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Previous studies demonstrate that market-oriented reform has contributed significantly to China's economic growth from the efficiency-based economic view. But some argue that state-owned firms have access to policy information, scarce resources, and government support, and thus state-owned firms might foster innovation. This study tries to find out either market force or state ownership helps improve firms' R&D efficiency.

Using data from China's high-tech industry, we employed the fixed-effect stochastic frontier model and the spatial panel Han-Philips linear dynamic regression model to investigate the relationship between market-oriented reform and the dynamic evolution of R&D efficiency in both temporal and spatial dimensions. Moreover, we examined whether the relationship is affected in a state-owned economy and an industry protection environment.

The results indicate the following: (1) the R&D efficiency of China's high-tech industry has improved steadily and has converged gradually across its regions during the market-oriented reform; (2) the marketization degree is positively correlated with R&D efficiency and its regional convergence; (3) the state-owned economy and industry protection have significantly weakened the ability of market forces to shape R&D efficiency — i.e. they reduce, rather than enhance, R&D efficiency.

This investigation helps understand the drivers of R&D efficiency in transition economies, and the findings are also helpful in defining the boundaries and constraints of market forces.

This essay focuses on an argument that challenges the notion of market reform as a desirable idea. It examines how market requirements, accounting practices, political intervention and organizational conditions interact and create conflicts in the implementation of market reform. In our case study, we aim to elucidate the detrimental effects of expanding pricing mechanisms into areas typically untouched.

The essay adopts a critical perspective toward the marketization in the public sector organizations based on the authors' previous studies and observations of the reforms in Swedish schools over the last 30 years. The case is conceptualized within Callon’s framework of the sociology of worth.

The paper provides an example of market dynamics introduced without the presence of pricing and qualification mechanisms, resulting in a trial-and-error situation. In this context, we document and problematize a trend toward marketization that has had negative consequences for Swedish schools. In doing so, the paper shows how market requirements, accounting practices, political interventions and organizational conditions interact and create conflicts during the implementation of market reforms. The case shows the emergence of a new economic entity and its underlying rationale, the quantification/pricing mechanism, with a special emphasis on the role of accounting and the repercussions on subjectivities as values shift.

This paper follows up on the New Public Financial Management (NPFM) global warning debate on the emergence of pricing/charging mechanisms in public services. It provides a critical overview of the diffusion and relevance of accounting evaluation processes to sustain continuous reforms, despite claimed criticisms, limitations and (un)intended consequences. The paper also provides some reflections on new avenues for further research and some possible ways out for accounting studies.

This paper aims to investigate the relationship between corporate environmental, social and governance (ESG) ratings and leverage manipulation and the moderating effects of internal and external supervision.

The authors draw on a sample of Chinese non-financial A-share-listed firms from 2013 to 2020 to explore the effect of ESG ratings on leverage manipulation. Robustness and endogeneity tests confirm the validity of the regression results.

ESG ratings inhibit leverage manipulation by improving social reputation, information transparency and financing constraints. This effect is weakened by internal supervision, captured by the ratio of institutional investor ownership, and strengthened by external supervision, captured by the level of marketization. The effect is stronger in non-state-owned firms and firms in non-polluting industries. The governance dimension of ESG exhibits the strongest effect, with comprehensive environmental governance ratings and social governance ratings also suppressing leverage manipulation.

Firms should strive to cultivate environmental awareness, fulfil their social responsibilities and enhance internal governance, which may help to strengthen the firm’s sustainability orientation, mitigate opportunistic behaviours and ultimately contribute to high-quality firm development. The top managers of firms should exercise self-restraint and take the initiative to reduce leverage manipulation by establishing an appropriate governance structure and sustainable business operation system that incorporate environmental and social governance in addition to general governance.

Policymakers and regulators should formulate unified guidelines with comprehensive criteria to improve the scope and quality of ESG information disclosure and provide specific guidance on ESG practice for firms. Investors should incorporate ESG ratings into their investment decision framework to lower their portfolio risk.

This study contributes to the literature in four ways. Firstly, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, it is among the first to show that high ESG ratings may mitigate firms’ opportunistic behaviours. Secondly, it identifies the governance factor of leverage manipulation from the perspective of firms’ subjective sustainability orientation. Thirdly, it demonstrates that the relationship between ESG ratings and leverage manipulation varies with the level of internal and external supervision. Finally, it highlights the importance of governance in guaranteeing the other two dimensions’ roles by decomposing overall ESG.

