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Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) play a significant role in China. Based on recent statistics, about 67% of firms were non-state owned, which contributed 47% of the R&D in 2017 (Report of the Top 500 Firms in China, 2017). The majority of these firms are SMEs, many of which are family businesses. Despite their importance, we lack both theoretical and empirical understanding of how these firms cope with the opportunities and challenges in China's fast-changing transitional market. In light of the mission ofManagement and Organization Review(MOR), i.e., publishing ground-breaking insights about management and organizations in China, we called for this special issue in order to promote the value of the unique Chinese institutional context for management inquiries.

Summary Eukaryotic genomes encode several buffering mechanisms that robustly maintain invariant phenotypic outcome despite fluctuating environmental conditions. Here we show that the Drosophila gut-associated commensals, represented by a single facultative symbiont, Lactobacillus plantarum (LpWJL), constitutes a so far unexpected buffer that masks the contribution of the host's cryptic genetic variation (CGV) to developmental traits while the host is under nutritional stress. During chronic under-nutrition, LpWJL consistently reduces variation in different host phenotypic traits and ensures robust organ patterning during development; LpWJL also decreases genotype-dependent expression variation, particularly for development-associated genes. We further provide evidence that LpWJL buffers via reactive oxygen species (ROS) signaling whose inhibition impairs microbiota-mediated phenotypic robustness. We thus identified a hitherto unappreciated contribution of the gut facultative symbionts to host fitness that, beyond supporting growth rates and maturation timing, confers developmental robustness and phenotypic homogeneity in times of nutritional stress., Graphical Abstract, Highlights • Upon nutritional stress, fly commensals buffer the effects of cryptic genetic variants • Fly gut commensals buffer transcriptional variation in developmental genes • Fly commensals buffer phenotypic heterogeneity and mediate developmental canalization • Compromising ROS activities impair microbial buffering capacity, Biological Sciences; Microbiology; Oral Microbiology

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.

Bacterial-derived metabolites profoundly influence the host's cellular and organismal physiology. Seth et al. (2019) report that via interspecies S-nitrosylation, microbiota-derived nitric oxide directly alters the host's Argonaute family protein activity, and consequently impinges on the overall post-transcriptional gene silencing program through the microRNA (miRNA) machinery.

Misconduct poses a significant threat to organizations, as these unethical and illegal actions result in loss of credibility and market value in addition to harming environmental and societal well-...

Although collaboration between competing organizations is one of the most challenging tasks in management, our knowledge about social-cognitive mechanisms that facilitate the collaborative interact...

In the animal kingdom, nutritional mutualism is a perpetual and intimate dialogue carried out between the host and its associated gut community members. This dialogue affects many aspects of the host’s development and physiology. Some constituents of the animal gut microbiota can stably reside within the host for years, and such long-term persistence might be a prerequisite for these microbes to assert their beneficial impact. How long-term persistence is established and maintained is an interesting question, and several classic model organisms associated with cultivable resident strains are used to address this question. However, in Drosophila, this model has long eluded fly geneticists. In this issue of PLOS Biology, Pais and colleagues present the most rigorous and comprehensive demonstration to date that persistence and gut residency do take place in the digestive tract of Drosophila melanogaster. This natural gut isolate of Acetobacter thailandicus stably colonizes the adult fly foregut, accelerates larval maturation, and boosts host fecundity and fertility as efficiently as the known laboratory strains. The discovery of such stable association will be a boon for the Drosophila community interested in host–microbiota interaction, as it not only provides a novel model to unravel the molecular underpinnings of persistence but also opens a new arena for using Drosophila to study the implications of gut persistence in evolution and ecology.

