Content

Message From The President

2008 IACMR Conference News

IACMR Donations to Help Earthquake Victims

IACMR Newsletter

The IACMR Newsletter is a bilingual newsletter published by the International Association for Chinese Management Research to facilitate the communication between the association and its members as well as to stimulate the dialogue among researchers in the field of Chinese Management. It appears on a quarterly basis.

Newsletter Editors

Zhen Xiong Chen, The Australian National University (Editor-in-Chief)
Josh Keller, University of Texas at Austin, USA (English Version)
Jie Gui, Institute of Scientific & Technical Information of China (Chinese Version)

Contributions

Contributions to the newsletter should be sent to Mr Red Ng at: iacmr@asu.edu. Submission deadlines are listed at the end of this newsletter. Please limit all submissions to less than 300 words, and do not extensively format documents for publication.

Feedback

Feedback and comments with regard to the newsletter can be sent to Red Ng at iacmr@asu.edu .

Becoming a member of IACMR

Understanding Leadership

One of my favorite business leaders in the Seattle area is Anders Burgland, co-owner of IKEA Seattle. I like him not only because he had tremendous international experience in running IKEA in different parts of the world, or how he turned IKEA Seattle into one of the seven most profitable IKEAs in a short time, but more because of his personal character, his views of leadership, and his leadership style. As a result, I often invite him to be the guest speaker of the classes I teach. He always accepts my invitation, and more impressively, he never repeats his talk; instead, every time he brings something new to the class. I remember in one of these talks, he asked my students to play a “leadership walk” game, which helped me a great deal in understanding what leadership is all about.

At the beginning of the game, he asked all students to stand up and form a circle. The rules of the game are quite simple: one student volunteers to play the role of a subordinate, and chooses the way he likes to walk, and then walks in whatever way inside the circle. For example, he can walk slowly and leisurely along the circle, or fast and urgent without any particular direction. Then one student volunteers to play the role of a supervisor (Anders does not like the word “manager”), who does NOT like the way the subordinate walks, needs to take action to correct him, until satisfactory. However, during this process, both the supervisor and the subordinate are NOT allowed to communicate with each other verbally, they could only use non-verbal cues to get their messages across. All other students play the role of an observer.

One student volunteered to be the “subordinate”. Anders asked him to step up and stand in the middle of the circle and then walk. The subordinate started to walk slowly with his head down. Then a volunteer “supervisor” came up. He stared at the subordinate for a few seconds and stood in front of the subordinate, with hands on his hip, and hinted him to stop walking. The subordinate looked up, a little surprised, but did not stop walking. Now the supervisor was shocked at such a reaction and appeared at a loss, so he started to follow the subordinate. At this moment, Anders asked them both to stop, and describe how they felt. The supervisor said, he thought the subordinate’s walking pace was too slow, not consistent with the company’s pace, so wanted to make him walk faster. The supervisor also said that he thought he had authority over him, so when I stood in front of him, he should have stopped and asked for my advice. But he did not. The subordinate said that the reason he chose that walking style was to show that he was a person who liked to think before taking action, and who was always reliable and dependable. When the supervisor stood in front of me with hands on hips, I sensed that he did not like my walking style, but I did not like the way he used his authority to force me because I view myself as an autonomous person, so I did not obey.

Anders then asked the supervisor if he understood his subordinate and knew what to do, but the supervisor seemed still at a loss, so Anders started to play the role of the supervisor and showed the student supervisor how he would do if he was in his position. This is what I saw. First, he observed how the subordinate walked for a few seconds, and then he started to use the same style to walk beside the subordinate. He naturally took one hand of the subordinate and walked together using the same pace. After a few seconds, with the subordinate’s hand in his hand, he started to walk faster with head up, and then looked at the subordinate hinting him to do the same. The subordinate seemed to understand and increased his pace. Anders then took his hand off and let the subordinate walk on his own. Game over.

