Indigenous Chinese Management Research Like It or Not, We Need It

What is the most fruitful approach to developing Chinese management research is perhaps the single most important question that Management and Organization Review is set up to address. A complex question such as this one typically engenders diverse views, and there has been an ongoing debate about the best way forward. The crux of the debate centers on whether it is more productive to focus on universal or China-specific (indigenous) management theories (e.g. Barney & Zhang, 2009; Cheng, Wang, & Huang, 2009). The indigenous approach requires the adoption of Chinese perspectives in conceptualizing research problems and formulating theories (for detail, see Li, Leung, Chen, & Luo, 2012). There is a constant plea for attention to context in management research, and we should also put this debate in context. The U.S. has been the dominant economic power after World War II as well as the dominant source of management research and theories. Despite the monumental work of Hofstede (1980) on cultural dimensions, most researchers do not worry about whether research and theories coming out of the U.S. context would generalize to other cultural contexts. There has not been any significant trend to require research and theories developed in the U.S. context to take into account their relevance and applicability in other cultural contexts. In contrast, indigenous research and theories developed in the Chinese context typically generate a knee-jerk reaction about their potential lack of generalizability to other cultural contexts. As an illustration, papers based on U.S. data typically do not carry a disclaimer about their potential lack of generalizabiliy to other cultural contexts, whereas papers based on Chinese data usually include a caveat about the uncertainty of cultural generality. This difference can easily be explained by economic power. If a theory or a set of findings works in the U.S., it is