Fifth Annual IACMR Li Ning Dissertation Proposal Grants
(Deadline: March 15, 2014)

Background and Proposal Topics

The IACMR Li Ning Dissertation Proposal Grants, sponsored by Li Ning Company and Li Ning Foundation, encourages doctoral students to conduct dissertation research that either uses existing theories with appropriate contextualization to analyze Chinese management phenomena, or develops context specific theories to explain unique Chinese management phenomena. There will be five grants of 10,000 RMB each for the first prize dissertation proposals, and five grants of 5,000 RMB each for the second prize dissertation proposals. In addition, the winners will be invited to attend the IACMR PhD Dissertation Proposal Workshop during the IACMR biennial conference in Beijing, China, from June 18-22, 2014, along with an award ceremony during the workshop.

We invite dissertation proposals on the following topics (but not limited to):

The relevance of Chinese traditional cultural values including regional sub-culture within mainland China to contemporary issues of strategic management, organizational behavior, and human resource management
Corporate governance of different types of Chinese firms such as state-owned firms, family firms and publicly-listed firms
Entrepreneurship in China抯 emerging market
Knowledge search, spillovers and innovation
Internationalization of Chinese firms
Competition and cooperation between domestic firms and foreign firms
Ethics, corruption and corporate social responsibility
Business leadership in the transitional era in China, or indigenous models of Chinese business leadership and their functioning mechanisms
The balance of harmony and conflict in managing Chinese employees
Social capital and guanxi in the evolving Chinese economic, social, and cultural contexts

Proposal Submission and Evaluation

Applicants must be active IACMR members (membership fee current). Proposals submitted for this grant should have not been approved by the applicant抯 dissertation committee (i.e., prior to the stage of PhD thesis proposal defense).

When submitting your application, the packet should include the following:

A one-page biography (in English) that includes the applicant抯 name, the university抯 name, years in the doctoral program, the advisor抯 name, the applicant抯 career interests and any papers that the applicant may have published or presented (list no more than five).
An abstract of the proposal (less than 150 words).
The proposal should include a summary of the research problem(s) and research question(s), relevant literature on the issue(s), key hypotheses with major theoretical arguments, the research methods, and the expected completion date. The entire proposal should be 7 pages with your biography as the first page and citations/budget as the last page (no more than ten citations). It must be single-spaced, in Times New Roman 12-pitch font size.
A signed letter (PDF file with the advisor抯 signature) from a faculty advisor commenting on your research potential and affirming that you are working on the dissertation proposal and that you do not have an approved dissertation proposal at this time.

The proposals will be evaluated by the members of IACMR Research Committee and other experienced scholars in the management area. The criteria for assessing the proposals include a) relevance to the theme of 揅ontext-Sensitive Management Research in China?, b) interestingness and novelty, c) clarity of exposition, d) adequacy of the research methods, and e) potential theoretical, empirical and practical contributions.

Submit the proposal and the signed faculty letter (with file names: your-name-proposal and yourname-letter) electronically to Dr. Haiyang Li and Dr. Xu Huang, Co-Chairs of the IACMR Research Committee (on or before March 15, 2014), at email address iacmr@asu.edu. Award decisions will be announced by April 25, 2014.

Suggested Readings

Tsui, A. S. 2004. Contributing to global management knowledge: A case for high quality indigenous research. Asia Pacific Journal of Management, 21: 491?513.

Tsui, A. S. 2006. Contextualization in Chinese management research. Management and Organization Review, 2: 1?13.

Tsui, A. S. 2007. From homogenization to pluralism: International management research in the Academy and beyond. Academy of Management Journal, 50: 1353-1364.

Whetten, D. A. An Examination of the interface between context and theory applied to the study of Chinese organizations. Management and Organization Review 5(1), 29-55.