The motivation for this paper is to provide a deeper understanding of some of the important and trending topics in the sport industry. Besides this, to consider the changing landscape of ownership, strategies and organisation of several types of sports in the contemporary environment, there is a need for deeper contextual knowledge of how different sport/s, leagues, clubs, associations, teams etc. own, organise and strategise at local to national to regional to international contexts.

This paper introduces the special issue on the sport industry that welcomes four interesting contributions of focusing on the important themes related to the sport industry. They include (1) digital transformation and needed capabilities, (2) fan engagement in a digital way using social media, (3) network convergence of business, entertainment and geo-politics through sports ownership and finally (4) the relevance and relation of social capital in the organisational strategy of sports organisations.

Four generic insights related to the themes and emerging trends in marketisation, ownership and digitalisation strategies in the sport industry are introduced in this paper. The first insight is that sports digitalisation and politicisation significantly impact the strategising, organising and networking activities of sports owners to foster value capture. Secondly, owners’ performance duality of marketisation of their sports clubs and vested business interests unravels the paradoxes of idealism and profit-maximisation. Thirdly, individual sports stars position themselves as an influential platform of value creation through on-field performance, social engagement and self-interests. Finally, the fourth insight is that the dual aims of sporting on-field success and profit making of large capital-funded sports clubs endanger the autonomy and governance of sports bodies/associations and an equitable sporting competition environment.

This paper provides an overview and reflections on the contributions of the papers in this special issue. The papers give different perspectives on how sport has been influenced by the development in society (1) with increasing digitalisation influencing organising of sport clubs and strategies for engaging fans, and (2) the influence of marketisation and politics in ownership strategies. As such, four insightful reflections are developed based on the originality of the contributions and the related extant literature presented on the themes of marketisation, ownership and digitalisation of the sport industry.

High-tech enterprises, as the national innovation powerhouses, have garnered considerable interest, particularly regarding their technological innovation capabilities. Nevertheless, prevalent research tends to spotlight the impact of individual factors on innovative behavior, with only a fraction adopting a comprehensive viewpoint, scrutinizing the causal amalgamations of precursor conditions influencing the overall innovation proficiency of high-tech enterprises.

This paper employs a hybrid approach integrating necessary condition analysis (NCA) and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to examine the combinatorial effects of antecedent factors on high-tech enterprises' innovation output. Our analysis draws upon data from 46 listed Chinese high-tech enterprises. To promote technological innovation within high-tech enterprises, we introduce a novel perspective that emphasizes technological innovation networks, grounded in a network agents-structure-environment framework. These antecedents are government subsidy, tax benefits, customer concentration, purchase concentration rate, market-oriented index and innovation environment.

The findings delineate four configurational pathways leading to high innovative output and three pathways resulting in low production.

This study thereby enriches the body of knowledge around technological innovation and provides actionable policy recommendations.

Although scholars in strategic management have identified innovating and exit as firms’ two sequential strategic responses to long-run crisis, the potential interdependency has yet remained implicit. Specifically, in the context of Chinese Privately Owned Enterprises (POEs), this study investigates the interrelationship of these two strategic responses during long-run crisis. Building on resource redeployment perspective, the authors propose that firms tend to simultaneously leverage innovating and exit responses.

The authors use the data from the 2010 Chinese POEs survey to verify how firms in the long-term crisis made strategic responses after the 2008 financial crisis. Besides, the authors utilize Probit regressions as the basic analysis and further employ bivariate Probit regressions to conduct robustness tests.

This study provides empirical evidence confirming that firms in the long-run period of the crisis tend to adopt both exit and innovating strategies at the same time, that is, the strategy of resource redeployment. Moreover, this study further finds that government subsidies, the degree of marketization and firm’s organizational capability could all accentuate the decision-making of firms’ resource redeployment.

The authors thus contribute to the study of strategic responses to crisis in strategic management by dynamically find out the interdependency of two responses and enrich the research on resource redeployment perspective by identifying three influential positive antecedents, adding to the ongoing investigation on positive drivers of resource redeployment.

The purpose of this paper is to have a deeper understanding of the nonlinear relationship between the impact of climate change on tourism development. Current studies on the effects of climate change on tourism development primarily rely on linear correlation assumptions.

