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In the 1980s, the Chinese state pushed the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) to establish businesses. Some of these businesses did not engage in any research and development (R&D), and this resulted in scientists having concerns about the boundary around the institutionalizing scientific community. When the state supported CAS’s ‘Knowledge Innovation’ reform in the late 1990s, CAS’s organizing principle became centered on a more narrowly scientific logic, which led to less reliance on business income. Regression analysis indicates that CAS-owned enterprises without R&D were more likely to be discontinued during ‘Knowledge Innovation’. Moreover, businesses having no R&D were more likely to be discontinued (1) if they were making high profits and (2) if they were supervised by an institute in which Academicians had longer tenure, because these conditions heightened science-market conflict.

Most social network studies following Granovetter’s (1985) vision of embeddedness have either focused on instrumental relations or lumped instrumentality and sentimentality together. This study seeks to clarify whether social relations that primarily build on sentimentality can impact economic action. Based on the context of Chinese market transition, this paper found that general managers that had affection-based social circles, that is, small groups in which people enjoy being together, were more likely to start a private firm after being laid off. In contrast, business-based social circles, defined as small groups mainly formed on business interests, did not have a significant interactive effect with layoff. These findings are consistent with the argument that affection-based social circles help managers experiencing job loss maintain a stable and positive self-identity, and that these circles also exert less constraint over radical career change.

Transitional China offers an ideal opportunity for scholars to examine an important yet understudied topic – the relationship between entrepreneurship and extensive social change. Using a national ...

This study explores the impact of the mismatch between two sources of power, ownership and status, on the effectiveness of interorganizational relations. We characterize three types of dyadic ownership-status relationships and examine their relative mixes at the group level: (1) power source match (A’s ownership and status are both higher than those of B); (2) ownership-dominated power source mismatch (A’s ownership advantage over B is greater than B’s status advantage over A); and (3) status-dominated power source mismatch (A’s ownership advantage over B is less than B’s status advantage over A). We found that power source match enhanced the effectiveness of venture capital (VC) syndication, and that ownership-dominated power source mismatch strengthened the positive effect of power source match because the syndicate could maintain legitimate ownership order and benefit from diverse inputs. By contrast, status-dominated power source mismatch weakened the positive effect of power source match, because it may have created disorderly interaction. Moreover, familiarity between participating VC firms diminished the negative moderating effect of status-dominated mismatch, because mutual trust helped organize group interaction, and entrepreneurial performance fulfilled a similar function, as the autonomy of entrepreneurs from the VC syndicate buffered turbulences caused by interaction problems among VC investors.

This article addresses three questions concerning authority relations (personal relations with superiors) in transitional China. First, can superiors retain an organizational unit in order to save a protege's job? Second, has instrumental usage of particularistic relations, orguanxi,lost its importance? Third, has ‘principled particularism’, an integration of political loyalty and authority relations, continued to impact careers? Based on first-hand survey data, I find that state-owned enterprises in which managers had closer authority relations were less likely to be sold or discontinued, and close authority relations also reduced the likelihood of career blockage (demotion/lay off). The significant interactive effect of party membership and authority relations revealed the continuation of ‘principled particularism’. The study underlines institutional continuity during rapid social change, renders insights into the processes of organizational restructuring, and depicts the relational base of formal organizations.

Some epithelial cells display asymmetry along an axis orthogonal to the apical-basal axis, referred to as planar cell polarity (PCP). A Frizzled-mediated feedback loop coordinates PCP between neighboring cells, and the cadherin Fat transduces a global directional cue that orients PCP with respect to the tissue axes. The feedback loop can propagate polarity across clones of cells that lack the global directional signal, although this polarity propagation is error prone. Here, we show that, in the Drosophila wing, a combination of cell geometry and nonautonomous signaling at clone boundaries determines the correct or incorrect polarity propagation in clones that lack Fat mediated global directional information. Pattern elements, such as veins, and sporadic occurrences of irregular geometry are obstacles to polarity propagation. Hence, in the wild type, broad distribution of the global directional cue combines with a local feedback mechanism to overcome irregularities in cell packing geometry during PCP signaling.