A similar game was played several times until almost every student had a chance to play the roles of subordinate or supervisor. Anders then asked the students what they have learned from their experience. One student said, if a supervisor wanted to correct a subordinate’s wrong behavior, he first needed to put himself in the shoe of the subordinate to understand why he did the way he did before taking any actions. Every person has his own value orientation and personal characteristics. If you do not use a method acceptable for the subordinate, the subordinate would resent it and would not change his behavior. Sometimes the reason that subordinates don’t act in accordance with supervisors’ desires has little to do with their intention, but their lack of understanding of what the supervisor wants. So when the supervisor found that the subordinates were doing things “wrongly”, they should not blame them first; instead they should focus on the solution and provide clear direction for them, and coach them patiently. Another student said that this game showed that change and be changed is a two-way interactive process that needs both sides to cooperate. Therefore, supervisors and subordinates really need to develop a deep understanding about each other and work together to achieve organization goals.

I always thought that leadership was a complex phenomenon, but this game completely changed my understanding of leadership. This simple version of leadership should help me in leading IACMR to achieve its goals, and I hope it is also helpful to you as you lead your students, your colleagues, and your organization.
 

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A Welcome Remark from the Program Chair of the 3rd IACMR Conference (June 19-22, 2008)

The Conference is only weeks away. I would like to welcome you to the conference and share some great news with you. Below are some highlights:

• An increase of 45% in total submissions to the conference compared to the 2006 conference!
• The English program has 28 paper sessions, 3 symposia, 5 keynote sessions, and 4 poster paper sessions.
• The Chinese Forum has 21 paper sessions, 2 keynote sessions, and 4 poster paper sessions.
• A Distinguished Executive Forum (Chinese language, possibly English translation).
• Two company visit programs.
• 11 Professional Development Workshops.
• Appreciation Lunch (June 19), Awards Lunch (June 20), and Presidential Dinner (June 21).
• Music program after the Presidential dinner.
• As of April 20, 525 scholars have already registered for attending the conference!

Come and be part of the growing community of Chinese management researchers, students, and practitioners. You will find the 2008 IACMR conference an invaluable learning experience.

We thank the Local Administrative Committee (LAC) led by the School of Business at Sun Yat-sen University for the wonderful preparations! Guangzhou is famous for great food and the Garden Hotel is one of the very best in Guangzhou! With the outstanding support provided by the LAC, we have done our best to ensure that your staying in Guangzhou will be an unforgettable experience!

The theme of the conference is “The Olympic Spirit in Chinese Management Research”. The theme has already illuminated during the preparation processes of the conference, and we are looking forward to further advocate and celebrate the Olympic Spirit in the coming conference!

Look forward to seeing you in Guangzhou!!

Jia Lin Xie
Program Chair, 2008 IACMR Conference
 

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Immediately after the earthquake happened in the Sichuan province of China on 12 May 2008, the leaders of IACMR made a quick decision to donate RMB5,000 via the Chinese Red Cross Foundation to help the victims of the earthquake. As a non-profit academic association, IACMR, on behalf of all members, wants to express its sincere sympathy and solicitude for the victims of the earthquake through this small contribution. We wish the people in the earthquake areas will rebuild their homelands and resume their normal lives as soon as possible.

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Professor Anne S. Tsui Elected as Program Chair & President of AOM!

We are pleased to announce that Dr. Anne S. Tsui, Founding President of IACMR, Motorola Professor of International Management at Arizona State University, Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Guanghua School of Management, Peking University, and Distinguished Honorary Professors at Xi'an Jiaotung University and Fudan University, was elected to be an officer of the Academy of Management! She will serve a 5-year term as a member of the Executive Committee of the Academy of Management beginning in August 2008. She will be the Program Chair Elect in 2008-2009, Program Chair for 2009-2010 AoM Conference, Vice President in 2010-2011, and President of AoM in 2011-2012. Congratulations to Professor Tsui!

Member Appointments

Professor Xiao-Ping Chen, current President of IACMR, was appointed to Associate Editor for Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes (OBHDP) – one of the leading journals in organizational behavior in the world, effective July 1, 2008. Profess Chen is a Professor of Management & Organization, and Evert McCabe Fellow, at Michael G. Foster School of Business, University of Washington, USA.

Dr. Michael Miles, Professor of Organizational Behavior and Change Management and a member of IACMR sinceinception, has been appointed as Director of the MBA Program, Telfer School of Management, University of Ottawa, Ottawa Canada.

Member Promotions

Dr. Haiyang Li has been promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management, Rice University.

