Harmonizing conflict in husband–wife purchase decision making: perceived fairness and spousal influence dynamics

To market important products to families successfully, salespeople must understand how couples behave in concert to resolve conflict across major decisions. The authors develop a model of spousal fairness and test it with a study of multi-period family purchase decision making. The results show that a spousal sense of fairness serves as a mechanism for contemporary couples to harmonize conflict over time in family decisions. Specifically, spouses’ perceived fairness mediates the relationship between spousal prior influence and spousal decision behavior in subsequent decisions. Spouses also consider their partner’s perceptions of fairness when taking action to restore fairness. Moreover, the effects of perceived fairness are moderated by spousal traits of empathy, egalitarianism, and empowerment in a gendered pattern.

Enabling Guanxi Management in China: A Hierarchical Stakeholder Model of Effective Guanxi

Guanxi (literally interpersonal connections) is in essence a network of resource coalition-based stakeholders sharing resources for survival, and it plays a key role in achieving business success in China. However, the salience of guanxi stakeholders varies: not all guanxi relationships are necessary, and among the necessary guanxi participants, not all are equally important. A hierarchical stakeholder model of guanxi is developed drawing upon Mitchell et al.’s (1997) stakeholder salience theory and Anderson’s (1982) constituency theory. As an application of instrumental stakeholder theory, the model dimensionalizes the notion of stakeholder salience, and distinguishes between and among internal and external guanxi, core, major, and peripheral guanxi, and primary and secondary guanxi stakeholders. Guanxi management principles are developed based on a hierarchy of guanxi priorities and management specializations. The goal of this application of instrumental stakeholder theory is to construct, for Western business firms in China, a means to reliably identify guanxi partners by employing the principles of effective guanxi. These principles are described in the form of testable propositions that advance social scientific research in this area of international business ethics. Chenting Su is Associate Professor of Marketing at City University of Hong Kong. He is also Adjunct Professor at Wuhan University, P.R. China. He previously taught at the University of Victoria, Canada, He writes for Journal of Marketing Research, International Journal of Research in Marketing, Journal of Travel Research, Journal of Business Ethics, Psychology & Marketing, International Journal of Market Research, Service Marketing Quarterly, Research in Marketing, and others. He presently serves as Executive Director of China Marketing Association, P.R. China. Ronald K. Mitchell is Professor of Entrepreneurship and J. A. Bagley Regents Chair in Management in the Rawls College of Business at Texas Tech University. He publishes in the areas of new value creation and stakeholder theory. From 1999–2002 he held a joint appointment in strategy and public policy in the Guanghua School of Management at Peking University, Beijing, PRC. He has won numerous awards for research and program building; presently serves in the leadership of the AOM Entrepreneurship Division; and is Co-Editor for the Entrepreneurship Theory & Practice three-volume Special Issue on Entrepreneurial Cognition. Joe Sirgy is Professor of Marketing and Virginia Real Estate Research Fellow at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech). He has published extensively in the area of business ethics and quality-of-life (QOL) research in relation to theory, philosophy, measurement, business, and public policy. He co-founded the International Society for Quality-of-Life Studies (ISQOLS) in 1995 and is currently serving as its Executive Director. He received the Distinguished Fellow Award from both the Academy of Marketing Science and ISQOLS. In 2003, ISQOLS recognized him as the Distinguished QOL Researcher for research excellence and a record of lifetime achievement in QOL research. He also is the current JMM section editor on QOL issues and a co-editor of Applied Research in Quality of Life.     

Managing opportunism in a developing interfirm relationship: The interrelationship of calculative and loyalty commitment

This research develops a framework for investigating associations among the duration of an exchange relationship, the interrelationship between a supplier's calculative and loyalty commitment, and opportunistic behavior on the part of a buyer. The findings indicate that (1) calculative commitment and loyalty commitment by suppliers function as substitutes; (2) a supplier's loyalty commitment increases gradually as a developing exchange relationship endures, whereas calculative commitment increases and then decreases; and (3) a supplier's calculative commitment leads to an increase in a buyer's opportunism, whereas the supplier's loyalty commitment leads to a decrease, and a supplier's loyalty commitment decreases the positive impact of calculative commitment on opportunism. These findings provide insights into how relationship duration affects buyers' opportunism through the interrelation between suppliers' calculative and loyalty commitment.     

