Cong Sun

Purpose: As Chinese stock market develops and grows, mutual fund plays an increasingly important role for strong financial strength and good social resources. This paper aims to present an overview of fund investment effect, identify the investment preference of institutional investors and explore the socially responsible investment value of mutual fund, especially green fund.Design/methodology/approach: In order to test the green effects in the fund market, especially from the perspective of institutional shareholding, the authors build three panel data models to examine the attention, promotion and network effect respectively.Findings: In general terms, the authors obtain a positive relationship between mutual funds and green firms (attention effect). This positive relationship is conducted by the comparison of institutional shareholding level between green firms and non-green firms by using two-samplet-test. The authors find that although all the coefficients of mutual funds' shareholding variables are positively related to social performance, only the number of mutual fund shareholders shows slight significance. The authors observe a stronger promotion effect of green funds on social performance than the other mutual funds (promotion effect). From a network perspective as well as previous social capital research, the mutual funds shareholding network shows a significant and positive effect on the firm's social performance in the firm–fund network (CFClose) as well as in the firm–firm network (CCClose), while the coefficients of closeness in the firm and green fund network are positive but non-significant (network effect).Research limitations/implications: Although some valuable findings have been documented, there is a great potential to be further explored. For example, how to guide more green funds to solve the finance problem of middle and small-sized firms may be another crucial task for the point of view of government or industry level. While at the mutual fund level, it is essential to positively participate in and fulfill the environment duty of listed firms which can not only satisfy the expectation of environment value investment.Practical implications: The fund market has witnessed unprecedented growth in China and plays an important role in promoting the development of green industries. This indicates the practice of mutual funds as socially responsible investment in China. Some effective measures should be taken to incentive the mutual funds to continually invest in environment-friendly firms, which would benefit to the promotion of social performance driven by financing innovation.Social implications: The ESG issue is a global one that needs the participation of the countries worldwide. As one of the most important emerging markets, regulators in China should consider taking more action in promoting ESG concerns. To some extent, institutional investments can actually reflect how the responsible investments are going in this market.Originality/value: This paper provides a systematic empirical analysis of Chinese fund market in the view of institutional investor preference. Three green effects, namely attention, promotion and network effects, are put forward, which have not been employed in previous studies. Our work is useful for understanding sustainable finance which has been elevating into national strategy.

Purpose: This study examines the factors that influence the improvement of the consumer goods sector in three dimensions (technology, internal factors and external environment) for exploring the upgrading paths of Shanghai's consumer goods industry.Design/methodology/approach: This paper targeted eight sub-industries of consumer goods as case studies, including food processing, and investigated from qualitative and quantitative perspectives using the technology-organization-environment (TOE) framework.Findings: The study confirms the diversity of paths to promote the upgrading of the consumer goods industry in Shanghai, and three paths are summarized in this paper. The “human–environment” linkage upgrade path is to bring sufficient economic contribution to help industrial upgrading by expanding market share, and this path is suitable for large enterprises in the industry to adopt; the “internal factor aggregation” upgrading path is to strengthen the aggregation effect of resources, form industrial clusters and link high human aggregation with industrial aggregation to exert leverage to transform and upgrade the consumer goods industry, and this path is suitable for SMEs in the industry to adopt; the “technology–environment” linkage upgrade path is to use technological factors for product innovation to occupy a favorable market position, to obtain high economic returns and realize industrial upgrading under the joint action of technology and external environment, and this path is suitable for high-tech enterprises to adopt.Originality/value: Shanghai still has a large area for growth toward foreign metropolises, under the backdrop of the strong development of new manufacturing. Also, to diversify their investment portfolio, the consumer goods industry should focus on population, job density and industrial growth while looking into industrial aggregation.

This study uses 31 provinces and municipalities from China’s textile industry as a research sample and divides the region into four geographical areas: eastern, central, western, and northeastern. It quantified smart servitization in the textile industry using input–output data and applied the fuzzy set qualitative comparison analysis to identify potential pathways for promoting smart servitization in the textile industry. The study’s findings indicate that there are significant geographical differences in the level of smart servitization in the textile industry across China. Moreover, the transformation and development of the textile industry require the co-operation of numerous factors, and the Chinese textile industry’s transformation paths can be summarized as “high-input” path, “technology—aggregation” path, “open” path, and “economic-agglomeration” path.

The structure of the manufacturing industry has forced manufacturing companies to understand the importance of digitalization and servitization transformation, in terms of production and R&D. In this study, we examine the relationship between servitization, digitization, and enterprise innovation performance through the lens of dynamic capabilities within enterprises. We also discuss the impact of the transformation servitization strategy on business innovation, and the mechanisms by which it impacts business innovation performance. The study’s findings indicate that servitization significantly contributes to innovation performance, and digitalization acts as a mediating mechanism between the proposed relationships. Thus, this article argues for the integration and growth of servitization and digitization.