Member Awards/ Recognition

Dr. Michael Hitt, Chairman of the IACMR Academic Advisory Committee and one of the key founding advisors for IACMR, has been honored with the Texas A&M University Former Students Faculty Distinguished Achievement Research Award.

Chung and Fischer have been named as winners of the second “Imagination Lab Foundation Award for Innovative Scholarship,” offered by the Imagination Lab Foundation in collaboration with the European Academy of Management. Chung and Fischer received this award in recognition of their evolving “experimental” approach to use the Case Method in executive development over the past several years.

Guofeng Wang, Runtian Jing, & Andreas Klossek’s paper has been chosen as a Highly Commended Award Winner at the Literati Network Awards for Excellence 2008. The title of the paper is "Antecedents and management of conflict: Resolution styles of Chinese top managers in multiple rounds of cognitive and affective conflict”
(published at International Journal of Conflict Management, 2007, 18(1): 74-97).

In March 2008, the course (“Organizational Behavior”) taught by Professor Runtian Jing from University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC) has entered the China National Program for Elaborate Courses (CNPEC).

IACMR Member’s Success in the Fulbright Scholarship

Three Ph.D candidates from the International Ph.D. Program (IPHD) of the Guanghua School of Management, Peking University, have been awarded the 2008-2009 U.S.-China Fulbright Ph.D. Dissertation Research Scholarship to conduct their dissertation research abroad. Zhenyan Lu will spend the year at Ohio State University under the supervision of Professor Jay Barney. Qian Li will be at the University of California, Berkeley to study under Professor David Levine and Ju Pang will be with Professor Peter Golder at the New York University. This Fulbright program is part of the largest U.S. government exchange program aims to support the most promising Ph.D. students around the world to study in the U.S. Congratulations to the three Guanghua students and best wishes to their success in their dissertation research.

A Job Hunting Story from a Member

I am Yuping Zeng. I just got a job offer as an Assistant Professor at the Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville (SIUe), USA, beginning in August 2008. I did my Ph.D. in Management at the Guanghua School of Management, Peking University from 2002 to 2007. Supported by a foundation donated by Mr.& Mrs. Shan Wang, I spent the last year of my Ph.D. program (2006-2007) at the Fisher College of Business, The Ohio State University, OH, USA, as a visiting student. After completing the Ph.D. degree in the summer of 2007, I came back to Fisher College as a post-doctoral researcher, working with Dr. Oded Shenkar.

I started my job search in early summer of 2007, before the annual meeting of the Academy of Management. I sent my CV. and request of scheduling a conference interview to SIUe and many other Universities. Unfortunately, the schedule of the representative of SIUe was full, so I was not able to meet with him. Luckily enough, SIUe contacted me in January of 2008 to do a phone interview. One week after the phone interview, I was invited to do a campus interview. Two weeks later, on February 14, 2008, I got the offer letter.

Receiving a nice offer letter is always exciting, however, it is even more so for a person like me who did not have a Ph.D. degree from a US or European university. This is also exciting news for my advisor, Dr. Changqi Wu, and encouraging news for all the students in the International Ph.D. program at the Guanghua School of Management, Peking University. I hope this report will encourage our IACMR members, especially Ph.D. students who are struggling with pursuing an academic career. You CAN DO IT!

Keep us informed

Please send us (iacmr@asu.edu) any relevant professional news about IACMR members, like change of position, membership of organizations and awards.

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Management and Organization Review in SSCI

In case you missed the update to the March newsletter, We are delighted to announce that on March 4, 2008, MOR was officially selected for ISI coverage in Current Contents/ Social and Behavioral Sciences (CC/S&BS) and Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), beginning with MOR 4.1 (March 2008). This is a wonderful accomplishment for a journal so young and an important milestone for MOR and IACMR that will allow us to better serve management scholars in China and beyond.

ISI’s decision to include MOR was based on many factors, including the citation of its articles and the exceptional caliber of its editors, advisory and review boards, and authors. We are extremely fortunate to have so many outstanding contributors to MOR. Please help continue our trend of excellence by submitting your papers, performing valuable developmental reviews, and disseminating the research published in MOR by citing its articles relevant to your work. Also, please do your part in spreading the word to others who may not yet know of MOR about the excellent work that has been published in our journal.