Based on the New Institutional Economics theory, the institutional setting inherently motivates and ensures the growth of the tourism industry. For a precise evaluation of the nonlinear consequences of climate change on tourism, this paper concentrates on Chinese cities between 2011 and 2021, methodically analyzing the influence of climate change on tourism.

The study findings suggest that there is an “inverse U”-shaped nonlinear relationship between climate change and tourism development, initially strengthening and subsequently weakening. Based on these findings, the research further delves into how institutional contexts shape the nonlinear association between climate change and tourism growth. It was found that in a higher institutional backdrop, the “inverse U” curve tends to flatten and surpass the curve adjusted for a lesser institutional context. Upon deeper mechanism analysis, it was observed that cities with more advanced marketization, improved industrial restructuring and enhanced educational growth exhibit a more evident “inverse U”-shaped nonlinear connection between climate change and tourism evolution.

First, previous studies on climate change and tourism development largely rely on questionnaire data (Hu et al., 2022). In contrast to these studies, this paper uses dynamic panel data, which to some extent overcomes the subjectivity and difficulty of causality identification in questionnaire data, making our research conclusions more accurate and reliable. Second, this study breaks through the linear relationship hypothesis of previous literature regarding climate change and tourism development. By evaluating the nonlinear relationship of climate change to tourism development from the institutional pressure perspective, it more intricately delineates their interplay mechanism, expanding and supplementing the research literature on the relationship mechanism between climate change and tourism development. Thirdly, the conclusions of this study are beneficial for policymakers to better understand and assess the scope of climate change impacts. It also aids relevant departments in clarifying the direction of institutional environment optimization to elevate the level of tourism development when faced with adverse impacts brought about by climate change.

This study empirically evaluates the effect of China’s 2016 Green Financial System (GFS) framework on corporate green development, focusing on the role of green investment in achieving sustainability.

This study uses a quasinatural experiment design to combine difference-in-difference and propensity score matching methods for analysis. It examines 799 polluting and 1,130 nonpolluting firms from 2013 to 2020, enabling a comprehensive assessment of the GFS framework’s influence.

This study affirms a statistically significant positive influence of the GFS framework on escalating green investment levels in polluting firms. Robust sensitivity analyses, encompassing parallel trend assessment, entropy balancing test, and alternative proxies, corroborate these findings. A mediation analysis identifies the implementation of an environmental management system as the potential underlying mechanism. A cross-sectional analysis identifies high financial slack, high profitability, mandatory CSR regulations, and marketization level as the influencing factors.

The study’s findings have critical implications for policymakers, regulators, and companies. Demonstrating the effectiveness of the GFS framework in driving green investment underscores the importance of aligning financial systems with sustainability goals.

This study contributes novel empirical evidence on the positive effect of China’s GFS framework on corporate green development. The quasinatural experiment design, coupled with comprehensive sensitivity analyses, strengthens the robustness of the findings.

This study examines the impact of China’s mixed-ownership reform on the innovation of non-state-owned acquirers, with a particular focus on the impact on firms with high financing constraints, low-quality accounting information or less tangible assets.

We use a proprietary dataset of firms listed on the Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges to investigate the impact of mixed ownership reform on non-state-owned enterprise (non-SOE) innovation. We employ regression analysis to examine the association between mixed ownership reform and firm innovation.

The study finds that non-state-owned firms can improve innovation by acquiring equity in state-owned enterprises (SOEs) under the reform. Eased financing constraints, lowered financing costs, better access to tax incentives or government subsidies, lowered agency costs, better accounting information quality and more credit loans are underlying the impact. Additionally, cross-ownership connections amongst non-SOE executives and government intervention strengthen the impact, whilst regional marketisation weakens it.

This study adds to the literature on the association between mixed ownership reform and firm innovation by focussing on the conditions under which this impact is stronger. It also sheds light on the policy implications for SOE reforms in emerging economies.

This study aims to explore how not-for-profit organisations (NFPs) adopt service innovation and improve their employee resilience capabilities as a response to environmental changes arising from marketisation of public services.

Using a multiple case-study research design, this study involved 32 interviews with frontline employees working in a not-for-profit care-providing organisation.

This study finds that the development of absorptive capacity can facilitate service innovation adoption in NFPs and improve employee resilience in times of transition.

This study offers theoretical insights on service innovation, absorptive capacity and employee resilience in NFPs. It makes practical recommendations that will enable NFPs to help frontline employees better adopt service innovation practices in business models endorsed by the private sector.