On September 5th, Associate Professor Jiang Han from the School of Economics and Management of the Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen) was invited to visit the School of Management to give a lecture entitled “Chewing off your own arm to get away: Upper-echelon social capital and declining firms’ desperate moves” to the students and faculty of the School. This lecture is one of the series of lectures on discipline and academic innovation of the School of Management, attended by Professor Wu Changqi, Dean of the School. Professor Wang Yimin, Vice Dean of the School, presided over the lecture.
This lecture focused on whether executives of listed companies will utilize their social capital to rescue declining firms. Based on the case study of management practice, Associate Professor Jiang Han first introduced the research question of whether executives are willing to use their social capital to save declining firms. He pointed out the potential conflicts of interest that executives face when they use their social capital to save declining firms, proposed the competing hypothesis that executives use resources provided by their social capital to save declining firms, and explored the influence of the psychological traits of executives. After the lecture, Associate Professor Jiang Han and the students and faculty discussed the self-help behavior of declining firms in the context of China.
Jiang Han is currently an Associate Professor and Presidential Scholar at the School of Management and Economics of the Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen). He received his PhD from the W. P. Carey School of Business of Arizona State University in 2014, and has held faculty positions at Tulane University and Arizona State University. Dedicated to research on social networks, inter-organizational relationships corporate governance and strategic decision-making, international business and entrepreneurship, he has published more than 10 papers in top international journals in management including Academy of Management Journal, Strategic Management Journal, and Production and Operations Management. He is a Senior Editor of Asia Pacific Journal of Management and a member of the editorial boards of Strategic Management Journal and Management and Organization Review, and serves as the Strategy Area Chair for the biennial conference of the Asian Academy of Management to be held in June 2024.