MOR Workshops and Caucus at the 2008 IACMR Conference

At the IACMR conference in Guangzhou there are three workshops and a caucus related to MOR activities.

MOR Paper Development Workshop: This workshop focuses on providing participants with support and feedback during their efforts to finalize papers for successful submission. The accepted applicants will confer with fellow participating authors and scholarly mentors, who have prepared comments to guide the development of each paper. This workshop is chaired by MOR Editorial Review Board member Ingmar Björkman. This workshop is full, and we wish the participating authors a great learning experience and all the best wishes in successful publishing these papers.

Editors Panel: Writing and Reviewing for Top Tier Journals Workshop: This workshop intends to provide participants with suggestions, ideas, and guidelines on preparing papers to submit to top tier journals. Participants will learn about the editing and reviewing processes, including what reviewers expect from a paper, and about revising a manuscript that effectively responds to reviewers’ feedback for greater success. The workshop chair is MOR Editor in Chief Anne Tsui, and the experienced panel leaders are current and past editors of the leading journals in our field. We welcome any conference attendees to participate in this workshop.

MOR Special Issue Workshop – Social Exchange Theory and Its Usefulness in Explaining Organizational Behavior in China: This workshop features papers currently under consideration for the MOR Special Issue on Social Exchange in Organizations, followed by a discussion about Social Exchange theory both in general and in the context of the papers. MOR Special Issue Guest Editors Lois Tetrick and Xiao-Ping Chen are the workshop chairs and welcome any conference attendees to participate in this workshop (no pre-registration necessary).

Innovations in Public and Nonprofit Sector Organizations in China Caucus: Directly connected with the MOR call for papers by the same name, this caucus discussion will focus on innovation practices and theorization in public and non-profit organizations. It will stimulate interests in public and non-profit sector innovations and encourage researchers to conduct research and submit manuscripts on this topic to the special MOR issue. The Guest Editors of this special issue, Zhilong Lan, Joseph Galaskiewicz, and Xianglin Xu, are the table discussion leaders.

Special Issues in MOR

Don’t forget MOR’s current open Calls for Papers:
• Special issue on “Building, Maintaining and Repairing Trust Across Cultures” (Deadline: December 1, 2008).
• Special issue on “The Globalization of Chinese Enterprises: Environment, Strategy and Performance” (Deadline: May 1, 2009).
• Special issue on “Innovations in Public and Non-profit Sector Organizations in China.” (Deadline: September 15, 2009).

MOR Volume 4, Issue 2 (July 2008)

Volume 4, Issue 2 (July 2008) of MOR will arrive your mailbox this month! This issue begins with a special Editor’s Forum on Analysis and Implications of the Chinese Product Recalls Phenomenon, introduced by Senior Editor Marshall W. Meyer. This timely forum includes four unique perspectives in response to the Chinese product recall phenomenon with articles by Marjorie Lyles, Barbara Flynn, and Mark Frohlich; Yadong Luo; Paul Beamish and Hari Bapuji; and Jay Barney and Shujun Zhang. We hope you enjoy these varied perspectives responding to the need to explore the implications and analyze product recalls and quality issues in China.

Also in MOR 4.2, we have Robert Hoskisson, Robert White, Daphne Yiu, and Garry Bruton with a piece exploring how participation in business groups effects affiliate firms’ capacity for innovation, especially in the face of governmental pressures that may reduce innovation resources. Gordon Redding proposes the use of semantic spaces as a way of differentiating culture from institutions in order to bridge the theoretical gap between culturalist and institutionalist perspectives when examining societies and economies. Fang Lee Cooke answers the call for an “insider’s perspective” in analyzing China’s enterprise culture.

We hope you find Raymond Friedman’s “Qingdao, 2005”, the cover image for MOR 4.2, as striking as we do! If you have photos or paintings reflecting Chinese themes, please remember MOR as an outlet for your artistic work. Send your photograph or painting in a (.jpg) file to iacmr.mor@asu.edu, and you could be an upcoming cover artist!

