Where will the IACMR Biennial Conference be held?

The conference will be held in the city of Hong Kong (HKG).

What is the primary focus of this conference?

This conference focuses on Chinese management research, providing a platform for scholars and practitioners to discuss advancements in the field.

IACMR Biennial Conference 2027

Name: IACMR Biennial Conference 2027
Start: 2027-06-02T00:00:00Z
End: 2027-06-06T00:00:00Z
Location: Hong Kong

Jun 2–6, 2027Hong Kong, ChinaIn-person

Registration open

The IACMR Biennial Conference 2027 is an academic gathering focused on Chinese management research. Hosted in the city of Hong Kong (Hong Kong), this event provides a platform for scholars, researchers, and practitioners to present their latest findings, engage in intellectual discourse, and foster collaborations within this specialized field. The conference aims to advance the understanding and practice of management in and related to China.

Committees & topics

Topics
Advancing Chinese Management Research in the Age of AI · Human-AI Dynamics in Organizations · Innovation in Chinese Contexts · Methodological Transformation in Management Research · Organizational Behavior · Human Resource Management · Strategic Management · Organizational Theory

Why it matters

This conference is a significant event for those dedicated to the study of management within the context of CHN. It serves as a crucial forum for disseminating new research, debating theoretical advancements, and exploring practical implications relevant to the unique business and organizational landscapes of CHN. The insights shared at this event can influence academic curricula, business strategies, and policy-making across various sectors.

The gathering in Hong Kong (HKG) offers a strategic location for such discussions, bridging Western and Eastern perspectives on management. It facilitates cross-cultural dialogue and collaboration, which are essential for developing comprehensive and nuanced understandings of global management challenges and opportunities. The conference's focus on CHN management research underscores the growing importance of this region in the global economy and its distinct contributions to management theory and practice.

How to prepare

Prospective attendees should prepare by familiarizing themselves with current trends and foundational theories in CHN management research. Engaging with recent publications and ongoing debates in the field will enable more meaningful participation in discussions and networking opportunities. Given the international nature of the conference, understanding diverse research methodologies and theoretical frameworks applied to CHN contexts will be beneficial.

For those presenting, tailoring research to highlight its relevance to the specific challenges and opportunities within CHN management will be key. Emphasizing comparative studies or unique insights derived from the CHN context can enhance the impact of presentations. Networking strategies should focus on identifying potential collaborators with complementary research interests, particularly those working on cross-regional or interdisciplinary projects related to CHN.

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 2 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

China

Central to the conference's theme, CHN is the primary focus of management research and case studies.

Role in topic

As the subject of the research, CHN provides the empirical context and theoretical challenges that drive the conference's agenda. Scholars from CHN and those studying CHN management will contribute significantly to the discussions.

HKG

The host city, HKG, offers a unique vantage point for understanding CHN management within a globalized context.

Role in topic

HKG serves as a critical hub for international business and academic exchange, making it an ideal location to discuss CHN management research. Its distinct economic and political environment provides a rich backdrop for examining management practices and theories that bridge different systems.

Topics & background

The background behind each topic and the actors that shape it.

Advancing Chinese Management Research in the Age of AI

Chinese management research emerged as a distinct field in the 1990s and 2000s, as scholars sought to test, adapt, and extend Western management theories against the realities of China's transition economy, state-owned enterprises, and culturally grounded practices such as guanxi. The International Association for Chinese Management Research (IACMR), founded in 2002, helped institutionalize the field through journals like Management and Organization Review and a sustained push for indigenous theorizing. Over two decades, the field has matured from a context-application enterprise into one that increasingly seeks to generate theory from Chinese phenomena themselves. The rise of generative AI and large language models since 2022 has destabilized the research enterprise on multiple fronts: AI tools now mediate literature review, coding, translation, and even theory generation, while AI itself has become a major empirical phenomenon as Chinese firms such as Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, and DeepSeek deploy frontier models at scale. Differences between the U.S. and Chinese AI ecosystems—shaped by export controls, data governance regimes, and industrial policy—mean that Chinese management scholars are studying a meaningfully different AI environment than their Western counterparts. Today the field confronts intertwined questions: how to leverage AI responsibly in scholarship, how to theorize AI-driven management practices in Chinese organizations, and how to maintain methodological rigor and research ethics as authorship, data provenance, and replication norms are renegotiated globally.

Key players

Human-AI Dynamics in Organizations

Research on human-AI interaction in work settings built on decades of work on human-computer interaction, decision support systems, and algorithmic management in platform firms such as Uber, Didi, and Meituan. The deployment of generative AI since 2022 expanded the question from narrow automation to collaborative cognition, with employees now co-writing, co-deciding, and co-creating with systems whose outputs are probabilistic and opaque. Empirical studies have documented productivity gains alongside concerns about skill erosion, over-reliance, and shifts in workplace identity. In Chinese organizations, human-AI dynamics carry distinctive features: extensive workplace monitoring is more normalized, AI-enabled performance systems are widespread in tech firms, and state guidance on algorithmic recommendation (e.g., the 2022 CAC algorithm regulations) shapes how systems are designed. Comparative work with European GDPR-based regimes and emerging U.S. state-level AI laws highlights how institutional context conditions trust, fairness perceptions, and adoption. The research frontier today centers on team-level effects of AI collaborators, the psychology of human oversight, accountability allocation when AI errs, and how leaders should redesign jobs, training, and culture as AI agents become more autonomous.

