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Few readers notice that in a celebrated essay, Goffman, in a footnote, acknowledges the Chinese source of his concept of face. Around the time that Goffman published 'On Face-work,' Merton urged that theory development requires, among other things, clarification or refinement of concepts. If culture is taken to be effectively related to action and meaning, it is necessary to go beyond the approach in which theories, concepts, and methods developed in one socio-cultural context are simply applied to data generated in another. The present paper shows that concepts from other cultures may challenge taken-for-granted assumptions, received wisdoms, and established conventions. The paper draws on semi-structured interviews with respondents in a number of sites in mainland China. Examination of the various notions of face articulated by respondents suggests possible developments in sociological conceptualizations of face neglected in previous discussion. It is shown that an individual's face generation and outcome may arise out of another individual's status or behavior. An individual's action may give rise to a collective face outcome and a collective's circumstances may have impact on an individual's face state. Additionally, it is shown that face itself may become an object of self-conscious deliberation and construction. The paper demonstrates that conceptualizations employed by Chinese subjects can lead to the identification or illumination of properties and relations neglected in mainstream cultural sociology. New directions of research and theorization are thus encouraged by incorporation of culturally extraneous experiences and categories into mainstream sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Occurrences of abusive supervision are steadily rising. Previous studies have tried to explain the influence of abusive leadership on workplace outcomes from perspectives of organizational justice and leader-member exchange based on the social exchange theory. Yet, a need exists for new explanations and mechanisms related to the influence of abusive leadership. As such, this paper aims to discover new mechanisms of abusive leadership effect. Drawing from social cognitive and affective events theories, we establish a dual process model to investigate how abusive leadership affects employees' helping behaviors from motivational and emotional perspectives. We examine whether employees' self-efficacy and negative affectivity mediate the relationship between abusive leadership and helping behaviors. The data were collected from 262 employees in China. The results indicate that abusive leadership has a negative impact on helping behaviors. Self-efficacy plays a role as a mediator, while negative affectivity does not play a role as a mediator in the abusive leadership—helping behavior relationship. Organizations should spend much time and money training managers to change their abusive behavior patterns. Managers should be responsible for keeping and enhancing employees' confidence as well as avoiding the negative emotions caused by leaders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The deepening and widening of globalization have profoundly modified the world?s political,economic and cultural landscapes as we know them. It calls for not only a green revolution in our ways of production and ways of life, but also a restructuring of the "knowledge?oriented"model of intellectual production that has served as bedrock to support the single?minded mentality of developmentalism. One of the possible routes to arrive at a new Weltanschauung is what I have termed as the "living wisdom"that can help to explicate the inexplicables by existing social theories. I argue in this paper that the Chinese living wisdom offers a nutshell view of how traditional resources can be made accessible for us to respond to current unprecedented challenges facing humanity. It is as much a best opportunity in the "metropolitan moment" for a "China?s representation" as for other civilizations, cultures and nations,such as the "eco?social time"in primitive societies,the ancient European philosophies on ontology and cosmology,and the rejection of sagehood and intellect by Zhuangzi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study seeks to investigate whether, how, and when leaders can facilitate knowledge sharing by leading ethically. Drawing on social learning theory, we hypothesize that ethical leadership can promote knowledge sharing through inducing organizational concern among employees. However, impression management climate will nullify the effect of ethical leadership on organizational concern and the consequent knowledge sharing. Two-wave data were collected from 567 employees and their supervisors from 73 teams in China. Mediation and moderated mediation hypotheses were examined using multilevel modeling. The results show that ethical leadership is positively related to knowledge sharing and that organizational concern significantly mediates the relationship. Moreover, impression management climate neutralizes the effect of ethical leadership on organizational concern and the resulting knowledge sharing. Our research suggests that leaders can enhance knowledge sharing by aligning their followers with the collective interest and generating genuine concern among them for the organization. To ensure the effectiveness of ethical leadership, organizations are recommended to put less emphasis on impression management and avoid linking performance appraisal and rewards with personal image. Employees' concern about self-interest represents a great barrier to knowledge sharing. This study is among the first to shed light on the role of ethical leadership in facilitating knowledge sharing; ethical leadership motivates employees to go beyond self-interest and show concern for the organization. We also highlight the potentially negative effect of the group climate and enrich our knowledge of impression management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Self-assessed health in four items of the Health Related Quality of Life Scale, overall health, physical health, mental health, and activity limitation, and perceived life satisfaction in six domains of the Brief Multidimensional Students’ Life Satisfaction Scale, overall life, family life, friendships, school experience, myself, and where I live were examined among 4,502 Chinese adolescent secondary school students in Hong Kong. Relative to the US adolescents in Youth Risk Behavior Survey the Hong Kong adolescents had very low levels of self-assessed health and life satisfaction. Among the different domains, family and school life were associated with the lowest satisfaction level. There were strong male advantages in self-assessed health and migrant disadvantages in life satisfaction. Age was negatively related to both health and life satisfaction. Two-parent family was a positive factor for adolescents’ quality of life but economic well-being was not a relevant factor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Paralleling with the contribution of Western systems thinking to the development of modern Chinese system theory, the authors notice that the concept of yin- yang is scattered in many social science researches in the West. However, those researches were still not rich enough to yield insights into the core value of yin- yang and, in turn, there is seemly no one unified guiding law or principle which governs both its theoretical and empirical applications. In this study, axiom system of the Yin-Yang-based system has been proposed and elaborated through the comparisons of systematic thinking between East and West. After incorporating the concept of causal chains, it can also be used to work as quantitative tool for business decision analysis in management practices. The aim of this study is to bridge the contemporary systematic thinking gap between East and West and to provide a complement to aid in further development of system theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]