Blackwell Synergy OnlineAccepted and OnlineEarly

MOR is pleased to be a part of Blackwell Synergy’s OnlineAccepted and OnlineEarly programs. Once MOR accepts an article, it is published online as OnlineAccepted prior to copy-editing and typesetting. OnlineAccepted is designed to help circulate our high-quality, peer-reviewed research papers immediately following acceptance by disseminating manuscripts to subscribers.
Similarly, after an accepted manuscript has gone through the proofing process, OnlineEarly provides access to the fully corrected and complete articles as they will appear in print but prior to their ultimate inclusion in a print issue.

As an IACMR member, your online access to MOR articles on the Blackwell site extends to OnlineAccepted and OnlineEarly articles. You can sign up for e-alerts about OnlineAccepted and OnlineEarly articles (as well as other alerts) at www.blackwell-synergy.com/action/.

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IACMR as a Vigorous Organization: Evidence from the Newsletter

(George) Zhen Xiong Chen
The Australian National University

Two years have flied away since I was elected as a representative-at-large (Asian Pacific) of IACMR and appointed as editor-in-chief for the IACMR Newsletter. Upon leaving this post, I still keep fresh memories of most news and information I edited for the Newsletter in the past two years. It just occurred to me that perhaps it would be a good idea to sort out some meaningful news from the Newsletter to outline the achievements of IACMR and its members in the past two years. I believe such highlights from the Newsletter would make convincing evidence to show that IACMR is a vigorous organization: it has been well recognized and making significant contributions to the filed of management on a worldwide spectrum.

The Achievements of IACMR and its Members

IAMCR has developed rapidly. From the column of “Message from the President” in a recent issue of the Newsletter, you will see that the total number of IACMR members has increased dramatically from 66 founding members to more than 4,600 today (updated data). According to the report from the program chair of the 2008 IACMR Conference, the total number of the papers submitted to the biennial conference has significantly increased to 360, which is about 45% more than the previous conference held two years ago. In the “MOR News” column, a piece of exiting news has been deeply embedded in my memory: Management and Organization Review (MOR), the official journal of IACMR, has been selected for ISI coverage in SSCI starting from the March 2008 issue. This is an important milestone in the development of MOR and IACMR. It demonstrates that MOR has been recognized as a leading management journal in the world. I guess MOR might have created an amazing record in the history of ISI: it got into SSCI within such a short time (just about three years)!

IACMR organizes world-class conferences. So far IACMR has already successfully organized two biennial conferences, and one more to come very soon. If you have attended the previous two conferences, I believe you will agree that they were world-class standard conferences – comparable with the AOM conference. The organizing processes of the conferences were very professional from beginning to end. The papers presented in the conferences was of high quality through a rigorous double blind review procedure. The keynote panels were always so exciting. From the “Conference News” column in the last issue, you can see that 20 distinguished scholars (including the current president of AOM) will be on keynote panels at the 2008 conference. Another highlight of the coming IACMR conference is that the participants will be able to have face-to-face interactions with the editors-in-chief of a number of leading management journals.

IACMR members play important roles in worldwide management academic arenas. From the “Member News” column in the current issue, you will be able to read the following marvelous news: Professor Anne Tsui, the founding president of our association, has been elected as the program chair of Academy of Management (AOM). This means she has been elected to be the president of AOM - the leading management professional organization in the world - during 2011-2012. Browsing through the “Member News” column in the recent issues, you will also find that at least three of our members have been appointed to serve as associate/ consulting editors for several top international management journals, including Jing Zhou (JAP associate editor), Sam Aryee (JAP consulting editor), and Xiaoping Chen (OBHDP associate editor). These election and appointments demonstrate that IACMR has a group of distinguished leaders and members who are playing key leading roles in the international management academic stage and creating significant impacts on the development of management discipline in the world.

Members’ research outputs create significant impacts in the world. Reading the column of “Member Publications”, you can see our members have been publishing high quality works continuously. From every issue of the Newsletter, you can always find our members’ papers appearing in top tier management journals such as Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Administrative Science Quarterly, Journal of Applied Psychology, and Strategic Management Journal. Unquestionably, these high quality publications will produce significant impacts on the development of theories and practices of management internationally.

