State-owned enterprises (SOEs) in China play a critical role in national economic development and the country's positioning on the global stage. Chinese SOEs have undergone substantial transformations from traditional government-run entities to a variety of corporate forms exhibiting different levels of state involvement. Despite their substantial influence, the internal diversity of SOEs – from wholly state-owned to mixed-ownership – has not been thoroughly examined. This paper provides an overview of SOEs' critical roles in the Chinese economy, the relationship between SOEs and privately owned enterprises (POEs), and the challenges of SOEs in different stages of Chinese economic development. It then introduces five research papers that explore the institutional, strategic, and organizational perspectives on how SOEs manage the dual pressures of state and market logic, respond to policy adjustments, tackle leadership challenges, and navigate current global trends such as digital transformation, technological innovation, and environmental sustainability. In this paper, we provide important implications for policy and managerial practices and highlight a future research agenda for the heterogeneity of Chinese SOEs, and how SOEs respond to these challenges in the evolving geopolitical landscape, adapt their strategies, and manage relationships with foreign governments and enterprises under such conditions.

Public Humanities projects notoriously begin with the bootstrapping commitment of one or two long-suffering and visionary individuals. If they can make it past the turbulent narrows of their beginnings, they often only endure through unrecognized and little-rewarded labor. Gatherings of public humanists can be exercises in commiseration. When you determine that you have enough funding to last one more year, celebration is in order. Such travails naturally lead to the question of how public humanities programs can move beyond being nice extras to become more central to the concerns of our home institutions. How, in short, can the work of public humanists be institutionalized and become part of the everyday humdrum of academic life rather than the desperate scrabbling of the righteous, committed, frantic, and overtired?

Grounded in Hofstede cultural dimensions theory, we examine how informal institutional factors shape cross-country venture capital (VC) flows. Separating VC activity into flows, our method studies how an increment in inflows supports ventures, and an increment in outflows more investing activity. Results suggest that (1) uncertainty avoidance negatively affects investors and ventures (the last with a larger effect), (2) individualistic attitudes equally support both investors and ventures, and (3) a higher level of power distance contributes to a larger private investors sector, an effect that is greater under strong formal institutions (FIs). Effects of masculinity, long-term orientation, and indulgence are inconclusive. Results are robust to various specifications, use of instruments, and endogeneity treatments. The implication is that the optimal characteristics of informal institutions for fostering VC activity differ depending on the level of FIs, as both institutions interact to affect both investors and ventures.

Institutional food is renowned for being monotonous and unappetising, yet the accuracy of these prescribed diets is difficult to verify archaeologically. Desiccated plant remains from beneath the floorboards at Hyde Park Barracks in Sydney offer a rare insight into the culture of food at the Female Immigration Depot (1848–1887) and the Destitute Asylum (1862–1886). Here, the author reveals the wide range of unofficial plant foods accessed by inhabitants at these two institutions—representing resources sourced from across the British Empire—and the sometimes-illicit nature of their consumption, highlighting the importance of incorporating archaeological evidence into discussions of institutional life.

The objective of feminist institutionalist (FI) political science is to expose institutions that perpetuate gender inequalities. The nature of these entities and the best strategies for studying them remain hotly debated topics. Some scholars identify ethnography as a valuable methodology for FI research. However, novices to this methodology might need help navigating it. In this theory-generating article, we aim to bridge the gap between different approaches to FI and ethnographic methodologies. We propose ethnographic approaches suitable for scholars who see gendered institutions as real entities that constrain and enable human practices, as well as those who perceive them as sedimented clusters of meanings. We illustrate our arguments using a partially fictional empirical example, inspired by findings from our own ethnographic research. We hope that this article will promote increased engagement, both theoretical and empirical, with ethnography among FI scholars.

This essay is in celebration of the contributions of Mario Rizzo. I argue that among contemporary economists in the Austrian School of Economics tradition it is Rizzo that advanced, more than his contemporaries, the scientific research program of rational choice as if the choosers were human beings; the dynamic subjectivism and the agony of choice and social interaction; the causal processes and the institutional dynamics that make up a complex social order; and the role of law, politics and civil society in shaping commercial life. In making this argument, I attempt to arbitrage the contributions of two essays of Rizzo’s: ‘Law Amid Flux’ and ‘The Genetic-Causal Tradition and Modern Economic Theory’.

