Daojuan Wang

This study reviews the current state of research on the relations between the political environment and firms’ internationalization strategies (IS). We systematically analyze 95 relevant articles from fifteen top journals in the fields of international business and management over the past 31 years (1990–2021) and develop an integrative framework that discusses the impact of multilevel political factors affecting firms’ IS via diverse theoretical mechanisms. Specifically, we categorize the political environment into five levels: supranational and international, national, sub-national, industry, and firm levels, and identify five main theoretical frameworks: institutional theory, resource-based view (RBV), agency theory, resource dependency theory, and transaction cost economics (TCE). These categories allow us to contextualize the political environment in which four main themes (entry mode, location choice, scope, and performance) related to IS research are explored. Based on this review, we provide a full picture of political impact on firms’ IS and identify the inconsistent findings, research gaps, and debates in the literature, highlighting value-adding avenues for future research.

Geographically dispersed supplier networks represent a crucial strategy for firms to mitigate supply chain dependencies. This study investigates how the digitalization of enterprises enables firms to expand their global supplier base. Grounded in resource dependence theory, we argue that digitalization helps firms identify suitable suppliers worldwide and manage complex multinational networks. We utilize a multidimensional digitalization index covering six dimensions: strategic leadership, digital outputs, technology drive, organizational enablement, digital application, and environmental support. Using data on Chinese listed companies from 2011 to 2023, our findings reveal that digitalization significantly expands suppliers’ geographic scope, especially under high economic policy uncertainty, world trade uncertainty, and geopolitical risks. Further analyses indicate that process and technological innovations are the primary drivers within digitalization, and that geographic expansion occurs mainly into Asia, Europe, and America. These findings position digitalization as a systemic enabler for building global supplier networks and a strategic response to external uncertainty. Our study extends resource dependence theory by demonstrating how digitalization facilitates the management of dependencies at the network level.

Emerging markets face growing pressures to integrate sustainable English business practices while maintaining economic growth, particularly in addressing environmental challenges and achieving carbon neutrality goals. English Financial information extraction becomes crucial for supporting green finance initiatives, Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) compliance, and sustainable investment decisions in these markets. This paper presents FinATG, an AI-driven autoregressive framework for extracting sustainability-related English financial information from English texts, specifically designed to support emerging markets in their transition toward sustainable development. The framework addresses the complex challenges of processing ESG reports, green bond disclosures, carbon footprint assessments, and sustainable investment documentation prevalent in emerging economies. FinATG introduces a domain-adaptive span representation method fine-tuned on sustainability-focused English financial corpora, implements constrained decoding mechanisms based on green finance regulations, and integrates FinBERT with autoregressive generation for end-to-end extraction of environmental and governance information. While achieving competitive performance on standard benchmarks, FinATG’s primary contribution lies in its architecture, which prioritizes correctness and compliance for the high-stakes financial domain. Experimental validation demonstrates FinATG’s effectiveness with entity F1 scores of 88.5 and REL F1 scores of 80.2 on standard English datasets, while achieving superior performance (85.7–86.0 entity F1, 73.1–74.0 REL+ F1) on sustainability-focused financial datasets. The framework particularly excels in extracting carbon emission data, green investment relationships, and ESG compliance indicators, achieving average AUC and RGR scores of 0.93 and 0.89 respectively. By automating the extraction of sustainability metrics from complex English financial documents, FinATG supports emerging markets in meeting international ESG standards, facilitating green finance flows, and enhancing transparency in sustainable business practices, ultimately contributing to their sustainable development goals and climate action commitments.

