The School of Management and the China Business Studies Initiative are proud to announce Professor Liang Wang’s paper, “Does Social Capital Work The Same Way in China and The West?”, has won the National Association of Chinese-Americans Best Paper Award at the 9th Annual “China Goes Global” Conference. This year’s conference was held at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, October 1—3. The China Goes Global conferences are hosted by the Chinese Globalization Association (CGA), a nonprofit organization with the mission “to assist, promote, and advance the development of the emerging field of study and research on Chinese globalization, emphasizing multidisciplinary approaches, including fields of knowledge such as international business, economics, political science, history, sociology and other relevant disciplines.”
Since 2006, China Goes Global conferences have pulled together a unique set of perspectives on the globalization of the Chinese business environment, economy and society. The conference provides an ideal opportunity for scholars and practitioners, as well as Ph.D. students, to share and discuss their most recent research with other experts in the field. Annually, CGA awards the best papers submitted to its annual conferences. Professors from the University of San Francisco are no strangers to these conferences. In fact, two other USF professors have also won Best Paper awards from the CGA conference in past years, beginning a proud legacy of recognized expertise at the international gathering. This article highlights three USF award winners and their works.
2015 National Association of Chinese-Americans (NACA) Best Paper Award
“Does Social Capital Work The Same Way In China and The West?”
Professor Liang Wang (with H. Zhang and R. Han) has won the 2015 NACA Best Paper Award for their paper, “Does Social Capital Work The Same Way In China and The West?”, at the 9th Annual China Goes Global conference in October 2015. Their research includes the mixed empirical results on the impact of social capital that called for a better understanding of contingency factors, such as culture. They have conducted a meta-analysis to test whether and how social capital functions similarly or differently between China and the West. They discovered that both network centrality and structural holes are positively related to performance. The findings suggest that network centrality is more effective in China, whereas structural holes play a more important role in the West.
2012 Emerald Best Paper Award
“Revisit the Institutional Influences on the rise of Made-in-China Multinationals”
Professor Xiaohua Yang (with C. Stoltenberg) was presented with the 2012 Emerald Best Paper award for their paper, “Revisit the Institutional Influences on the rise of Made-in-China Multinationals”, at the 6th CGA conference. Their paper examines how changes in the global environment, especially global financial crises, have solidified the Chinese government’s role in pushing and encouraging Chinese firms to engage in outbound foreign direct investment (OFDI) activities. They argue that the role of the state in China will be further solidified through its national goal of enhancing competitiveness via knowledge acquisition by its multinationals investing globally and simultaneously. Multinationals’ OFDI initiatives and strategies will be reinforced by the state’s economic policies and goals, while their behavior will co-evolve with and be reshaped by local, national and international environments.
2011 Emerald Best Paper Award
“Where do local and foreign investors lose their edge? The mediating role of state ownership in shaping their relative informational advantage”
Professor Sara Xiaoya Ding (with O. Guedhami, Y. Ni, J. Pittman) was awarded the 2011 Emerald Best Paper Award for their paper, “Where do local and foreign investors lose their edge? The mediating role of state ownership in shaping their relative informational advantage”, at the 5th CGA conference in 2011. Their winning paper investigates how state ownership of listed firms shapes the information environment facing institutional investors in China. They provide strong, robust evidence that the informational role that local and foreign institutional investors play in China hinges on the extent of state ownership. They have found that local institutional investors in state-run firms are better informed than foreign institutional investors. In contrast, foreign institutional investors have an informational advantage over local institutional investors in non-SOEs.