price, store image, product, shopping environment, customer service, payment process, after-sales service, store policies, and shopping convenience). Our results show that different retail formats achieve success through the implementation of similar positioning strategies, in which case, it is not heterogeneity but homogeneity that contributes to retailers' success greatly at the development stage of retail expansion. Our results challenge previously proved effectiveness of inimitability to success by the resource-based view, and support homogenous idiosyncrasy of retailers in the implementation of customer-oriented positioning strategies in an emerging market.