SummaryEukaryotic genomes encode several well-studied buffering mechanisms that robustly maintain invariant phenotypic outcome despite fluctuating environmental conditions. Here we show that the gut microbiota, represented by a single Drosophila facultative symbiont, Lactobacillus plantarum (LpWJL), acts also as a broad genetic buffer that masks the contribution of the cryptic genetic variations in the host under nutritional stress. During chronic under-nutrition, LpWJL consistently reduces variation in different host phenotypic traits and ensures robust organ patterning; LpWJL also decreases genotype-dependent expression variation, particularly for development-associated genes. We further demonstrate that LpWJL buffers via reactive oxygen species (ROS) signaling whose inhibition severely impairs microbiota-mediated phenotypic robustness. We thus identified an unexpected contribution of facultative symbionts to Drosophila fitness by assuring developmental robustness and phenotypic homogeneity in times of nutritional stress.

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 ...

Our study analyzes the association between civic engagement and entrepreneurship. Analysis of a longitudinal national survey shows that volunteering, a major form of civic engagement, increased the...

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.

Commensal bacteria profoundly affect the biology of their animal partners. Drosophila melanogaster has been broadly used to study microbiota effects on invertebrates, whose findings are frequently applicable to translational studies. The beneficial role of commensal microbes on Drosophila biology is extensively described, ranging from growth to metabolism, immunity and even behaviour. However, the mechanisms underlying these effects are not well understood. Studies continue to discover new layers of complexity in the host-bacteria partnership that constantly changes depending on a plethora of different variables. This review discusses the latest advances in understanding the molecular bases of microbiota impact on Drosophila physiology and behaviour, emphasizing its broad influence and the intricate interdependence of the two partners in shaping their biology.

The microbial environment influences animal physiology. However, the underlying molecular mechanisms of such functional interactions are largely undefined. Previously, we showed that during chronic undernutrition, strains of Lactobacillus plantarum, a major commensal partner of Drosophila, promote host juvenile growth and maturation partly through enhanced expression of intestinal peptidases. By screening a transposon insertion library of Lactobacillus plantarum in gnotobiotic Drosophila larvae, we identify a bacterial cell-wall-modifying machinery encoded by the pbpX2-dlt operon that is critical to enhance host digestive capabilities and promote animal growth and maturation. Deletion of this operon leads to bacterial cell wall alteration with a complete loss of d-alanylation of teichoic acids. We show that L. plantarum cell walls bearing d-alanylated teichoic acids are directly sensed by Drosophila enterocytes to ensure optimal intestinal peptidase expression and activity, juvenile growth and maturation during chronic undernutrition. We thus conclude that besides peptidoglycan, teichoic acid modifications participate in the host–commensal bacteria molecular dialogue occurring in the intestine. Under nutritional limitation, modification of the Lactobacillus plantarum cell wall by d-alanylation of teichoic acids is important for host intestinal peptidase expression and consequently growth of the Drosophila host, providing further insights into host–commensal interactions.

Irradiated or injured cells enter apoptosis, and in turn, promote proliferation of surrounding unaffected cells. In Drosophila, apoptotic cells have an active role in proliferation, where the caspase Dronc and p53 induce mitogen expression and growth in the surrounding tissues. The Drosophila p53 gene structure is conserved and encodes at least two protein isoforms: a full-length isoform (Dp53) and an N-terminally truncated isoform (DDNp53). Historically, DDNp53 was the first p53 isoform identified and was thought to be responsible for all p53 biological activities. It was shown that DDNp53 induces apoptosis by inducing the expression of IAP antagonists, such as Reaper. Here we investigated the roles of Dp53 and DDNp53 in apoptosis and apoptosis- induced proliferation. We found that both isoforms were capable of activating apoptosis, but that they each induced distinct IAP antagonists. Expression of DDNp53 induced Wingless (Wg) expression and enhanced proliferation in both ‘undead cells’ and in ‘genuine’ apoptotic cells. In contrast to DDNp53, Dp53 did not induce Wg expression in the absence of the endogenous p53 gene. Thus, we propose that DDNp53 is the main isoform that regulates apoptosis-induced proliferation. Understanding the roles of Drosophila p53 isoforms in apoptosis and in apoptosis-induced proliferation may shed new light on the roles of p53 isoforms in humans, with important implications in cancer biology.

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.