Over the past few decades, China has emerged as a dominant force in global manufacturing, producing large shares of key products, such as personal computers, mobile phones and electric vehicles. Along with this production boom, Chinese multinational enterprises (CMNEs) have aggressively pursued cross-border mergers and acquisitions to secure strategic assets in developed countries. This mirrors Japan’s global expansion in the 1970s and the 1980s, raising concerns regarding the strategic motives behind China’s growing influence. This study examines the strategic asset-seeking behaviour of CMNEs, focusing on the case studies of Lenovo and Haers. It uses a framework that integrates the strategic intent view with the resource-based view to explore two key questions: What are the strategic intents of CMNEs behind their strategic asset seeking and acquisition? How are cross-border strategic asset acquisitions used to propel CMNEs towards their strategic intent? The findings offer insights for Western companies into the long-term objectives of CMNEs and the strategies employed to achieve their strategic intents, enabling them to respond strategically rather than tactically. Moreover, emerging market firms can acquire valuable lessons from this research, including best practices for strategy development and resource utilisation, while being aware of the potential risks of associating Western brands with products from emerging markets.

Time theft, especially with the shift to remote work during the pandemic, is an increasing challenge for organizations. Existing studies demonstrate that both authoritarian leadership and laissez-faire leadership can exacerbate time theft, putting leaders in a behavioral dilemma of neither being strict nor lenient. Additionally, the pervasive and covert nature of time theft diminishes the effectiveness of subsequent corrective actions. Our study aims to investigate how to prevent time theft by mitigating employees’ inclinations. Based on role theory, our study examines whether supervisor developmental feedback can encourage employees to perform work roles more appropriately. To uncover the complicated internalization process of role expectation, our study incorporates perceived insider status and work passion as serial mediators and considers the boundary effect of leaders’ word–deed consistency. In Study 1, a survey of 402 employees revealed that supervisor developmental feedback can negatively predict employee time theft through employees’ perceived insider status and work passion. Study 2 employs the same sample to further identify three topics of supervisor developmental feedback: skill learning, attitude learning, and social learning. Moreover, serial multiple mediating effects are affirmed across topics. The findings suggest that providing feedback on employees’ learning and growth is an effective approach to prevent time theft.

This Ph.D. thesis presents new research on the "success paradox" in mergers and acquisitions (M&As), with a focus on cross-border acquisitions (CBAs). It investigates firm motives for CBAs, determinants of CBA performance, and value creation mechanisms, addressing gaps in existing research by integrating multidisciplinary perspectives and proposing an inclusive model. The study also examines CBAs by Nordic firms. A preliminary survey and extensive literature review resulted in an "input-process-output" theoretical framework and ten hypotheses, combining insights from the resource-based view (RBV), dynamic capabilities, process, and synergy theories. The framework incorporates contextual and implementation factors, addressing their interdependencies. Data collected via an online survey and analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) support the framework and hypotheses. Some key findings include: 1. CBA performance is influenced by both firms' resource bases, the acquirer's capabilities in value identification and resource reconfiguration, and deal-setting factors (e.g., the target firm’s management attitude and competition). These factors are necessary but not individually sufficient for success. 2. Positive impacts of certain resource base natures, value identification, and resource reconfiguration capabilities on CBA performance were consistently supported. Key drivers include pre-acquisition performance, resource similarity and complementarity, and host-country experience. 3. The higher-order construct "resource reconfiguration" has the strongest relationship with CBA performance.

This study examines the complex joint effect of firm and board characteristics on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) disclosure by Chinese listed banks, viewed from a configurational perspective. By utilizing fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) on a sample of 33 Chinese listed banks from 2020, we obtained results that explain some of the inconsistent findings in the current literature and suggest that four specific configurations of firm and board characteristics are equally conducive to high levels of ESG disclosure. Specifically, bank attributes (i.e., size, state ownership, and cross-listing) are the most salient aspects of promoting ESG disclosure, but the final effect relies on a combination of these attributes and other board characteristics (i.e., board size, independence, gender diversity, and a corporate social responsibility committee). We demonstrate the significance of employing configurational thinking to evaluate corporate governance in relation to ESG disclosure. Our findings indicate that the connection between board characteristics and high levels of ESG disclosure varies according to bank attributes.