We explore gender attitudes towards competition in the United Arab Emirates—a traditionally patriarchal society which in recent times has adopted numerous policies to empower women and promote their role in the labor force. The experimental treatments vary whether individuals compete in single-sex or mixed-sex groups. In contrast to previous studies, women in our sample are not less willing to compete than men. In fact, once we control for individual performance, Emirati women are more likely to select into competition. Our analysis shows that neither women nor men shy away from competition, and both compete more than what would be optimal in monetary terms as the fraction of men in their group increases. We offer a detailed survey of the literature and discuss possible reasons for the lack of gender differences in our experiment.

Coordination problems arise in many economic, political, and social situations. Many times, authorities and institutions are created to solve these coordination problems. However, the success of these institutions depends on whether people are willing to follow their prescriptions. Using a behavioral experiment on Amazon Mechanical Turk we analyze whether an authority can aid in solving hawk-dove coordination games and whether its success depends on a shared identity by the players. The authority is represented in our experiment by a randomizing device that recommends actions to players to implement a socially efficient correlated equilibrium. In the game, players are better off following the recommendations if they believe others will do as well. We investigate whether people are more likely to follow recommendations when they have a shared identity. We find that the device's success is not driven by group membership, but rather by the content of its recommendations.

This paper presents an analytical mapping of institutional design possibilities for alternative ways for digital platforms to institutionalise property and corporate form. It builds on the institutional imagination catalysed by three vignettes of experimental sharing economy initiatives presented towards the start of the paper, each of which highlights the imbrication and interdependence between economic and social dimensions of the sharing economy. The paper then interrogates the vignettes through three analytical entry points to the institutional design of commons-based sharing economies: platform, care and place. By remapping the vignettes’ practices around these three entry points, the paper shows how they help constitute the incipient formalisation of commons-based approaches to the sharing economy. The prospects for carrying out a redesign of property and corporate forms more generally thereby become more visible, providing a sound foundation for more in-depth empirical and historical work on alternative trajectories of the sharing economy in the future.

Normative reasoning within the mainstream economic framework has been largely shaped by utilitarian ethics. The growing popularity of effective altruism indicates that the utilitarian spirit has also permeated the sphere of social sentiment, evaluating our pro-social behaviour and charitable giving in terms of efficiency. The present study assesses the appropriateness of judging social outcomes through the prism of allocative efficiency by questioning to what extent the society of effective altruists is robust, sustainable, and resilient. Using computer simulations based on the dictator game, we demonstrate that a society of welfare-maximising effective altruists can achieve an optimal outcome alongside equality under extremely restrictive assumptions, such as the uniformity of giving strategies (i.e. interacting with other effective altruists exclusively) and initial equality of wealth distribution. Yet, in the world of unequal opportunities, utilitarian giving tends to increase wealth disparity. In addition, in polymorphic societies, effective altruists underperform compared to deontological (or unconditional) altruists. Consequently, we demonstrate that striving for allocative efficiency might undermine the equality and resilience objectives and question whether the former should remain the dominant economic normative principle.

In the field of American state politics, the tension between majoritarian institutions and equality has largely been ignored. Do state institutions that empower majority preferences exacerbate disparities in social outcomes? Under what conditions do majoritarian institutions exacerbate inequalities in the American states? Our argument is that equality is most likely to be threatened under majoritarian institutions when (1) there are systemic participatory biases and/or (2) there are widespread prejudices about particular groups in society. We find that more majoritarian institutions are associated with larger disparities between White and Black life expectancy and poverty rates across the American states, but not differences in educational attainment. We also find that this effect is moderated by racial context, with majoritarian institutions being associated with greater disparities for states with diverse racial contexts and smaller disparities in more homogenous states. These findings suggest that majoritarian institutions operate to the benefit of the White majority, while coming at the cost of minority population outcomes when a racial threat is perceived, and presumably, public opinion is biased.