The Ethics of Consumer Sovereignty in an Age of High Tech

We argue that consumer sovereignty in an increasingly high tech world is more of a fiction than a fact. We show how the principle of consumer sovereignty that governs the societal impact of economic competition is no longer valid. The world of high tech is increasingly responsible for changes in the opportunity, ability, and motivation of business firms to compete. Furthermore, the world of high tech is increasingly responsible for changes in the opportunity, ability, and motivation of consumers to engage in rational decision making. We conclude that we cannot rely on consumer sovereignty to maintain a thriving economy. Instead, we need to develop performance standards designed to meet the demands of the various stakeholders of the organization.     

A paradox of price–quality and market efficiency: a comparative study of the US and China markets

The price–quality schema rests on an assumption that price is credible information about product quality. However, the credibility of price information varies across different markets. In an inefficient market, consumers would believe in the price–quality relationship to a lesser extent because price information is less credible. Paradoxically, in such a market, sometimes consumers have to rely more on price to infer quality because other product information is less available. With a cross-national perspective, this study investigated the influences of market efficiency and consumer risk aversion on the price–quality schema between the China and the US markets. We found that due to the inefficient market environment, Chinese consumers possess a weaker price–quality schema than American consumers. Chinese consumers are more risk averse than their American counterparts. However, in China, risk-averse consumers are more likely to use price to infer product quality. Implications for global marketing are discussed, and directions for future research are suggested.     

Understanding Asian business strategy: Modeling institution-based legitimacy-embedded efficiency

To understand the unique aspects of Asian business practice, we propose a conceptual framework of institution-based, legitimacy-embedded efficiency. We underscore the institutional foundations of Asian business practice and propose that gaining legitimacy takes priority in order to attain the efficiency that follows from legitimacy in Asian business practice. We then highlight several fundamental, philosophic principles that define the meaning of legitimacy and ways to achieve legitimacy in Asian societies. We also provide a brief summary of each paper in this special issue and then proceed to pinpoint desirable directions for further research in light of our conceptual framework.     

The many faces of trust and guanxi behavior: Evidence from marketing channels in China

This study examines how a trusting relationship influences firm boundary agents' guanxi behavior which involves saving face (wei hu mianzi), and affect investment (ganqing tou zi). At the individual level, we decompose trust into its competence and goodwill forms and examine their relative and interactive effects on guanxi behavior. A study conducted among 354 Chinese purchasing managers reveals that both competence trust and goodwill trust promote guanxi behavior, and these two types of character trust are substitutive for each other in terms of motivating the use of guanxi. At the firm level, calculative trust directly affects guanxi behavior and also negatively moderates the effect of competence trust on guanxi behavior. These results imply that calculative trust may substitute for competence trust in facilitating economic transactions and thereby reduce the use of guanxi in business interactions.     

Is Guanxi Orientation Bad, Ethically Speaking? A Study of Chinese Enterprises

Guanxi as one of the key factors leading to business success in China (PRC) has ironically been synonymous with bribery. This raises some serious questions: should Western foreign firms do business in China? How should they do business with Chinese firms? This study investigated the relationship between guanxi orientation and cognitive moral development in an attempt to determine whether the level of guanxi orientation of Chinese business people affects their ethical reasoning. Based on a classification of Chinese enterprises (Nee, 1992), it was found that Chinese enterprises rely on guanxi for business to different extents. However, their levels of cognitive moral development are not significantly different, suggesting that guanxi orientation has very little to do with ethical reasoning (as captured through an established measure of cognitive moral development). Furthermore, time in profession was found to positively affect guanxi orientation; however, age failed to predict guanxi orientation and education turned out to be a negative predictor of guanxi orientation.     

Market orientation,job satisfaction,product quality,and firm performance: evidence from China

This article examines the processes by which market orientation (MO) affects performance using a cross‐level approach. The results of a survey of 2,754 employees from 180 firms in China show that organization‐level MO culture leads to unit‐level MO behavior, which improves employee‐level job satisfaction and then product quality, which in turn fosters organizational performance. In particular, MO behavior fully mediates the effects of MO culture on employee satisfaction, product quality, and organizational performance. Leadership quality strengthens the effect of MO culture on unit‐level MO behavior. Moreover, MO behavior enhances firm performance indirectly through employee job satisfaction and product quality. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Entering Guanxi: A Business Ethical Dilemma in Mainland China?

This paper represents an effort to distinguish between two types of guanxi prevalent in mainland China: favor-seeking guanxi that is culturally rooted and rent-seeking guanxi that is institutionally defined. Different rules of maneuvering the two types of guanxi are identified in light of Chinese cultural and business ethics. Strategies for entering guanxi in mainland China are also suggested.