Members continue to win international academic awards. Again from the “Member News” column, you will read that our members have won a number of international academic awards. For example, Professor Shuming Zhao, senior vice president of IACMR, won the First Prize in the 4th Chinese Humanities and Social Sciences Best Research Works (2006) sponsored by the Ministry of Education in China. Another example is that Tsui-Auch & Molleing won the Carolyn Dexter Best Paper Award from the 2007 AOM Conference. The attainment of such prestigious awards suggest that our members’ high quality academic outputs have been well recognized in China and in the world.

Members have made significant progress in academic careers. If you look at the recent news about member promotions, you might note an interesting phenomenon: within only one university in USA, three of our members got promotions one by one within a short period: one got promotion to professor (Jing Zhou) and two to associate professors with tenures (Yang Zhang and Haiyang Li). I believe you will agree that getting promotions to professor or associate professor with tenure in a worldwide leading university means that our members there have excellent performance, and this mirrors their significant progresses in their academic careers.

Final Words and Acknowledgements

I should point out that the news published in the Newsletter can only reflect part of the picture of the developments of IACMR. Nevertheless, I believe the evidence from the Newsletter I highlighted above is strong enough to allow me to conclude that IACMR is a vigorous organization of significant impacts and great promises. It consists of outstanding and promising members around the world who have been producing high quality academic products to enrich the worldwide bank of management knowledge. It publishes a leading management journal that has brought about significant impacts on the development of managerial theories and practices in the world. It has been successfully organizing high quality conferences that serve as great platforms for both Chinese and overseas scholars to effectively exchange their research outcomes biennially. In addition, IACMR has many capable and dedicated volunteers who are highly committed to help the association get ahead and move forward. I believe IACMR has become and will continue to be one of the leading management professional organizations in the world. Personally, I feel very proud to be a member of this association, and very lucky to have a precious experience to serve it in its process of development.

At the moment when I am completing my final editing job for the Newsletter, I would like to express my sincere appreciation to the following people: Jie Gui (Chinese editor), Josh Keller (English editor), Huibert deMan (ex-English editor), Winee Wu (ex-secretary of IACMR), Red Ng (secretary of IACMR), Xiaoping Chen (president), Anne Tsui (founding president) and the other officers of IACMR. Without their hard work, cooperation, great help and support, it would be impossible for us to have enjoyed reading so much interesting news from our Newsletter.

Finally, I would like to congratulate Dr Xiaohua Yang, who has just been appointed as the new editor-in-chief of the Newsletter. I strongly believe the Newsletter will bring our members more and more interesting and exciting news about IACMR and its members. I hope all of our members will enjoy reading our Newsletter and love IACMR, a vigorous organization of great promises!

More Love Since Leaving……

Yichi Zhang
Peking Universisy

Time is fleeting so fast that my “retirement” moment has been getting close unconsciously. Two years ago when I became the representative at-large of Mainland China, I felt a bit anxious about this task because I had no experiences of serving in this type of association. Because of the help of leaders and colleagues in the association, I have learned a lot and am happy to have been involved in the early growth of IACMR.

Management research is relatively new in China, especially for research that aims at bringing knowledge into the existing body of western literature. Among the top priorities is the mission to offer role models of research for university professors and students. To accomplish this goal, together with other leaders of the association, I helped to publish two books in Chinese to introduce award-wining articles of ASQ and AMJ in the past 10 years. During this process, I helped the association contact the headquarters of the two journals and the local publisher, Peking University Press, for signing contracts about copyrights and negotiated with a local translation house for service quality, and coordinated with professors at PKU Guanghua School of Management for proofreading translated chapters. It should be noted that all the professors proofread chapters or, in some cases, re-translated poorly translated chapters as volunteers. This is the first time for ASQ and AMJ to allow their articles in dispersed issues across 10 years be translated into one foreign-published book, so they themselves even did not know whether they should give way to us and subsequently what they should claim in copyright negotiation.

Although the mission took time and energy, the outcome was worthwhile. The books have gained wide recognition in China already. At the very beginning, the publisher thought that the books were too academic and thus too small to earn money to cover expenses for publishing. Soon it turned out that the project was so successful that the first batch was sold out and the publisher had to reprint

the books right away. The jump from an image of “subsidized academic work” to a profitable publication reflected the hunger for exemplary research of local management scholars and implied a strong need for an academic association like IACMR. This is an innovative way to reproduce the excellent articles in the format of books in order that they can have a better effect. Books are better means for people to read off-line, especially for the people who don’t have easy access to academic resources in their available libraries. Also, books put similar good papers together to make a stronger impression and impact on people.