The complex interaction between the metazoan host and its commensal gut microbiota is one of the essential features of symbiosis in the animal kingdom. As there is a burgeoning interest to decipher the molecular dialog that shapes host-microbiota mutualism, the use of gnotobiotic model organism becomes an imperative approach to unambiguously parse the specific contributions to such interaction from the microbiome. In this review, we focus on several remarkable gnotobiotic studies in Drosophila that functionally depicted how the gut microbes can alter host physiology and behavior through transcriptomic regulation, hormonal control, and diet modification. These results in concert illustrate that the gnotobiotic flies mono- or poly-associated with members of its gut microbiota deliver a versatile and powerful model that is amenable to different types of studies ranging from classic genetics to large-scale systems approaches.

Using a 1995 national survey of 2,870 Chinese private entrepreneurs, this article examines collaboration between private business and government in times of economic transition. Much as in the late 18th century situation in France as described by Tocqueville, special moments occur when a newly emerging business class offers monetary payments for charity and for honorary offices. In exchange, the government, desperate for new sources of revenue, provides social recognition and political access. The data suggest that into at least the 1990s Chinese private entrepreneurs donated generously to government welfare projects, and in exchange gained political access and social status via appointment to political councils.

Objective The study was initiated to obtain histologie distribution, clinical features, and treatment results in patients with primary gastrointestinal non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas.

Some epithelial cells are polarized along an axis orthogonal to their apical-basal axes. Recent studies in Drosophila lead to the view that three classes of signaling molecules govern the planar cell polarity (PCP) pathway. The first class, or module, functions across whole tissues, providing directional information to individual cells. The second module, apparently shared by all planar polarized tissues, and related to the canonical Wnt signaling pathway, interprets the directional signal to produce subcellular asymmetries. The third modules are tissue specific, acting to translate subcellular asymmetry into the appropriate morphological manifestations in the different cell types.

International audience; The canonical role of p53 in preserving genome integrity and limiting carcinogenesis has been well established. In the presence of acute DNA-damage, oncogene deregulation and other forms of cellular stress, p53 orchestrates a myriad of pleiotropic processes to repair cellular damages and maintain homeostasis. Beside these well-studied functions of p53, recent studies in Drosophila have unraveled intriguing roles of Dmp53 in promoting cell division in apoptosis-induced proliferation, enhancing fitness and proliferation of the winner cell in cell competition and coordinating growth at the organ and organismal level in the presence of stress. In this review, we describe these new functions of Dmp53 and discuss their relevance in the context of carcinogenesis.

In the presence of physical injury or genotoxic stress, the developing tissue activates a series of repair and regenerative responses that ultimately lead to distinct cellular outcomes such as the commitment to apoptosis accompanied by simultaneous proliferation. Such adapted cellular response is a result of complex interactions among different signaling pathways that play pleiotropic roles during development and stress response. How cells integrate the instructions from the pleiotropic signaling factors such as JNK, p53 or pRb to generate a specific response is one of the enduring questions in cell biology. For example, in the developing Drosophila wing, JNK, p53 or pRb can alternatively induce apoptosis, proliferation or apoptosis-induced proliferation (AiP) depending on the cellular context and stimuli. AiP is the process by which the apoptotic machinery induces the expression of mitogens, which in turn triggers the proliferation of the neighboring cells. This process is relevant to regeneration and has been proposed to be important in tumor repopulation after irradiation.1 Molecular mechanisms of AiP were first discovered and greatly studied in Drosophila imaginal tissues that have a high regenerative capacity, such as the wing and the eye discs. AiP in Drosophila channels through the apoptotic machinery, where Dronc/Caspase-9 activates a feedback loop involving JNK and p53.2,3 However, the underlying mechanisms of AiP lack apparent molecular details. It has been proposed that the molecular mechanisms that distinguish between apoptosis and AiP may rely on specific p53 isoforms (Dp53 or DΔNp53 expression,4 Fig. 1). While full-length Dp53 induces solely apoptosis via the activation of rpr, DΔNp53 favors Hid induction and results in the expression of Wingless/Wnt mitogen and AiP. Other studies have depicted the role of JNK signaling as an important partner of p53 in apoptosis and AiP.5

