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A key issue for a state in transition when a new institution is imported into its domestic economic field is the relationship between the process dynamics of the formation of the new institution and the corresponding development of the network between firms. For China, such problems as the loss of the initial goal of the imported institution are particularly serious. This article studies the foundation of independent directors and the interlocking network of China's listed companies created by independent directors. The article has two main findings: first, the institution creates a heterogeneous network. During the process, institutional actors with different backgrounds contribute to the structural heterogeneity of the interlocking network. Second, the heterogeneous network has feedback on the effectiveness of the institution. The heterogeneous network may either strengthen or weaken the new institution depending on the types of network ties. In the analysis, this article shows how political networks and professional networks are shaped by different independent directors with different former status and the different effects these networks have on the institution of independent directors. Keywords: Isomorphism, Network heterogeneity, Political networks, Professional networks, Status projection Background QuestionOver the past 20 years, building on the concept of corporate governance, the Chinese government has introduced a set of new institutions to regulate China's listed companies in its emerging stock market. A major criticism of these institutions is that most of them did not function as well expected. For instance, the institution of independent directors is designed to solve the problem of insider control. In reality, however, many believed independent directors were just "eye candy," and there were debates among researchers on the effectiveness of this institution. These debates and such puzzles of isomorphism as embedding an imported institution into China's economic and political environment suggest that the institutionalization process in an economic field is not merely about legitimacy, as neoinstitutionalists would suggest. Therefore, to better understand the institutionalization processes of imported institutions, one needs to analyze how and in what sense such institutions become effective. Li The Journal of Chinese Sociology (2015) 2: 13 DOI 10.1186/s40711-015-0015-9 On the other hand, when we focus on the institution of independent directors, an interesting phenomenon is that when independents began to sit on boards of listed companies, they inevitably reshape the interlocking networks of board directors among firms. The interlocking of boards has long been taken as an important indicator of the market structure. As past studies have shown, interlocking networks of American corporations in different historical periods well reflect the market structure of that period. In early times, the interlocking network centered on railway giants and telegraph and telephone companies (Roy 1983);...

The increasing prominence of urban scaling laws highlights the importance of a systematic understanding of the variational scaling rates for different economic activities. In this article, we utilize several datasets to provide the first systematic investigation of the urban scaling of manufacturing industries in China. Most existing literature assumes that the divergence in urban scaling can be explained by returns to agglomeration, with a few exceptions instead highlighting the role of knowledge complexity or a mixture of both. Our main purpose in this paper is to explain the inter-sector variation of urban scaling rates. In doing this, we provide a clearer approach to demonstrating the relations between urban scaling, returns to agglomeration, and knowledge complexity. Our findings are twofold. First, after uncovering the scaling rates (denoted as urban concentration) and returns to agglomeration (denoted as urban productivity) for each sub-manufacturing sector, we prove that, rather than being a positive predictor, returns to agglomeration is slightly negatively associated with urban scaling rates. This finding reveals that urban concentration of manufacturing may not simply be a natural consequence driven by the maximization of performance. We also show that this result of the manufacturing system contrasts with what would be found in other pure knowledge systems such as patents. Secondly, we measure the complexity for each sector and demonstrate that the variation of urban concentration can be largely explained by their complexity, consistent with the knowledge complexity perspective. Specifically, complex manufacturing sectors are found to concentrate more in large cities than less complex sectors in China. This result provides support for the view that the growth of complex activities hinges more on diversity than on efficiency. The findings above can greatly reduce the current level of ambiguity associated with urban scaling, returns to agglomeration and complexity, and have important policy implications for urban planners, highlighting the significance of a more balanced and diversified configuration of urban productive activities for the growth of innovation economy.

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