Can minimizing risk exposures help in inhibiting carbon footprints? The environmental repercussions of international trade and clean energy.

Since bettering environmental conditions has acquired significant interest globally, discovering factors that may facilitate the establishment of environmental sustainability is currently of foremost importance. Hence, this study considers a sample of 33 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and checks whether reducing exposure to different forms of country risks, in the presence of international trade and clean energy consumption, can reduce their respective carbon footprint levels. Utilizing annual data from 2000 to 2018 and employing methods that handle problems related to dependence across cross-sectional units and heterogeneity of slope coefficients, the findings endorse that (a) reducing financial and political risks abate carbon footprints, (b) economic risk exposure does not influence carbon footprints, (c) international trade exerts carbon footprint-boosting effects, and (d) undergoing unclean to clean energy transition curbs carbon footprints. Accordingly, the concerned governments should these findings into account while conceptualizing green environmental policies in the future.

How Do Upper Echelons Perceive Porter's Five Forces? Evidence From Strategic Entrepreneurship in China.

Porter's five forces model is an authoritative management tool used in analyzing the profitability and attractiveness of industries through an outside-in viewpoint. In the past decade, dramatic and rapid changes have prompted some criticism of the model. The comparison between new and old economy analysis makes the fundamentals of the model seem weak. Moreover, the past decade has shown that strategy and entrepreneurship in China are not completely dependent on the model. This study first aims to verify the sustainability of the five forces model and analyze its integration into China's entrepreneurial economy. By conducting in-depth interviews among the upper echelons from various industries, it was found that along with the competitive factors emphasized by the model, Chinese entrepreneurs attend to cooperative factors such as Guanxi, the Chinese term for relationship, and the possibilities of technology integration with the five forces. They also tend to enlarge the strategic view to consider factors such as how the market evaluates the forces. To verify these findings, the authors carried out a large-scale survey with a modified questionnaire analyzing the data collected using exploratory factor analysis with SPSS 22. The outcome shows that Porter's model is still valid to some extent. Companies are still working in a network of buyers, suppliers, substitutes, new entrants, and competitors. However, reinventions are necessary to include the new factors of Guanxi, technology (e-commerce and logistics), and marketing and branding, which have changed the structure of the industry. These factors arise from the cooperative nature of Chinese culture and may have equal or even larger significance compared with their competitive counterparts in today's business world.

How Is Knowledge Perceived as Power? A Multilevel Model of Knowledge Power in Innovation Networks.

Inter-organizational power relations have long been considered to be balanced in innovation networks, which are viewed as loosely coupled systems. Some recent studies, however, show that innovation networks are asymmetric and hierarchical, and the power of network actors has become a significant but rarely addressed issue. As knowledge is the most important resource in the network, this paper introduces the concept of knowledge power by combining related research perspectives and conducting some fundamental research on it as follows: (1) knowledge power's origins are analyzed by proposing the term "activated knowledge" and studying the path through which it is formed over multiple levels of the network; (2) a multilevel framework of characteristics of activated knowledge, which is considered the major determinant of knowledge power, is established, and suggestions are offered for how they impact knowledge power; and (3) a multilevel measurement model for knowledge power is built, and the above propositions are tested by mathematical inference. The purpose of this paper is not only to study knowledge power's formation, determinants, and measurement but also to offer a comprehensive view, combining multiple network levels and multiple research perspectives, that should be useful to researchers conducting future studies in this field.