A major challenge in global sales research is helping managers understand sales ethics across countries. Addressing this challenge, our research investigates whether a few demographic variables and psychographic variables reduce unethical sales behaviors (USBs) in Canada, Mexico, and the USA. Further, using literatures associated with business ethics, national culture, and customer orientation advocacy, we hypothesize why sales managers should expect similarities and differences in USBs between countries. We tested hypotheses using a sales contest scenario and six USBs, examining survey responses (...) from 948 business-to-business salespeople of a multinational company’s sales force in Canada, Mexico, and the USA. The results reveal that several psychographic variables (such as commitment, relationship to sales manager, and achievement need) affect salespeople’s tendency to engage in USBs differently in each country. In addition, business ethics, individualism, and customer orientation advocacy associated with each country can be used to anticipate similarities and differences in USBs between countries. This research offers important theoretical contributions and implications for more effectively managing sales forces and reducing USBs across countries. (shrink)

One challenge that globalization has brought to business is that firms, as they expand their market globally through cross-border alliances, need to deal with partner firms from countries of different religious background. The impact of a country’s dominant religion on its firms’ international market entry mode choices has not been examined in traditional approaches. Focusing on hypothesizing the influence of Christian beliefs and atheism (i.e., the absence of belief in any deities), this research aims to fill the gap by exploring (...) religion’s role in providing moral restraint on managers’ propensity for opportunism, which in turn affects these managers’ choices of their firms’ international market entry via non-equity alliances or joint ventures. A study of 22,156 cross-border alliances formed in 48 industries world-wide over 9 years provides new insight toward understanding religion’s influence on firms’ international market entry mode decisions through the ethical dimension of strategic leadership. (shrink)

In this study, we sorted out the research hotspots in sports science by bibliometric method and also used social network analysis to explore the relationship between knowledge networks and their scientific performance. We found 38 high-frequency keywords with obvious curricular nature or classical direction of sports science research and 4 high-frequency research groups. The topics of hotspots covered the secondary disciplines of sports science: physical education and training, national traditional sports, sports human science, and sports humanities and sociology. However, sports (...) human science research is less; therefore, accelerating the research of sports human science is the focus of future research. Meanwhile, we use social network structure analysis to study the relationship between knowledge elements in knowledge networks and their scientific performance. In addition to betweenness centrality, the closeness centrality, clustering coefficient, and structural holes of knowledge elements are significantly and positively related to their influence. In the relationship between knowledge elements and productivity, betweenness centrality and closeness centrality show significant positive correlations, and clustering coefficient and structural hole show significant negative correlations. Therefore, knowledge networks can be used to predict the scientific performance of knowledge elements. (shrink)

Entrepreneurship competitions are an important way to implement entrepreneurship education in universities and the main way for many students improve their entrepreneurial competence. To clarify the mechanism of the role of entrepreneurship competition on the entrepreneurial competence of university students, based on data from a sample of 170,764 university students from 31 provinces in China, this study constructs a moderated mediation model that focuses on the mediating role of entrepreneurial spirit in entrepreneurial competition and entrepreneurial competence and the moderating role (...) of entrepreneurial practice. The results showed that ECompetition found to have a significant positive predictive effect on ECompetence. ES plays a mediating role in the relationship between ECompetition and competence. The direct predictive effect of ECompetition on ECompetence and the mediating effect of ES on their relationship is moderated by EP. The results provide a new perspective on the impact of entrepreneurship competition on college students’ entrepreneurial competence and expands the experiential learning theory in entrepreneurship education. (shrink)

Social network theory is an important paradigm of social structure research, which has been widely used in various fields of research. This paper reviews the development process and the latest progress of social network theory research and analyzes the research application of social network. In order to reveal the deep social structure, this paper analyzes the structure of social networks from three levels: microlevel, mesolevel, and macrolevel and reveals the origin, development, perfection, and latest achievements of complex network models. The (...) regular graph model, P1 model, P2 model, exponential random graph model, small-world network model, and scale-free network model are introduced. In the end, the research on the social network structure is reviewed, and social support network and social discussion network are introduced, which are two important contents of social network research. At present, the research on social networks has been widely used in coauthor networks, citation networks, mobile social networks, enterprise knowledge management, and individual happiness, but there are few research studies on multilevel structure, dynamic research, complex network research, whole network research, and discussion network research. This provides space for future research on social networks. (shrink)