The TP53 tumour-suppressor gene is expressed as several protein isoforms generated by different mechanisms, including use of alternative promoters, splicing sites and translational initiation sites, that are conserved through evolution and within the TP53 homologues, TP63 and TP73. Although first described in the eighties, the importance of p53 isoforms in regulating the suppressive functions of p53 has only become evident in the last 10 years, by analogy with observations that p63 and p73 isoforms appeared indispensable to fully understand the biological functions of TP63 and TP73. This review summarizes recent advances in the field of 'p53 isoforms', including new data on p63 and p73 isoforms. Details of the alternative mechanisms that produce p53 isoforms and cis- and trans-regulators identified are provided. The main focus is on their biological functions (apoptosis, cell cycle, aging and so on) in cellular and animal models, including mouse, zebrafish and Drosophila. Finally, the deregulation of p53 isoform expression in human cancers is reviewed. Based on these latest results, several developments are expected in the future: the identification of drugs modulating p53 isoform expression; the generation of animal models and the evaluation of the use of p53 isoform as biomarkers in human cancers.

This paper discusses the relationship between fabrics and clothing and advances the fabric factor in home clothing design. Considering the specific characteristics of new fabrics, this paper analyzes the uses of new fabrics in home clothing design, aiming at promoting the use of new fabrics in home clothing. This paper serves as a reference and direction for home clothing design in a sense.

We argue that people that occupy marginal organizational positions have advantages in moving across contentious organizational boundaries. Ganshi were the “marginal man” in Chinese government organizations – their rank was low and their main job was to “get things done.” Discrete-time event history analysis of career histories of Chinese political elites indicates that ganshi were more likely to move between organizations that had conflict with each other, suggesting that the marginal man are less constrained by particularistic authority relations, are more likely to leave various people good impression, and have greater leeway developing novel practice which enhances their image as a capable person. The marginal man’s practice helps neutralize interorganizational conflict and the softened organizational boundaries in return facilitate their mobility. Our study highlights the imperative for studying contentious boundaries in social mobility research and the importance of the practice-based view for the in...

This study analyzes the association between the status of doctoral candidates’ graduating department and the status of their employing department. We found that the relationship is curvilinear (“in...

Summary Facultative animal-bacteria symbioses, which are critical determinants of animal fitness, are largely assumed to be mutualistic. However, whether commensal bacteria benefit from the association has not been rigorously assessed. Using a simple and tractable gnotobiotic model— Drosophila mono-associated with one of its dominant commensals, Lactobacillus plantarum—we reveal that in addition to benefiting animal growth, this facultative symbiosis has a positive impact on commensal bacteria fitness. We find that bacteria encounter a strong cost during gut transit, yet larvae-derived maintenance factors override this cost and increase bacterial population fitness, thus perpetuating symbiosis. In addition, we demonstrate that the maintenance of the association is required for achieving maximum animal growth benefits upon chronic undernutrition. Taken together, our study establishes a prototypical case of facultative nutritional mutualism, whereby a farming mechanism perpetuates animal-bacteria symbiosis, which bolsters fitness gains for both partners upon poor nutritional conditions., Graphical Abstract, Highlights • Symbiotic bacteria hasten the growth of undernourished Drosophila larvae • Without larvae, bacteria rapidly exhaust their nutritional resources and collapse • Larvae secrete maintenance factors allowing bacteria to overcome nutrient shortage • Drosophila larvae/bacteria symbiosis is a case of facultative nutritional mutualism, Storelli et al. describe a mechanism whereby Drosophila larvae maintain their association with beneficial symbiotic bacteria. Symbiotic bacteria hasten the growth of undernourished larvae, while larvae secrete maintenance factors allowing bacteria to persist despite the shortage of their nutritional resources. Thus, Drosophila/bacteria symbiosis is a case of facultative nutritional mutualism.