Key players

Innovation in Chinese Contexts

China's innovation trajectory has shifted from imitation and process upgrading in the 1990s to indigenous innovation policies launched in the mid-2000s, and then to the Made in China 2025 and dual-circulation strategies of the 2010s and 2020s. State-directed investment in semiconductors, electric vehicles, batteries, renewables, and AI has produced global leaders such as BYD, CATL, Huawei, and DJI, while platform giants have built distinctive innovation ecosystems around super-apps. Scholars have documented features that distinguish Chinese innovation: rapid scaling, government-business coordination, frugal and user-driven design, and dense regional clusters like Shenzhen and Hangzhou. U.S.-China technology tensions since 2018, including semiconductor export controls and outbound investment screening, have reshaped the innovation environment by tightening access to advanced inputs and accelerating self-reliance strategies. At the same time, Chinese firms are internationalizing R&D—building labs in Europe and Southeast Asia—and competing globally in EVs and clean tech, prompting responses such as EU anti-subsidy investigations. Current research debates how Chinese innovation models travel, whether the state's heavy hand is a comparative advantage or constraint at the technological frontier, and how decoupling pressures will reshape global innovation networks.

Key players

Methodological Transformation in Management Research

Management research methodology has undergone successive waves of change: the quantitative-qualitative debates of the 1980s, the credibility and replication crisis that swept the social sciences after 2011, and a subsequent push toward preregistration, open data, and transparent reporting. Chinese management research has navigated these waves while also confronting context-specific issues: measurement equivalence in cross-cultural surveys, access to government and firm data, and translation validity. The current transformation is driven by AI and computational methods. Large language models enable text-as-data at unprecedented scale, machine learning supports prediction-oriented theorizing, and digital trace data from platforms allows behavioral observation that bypasses self-report bias. At the same time, AI raises new threats to research integrity, from fabricated data and citations to undisclosed model-assisted writing, prompting journals such as those affiliated with the Academy of Management and IACMR to issue guidance. The field is now debating how to integrate computational and interpretive traditions, how to evaluate causal inference in observational big-data settings, and how to uphold ethics and reproducibility when data are proprietary and models are closed.

Key players

Organizational Behavior

Organizational behavior (OB) emerged from the Hawthorne studies and human relations movement and matured through decades of work on motivation, leadership, teams, and justice. Chinese OB research initially tested Western constructs—transformational leadership, organizational citizenship behavior, psychological contracts—in Chinese samples, before developing indigenous constructs such as paternalistic leadership, guanxi-based trust, and zhongyong (doctrine of the mean) thinking. This trajectory mirrored broader calls within IACMR for theory grounded in Chinese realities rather than imported wholesale. The post-pandemic period has reshaped OB's empirical landscape: hybrid and remote work have altered socialization, supervision, and well-being; algorithmic management has changed the experience of fairness and autonomy; and macro shocks have heightened attention to resilience, meaning, and mental health at work. In China specifically, debates around 996 work culture, lying flat (tang ping), and youth unemployment have made employee well-being and motivation salient public issues. Contemporary OB scholarship is reorienting around AI-mediated work, cross-level dynamics in distributed teams, and the moral and identity consequences of working with intelligent systems.

Key players

Human Resource Management

Human resource management (HRM) evolved from personnel administration into a strategic function during the 1980s, with later development of strategic HRM and high-performance work systems frameworks. In China, HRM transformed dramatically as state-owned enterprises reformed labor relations in the 1990s, private and foreign firms imported professional HR practices, and the 2008 Labor Contract Law formalized employment protections. Scholars have documented hybrid HRM systems blending market mechanisms with legacy danwei-era expectations. Recent years have brought significant pressures: demographic decline and rising labor costs in China, intensifying competition for AI and engineering talent, and platform-economy expansion that blurred employee-contractor boundaries. Regulatory crackdowns on overtime culture and renewed attention to gig worker protections have changed firm practices, while multinational firms navigate divergent HRM regimes amid geopolitical tension. HRM research today is centered on AI in selection, performance management, and learning; on talent strategies under demographic and geopolitical constraints; and on the redefinition of the employment relationship as work becomes more flexible, monitored, and algorithmically mediated.

Key players

Strategic Management

Strategic management coalesced as a field through the industrial organization economics of the 1970s, the resource-based view of the 1980s and 1990s, and subsequent work on dynamic capabilities, business models, and ecosystems. Chinese strategy research expanded in parallel with the country's economic rise, focusing on how firms compete amid institutional voids, navigate state ownership, and internationalize through M&A and greenfield investment. The 2018-onward U.S.-China technology rivalry, COVID-era supply chain disruptions, and the energy transition have collectively forced a rethinking of strategy. Firms now contend with geopolitical risk as a first-order strategic variable: export controls, sanctions, data localization rules, and forced divestitures (such as around TikTok) have reshaped where firms invest, source, and list. Chinese firms have responded with friend-shoring to Southeast Asia and Mexico, while Western firms pursue China-plus-one strategies. Strategy research is now grappling with nonmarket strategy under intensifying state-business entanglement, with AI as a source of competitive advantage and disruption, and with how ecosystems and platforms compete across fragmenting digital spheres.

Key players

Organizational Theory

Organizational theory developed through Weberian bureaucracy, contingency theory, resource dependence, institutional theory, and population ecology, with later contributions from categories, organizational identity, and field-level dynamics. Chinese organizational scholarship has both drawn on and challenged these traditions, examining how state-owned enterprises, business groups, and hybrid organizations operate under conditions where the state, market, and party intertwine. In the last decade, organizational theory has been pressed by phenomena that strain existing frameworks: platform organizations that orchestrate millions of contributors without hierarchical control; meta-organizations and ecosystems; the rapid rise and fall of Chinese ed-tech and fintech sectors following regulatory shifts; and ESG-driven changes in firm purpose. Comparative work shows how institutional logics differ markedly between Chinese, U.S., and European fields. Current debates engage how to theorize organizations as AI-augmented entities, how to model state-market hybrids beyond convergence narratives, and how organizations adapt to legitimacy pressures across fragmented institutional environments.

Key players