In these two years, together with my colleagues, whenever possible I actively promote the IACMR and the biannual conference and their potential contribution to Chinese management research and management education. More and more, IACMR is mentioned by professors and students in Chinese universities and practitioners in real business. One indicator of the growth of IACMR in the Chinese mainland is that the number of submissions to the China Forum of the 2008 conference has reached about 170, setting a historical record.

Nowadays, the Chinese economy is the focus of the world. Businesses are eager to have a presence in China. But this isn’t the picture yet in academia. Researchers and students in China now are following western counterparts in many aspects. For example, many of us are using theoretic models established in western contexts to examine the phenomena in China. We take pride in publishing in western journals, and we are encouraging our students to submit articles written in English to western conferences, etc. Some day, I hope, professors and students in western countries also will highly appreciate their presence in IACMR conferences, a publication in the official journal of IACMR or MOR will be regarded by them as comparable to ASQ or AMJ today!

On leaving, I also want to give my sincere thanks to IACMR, from serving this association I learned more about the spirit of volunteerism, which will benefit my whole life and beyond.

IACMR and Organizational Life Cycles

Ingmar Björkman
Swedish School of Economics

Scholars have often analyzed organizations with the help of a life cycle metaphor. Organizations are modeled as following certain fairly predictable patterns. Researchers have suggested a variety of life cycle models, each comprising a set of somewhat different stages. However, most suggest that the few organizations which survive the early difficult years will go through at least the following stages: start-up, growth, maturity, decline, and revival or death. Each stage is characterized by different ways to manage and organize the activities of the organization.

If we apply a life cycle model to the International Association for Chinese Management Research, what does the analysis tell us? I have been a member of IACMR since the organizing meeting in August 2001, and have during the last two years served on its executive committee as representative-at-large for Europe. In my view, the organization has come a very long way from its inception seven years ago. The dedication, professionalism, and social capital of founding president Anne Tsui was extremely important for the successful start-up of IACMR, and from the start she worked together with a key group of highly committed China management scholars.
IACMR immediately entered into a phase of rapid growth and development (as described by IACMR President Xiao-Ping Chen in Newsletter Issue no. 4, 2007). The inaugural conference was held in Beijing in 2004, the second in Nanjing in 2006, and as you all know, the next conference will take place in Guangzhou on June 19-22 this year. The number of participants and submissions to our biyearly conference continues to increase, this time there was 45 percent increase in submissions to an impressive 360 papers and proposals. Concomitant with the increased scale of the

IACMR conference, its scope has broadened. This year, the professional development workshops on the last day of the conference have been expanded to cover a range of new issues in addition to some of the most popular workshops organized two years ago. In Guangzhou, there will be workshops dedicated to developing the PhD proposals and research papers submitted by the participants as well as sessions covering research methods, the future directions of Chinese strategy research, and how to publish and review for top tier journals, to name just a few of the exiting events taking place on that day. I strongly encourage you to participate in some of the workshops organized on June 22.

I found the two first conferences to be extremely well organized. They had a well balanced mix of paper presentations by scholars who focus on China management research with talks given by a handful of world famous researchers. One of the strengths of the conference is that it has something to offer for everyone while still being sufficiently small to allow for good personal interaction between the participants.

Another good indication of the development and growth of IACMR is its official journal, the Management and Organization Review. The first issue was published in 2005, and some weeks ago we received the great news that MOR has been accepted for inclusion in the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) beginning from March 2008. This is an outstanding achievement, MOR perhaps breaking the record for the shortest time for any new management journal to become recognized by SSCI. The decision is also important because a growing number of universities in China and beyond use the inclusion of a journal in SSCI (and its impact factor, i.e. the number of times an article is cited by another SSCI journal within a two-year time span) as an important indicator of the quality of the research published. I have submitted two papers to MOR, and after having gone through three and four rounds of reviews before the papers were finally accepted for publication I can assure that the reviewing processes are rigorous and extremely developmental.

