a b s t r a c tThis paper tests the impact of guanxi on behaviors among firms in a Chinese marketing channel. Guanxi is operationalized in this paper as emotional closeness and interactive state. We find that the emotional closeness between channel-boundary personnel of firms has a positive impact on their exercise of noncoercive power, a negative impact on their exercise of coercive power, and a negative impact on the perceived conflict between them. In addition, emotional closeness has an indirect but positive impact on perceived cooperation. Interactive state between the boundary personnel of two firms has a positive impact on a firm exercising noncoercive power and a negative impact on perceived conflict between them. At the same time, it is positively related to a firm exercising coercive power. This shows not only the significant influence of guanxi on a firm's channel behaviors but also the constructive effects of both emotional closeness and interactive state on marketing channel behaviors in China.

Channel communications in emerging markets are embedded in the intricacy of economic and sociocultural environments. Managing channel relationships in emerging markets therefore requires more than formal interfirm communication to rely on interpersonal influence. Extending embeddedness theory, we offer a conceptualization incorporating three embedding elements – task environment, social relations, and institutional norms – into a preliminary model that specifies the antecedents, moderators, and contingent consequences of interpersonal influence strategies in marketing channels. Specifically, dependence, firm boundary spanners’ social capital, and their cultural values (e.g., guanxi orientation) may combine to shape firm boundary spanners’ use of interpersonal influence in channel communications, which in turn affects channel member satisfaction. In a Chinese marketing channel context, we test our research hypotheses with parallel analyses of 395 matched supplier–retailer dyads. The empirical results provide general support for the predictions, and reveal differences between suppliers and retailers in terms of the focal effects. Journal of International Business Studies (2009) 40, 668–689. doi:10.1057/jibs.2008.84

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Purpose -To investigate the impact of situational factors on mall shoppers' buying decisions. Design/methodology/approach -Based on Belk's framework on situational factors in a sales situation, the study employed a dataset of mall shoppers in the USA, China and Hong Kong and logistic regression for analysis. Findings -It is found that, whether in the combined sample or in the individual samples, nine of the 13 situational factors considered significantly affected shoppers' purchases of food or non-food products. However, situational influences on purchases varied according to the types of products bought. More importantly, the findings on the impact of some factors were consistent across three or two samples, suggesting that their external validity may be extended to certain conditions. Research limitations/implications -The study had a limitation in the selection of the malls where the interviews were conducted, so some of the findings may be mall-specific rather than representative of the general population of shoppers in the nations or regions. Practical implications -The information disclosed here may help the practitioners to better understand shoppers' (especially Chinese shoppers') behaviour in malls and, as a consequence, to undertake more efficient marketing strategies in malls (especially in the malls in China). Originality/value -The distinguished feature of this paper is that it simultaneously examined the impacts of 13 situational factors on mall shoppers' purchase decisions with multinational data. This allowed researchers to check both the internal validity and the external validity of the observed impacts of the situational factors. IntroductionRetailers and manufacturers are very interested in how shoppers make their purchase decisions, as well as when, why and whether a shopping trip leads to a purchase. Such information is critical in formulating marketing strategy (Kotler, 2000) and retailing planning (Levy and Weitz, 1992). Marketing literature has revealed that many factors may affect shoppers' purchase decisions, including individual and psychological characteristics, cultural, social and environmental variables and promotional strategies. Belk (1975) made a distinction between situational and non-situational factors. He suggested that situation factors, such as task definition, physical and social surroundings, temporal perspectives and antecedent states, may play a major role in sales situations, and thus deserve special attention from marketers.This study, based on Belk's framework, focused on two important issues regarding the impact of situational factors -specifically on the significance of different factors when examined collectively rather than individually; and when conducted simultaneously in several countries/regions rather than in just a single country.The impact of situational factors has been examined extensively (see the literature review below for details); however, most of these studies have focused on particular types of situational influences and have left the question, "...

This paper studies the causal relationship between dependence and power in the context of marketing channels in China in the setting of department stores and their suppliers. The hypothesized relationship that a channel member's power is derived from the other's dependence in the channel dyad, which is based on existing Western literature on channel behavior, did not fit well with our data. Some dimensions of dependence did not have a significant influence on channel members’ perception of power. The empirical data fits better with a reversed relationship inferred from the Chinese psychoculture.