A range of other developments must also be mentioned. IACMR has organized workshops on research methods, on job search and career development, and on doctoral dissertation work. Interesting business meetings are organized at every Academy of Management conference in the US, and the quarterly Newsletter and the home page of IACMR both contain a wealth of useful information for China management researchers. And, of course, at the time of my writing, IACMR has expanded to about 4,600 members.
During the period of fast growth, the management and organization of IACMR has to some extent changed. The number of people involved in managing IACMR and the events it organizes has multiplied, and the executive committee has now a much clearer distribution of responsibilities than in the early days. These developments are necessary to make a larger and more complex professional organization like IACMR work. The formalization of IACMR’s operations must probably continue in the years ahead when a new generation of scholars gradually will be called upon to take responsibility for various aspects of the organization’s activities.

IACMR has now, in my view, made a successful transition from the growth phase to the early phases of maturity. Although the association is likely to continue to grow, it has reached a stage where the building blocks are in place to assure that IACMR will continue to serve as a thriving professional association, similar in many ways to the (US) Academy of Management but of course with a clearer geographical focus. And nowhere on the horizon is there any indication of a decline! As I step down from the executive committee at the Guangzhou conference, I would like to wish the new committee all the best and invite all our members to join us in our activities.

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We are currently seeking two volunteers to serve as an English language editor and a Chinese language editor for IACMR Newsletter, respectively. The current editorial team, Zhen Xiong Chen (Editor-in-Chief), Josh Keller (English editor), Jie Gui (Chinese editor), will be stepping down in June after having served a very successful two-year term. We wish to congratulate the team’s significant achievements in building up this publication from ground to its current respectful statue with admirable impact on the growth of IACMR as a worldwide academic and scholarly community with over 4600 members around the globe. Thus, the incoming team will have the privilege and opportunity to build on the solid foundation and to take this unique publication to its next height. We would like to recruit two scholars/PhD students who are enthusiastic, responsible, and have aspirations to serve a prestigious and growing community like IACMR, preferably, one being a native English speaker/writer with superb English language skills and the other being a native Chinese speaker/writer with superb Chinese language skills as well as high English proficiency.

Please register your interest with and send your CV to Red Ng at iacmr@asu.edu.
If you have any questions, please contact Red Ng at iacmr@asu.edu or myself.


Dr Xiaohua Yang
Incoming editor-in-Chief, IACMR Newsletter
School of management
Queensland University of Technology
Email: x3.yang@qut.edu.au

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The 11th International Conference on Work Values and Behavior

Time: June 22-25, 2008
Venue: Carlton Hotel Singapore
Host: Nanyang Business School

The scientific program will include:
a) Keynote address by Professor Jiing-Lih Larry Farh from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
b) Two special forums, including a Meet the Editors forum and a forum on Best Practices in Diversity Management (featuring international researchers and the General Manager of the Tripartite Centre for Fair Employment in Singapore).
c) Presentations and posters on a range of topics, including: cross cultural research, organizational learning and strategy, entrepreneurship and developing economies, work-life balance, spirituality and humanistic leadership, attitudes and personality, job performance and citizenship behavior.

The social program will include:
a) A poolside welcome reception with local artistic performance.
b) A tour of different cultural areas in Singapore.
c) A gala dinner and tour of the Marina Bay area (the Esplanade theatres, the Merlion, and Raffles hotel).
 

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Vice-President and Program Co-Chair for 2008 meeting -

Jia Lin Xie, University of Toronto

Vice-President and Program Co-Chair for 2008 meeting -

Jing Zhou, Rice University

Vice-President and Chair of the Local Arrangements Committee for 2008 meeting -

Xinchun Li, Sun Yat-sen University

Executive Secretary/Treasurer –

Xin Yao, Wichita State University

Representative at Large (The Americas) -

Catherine Levitt, California State University

Representative at Large (Europe) -

Ingmar Bjorkman, Swedish School of Economics and Business Administration

Representative at Large (Asia Pacific) -

Zhen Xiong (George) Chen, The Australian National University

Representative at Large (The PRC mainland) -

Yichi Zhang, Peking University

See also here.

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