This article examines how social networks and social media influence women’s entrepreneurial entry in India. Using an explanatory sequential mixed-methods approach, we combine quantitative analysis of GEM data with qualitative interviews. The quantitative results show that having an entrepreneur in one’s social network increases the probability of start-up involvement by 2.5 percentage points, while media exposure contributes an additional 1.8 percentage points. Interviews with women entrepreneurs illustrate how social media provides motivation, role-modeling, and perceived attainability, whereas personal networks offer emotional support, early clients, mentorship, and informal financing. Situating these findings within broader debates on social capital and female entrepreneurship, the study highlights how interpersonal and digital ties function as low-cost, relational resources in contexts of limited institutional support. This dual perspective advances existing research by clarifying the distinct yet complementary ways in which offline networks and online media shape women’s early entrepreneurial decisions and help reduce perceived barriers.

In this study, we answer the call for integrating insights from different language-related research areas in international business. We investigate the antecedents and outcomes of mandating English as a common language in the Indian subsidiaries and joint ventures of Cummins, a large US-headquartered industrial, multinational enterprise (MNE). Our Transaction Cost Theory lens shows how the mandated adoption of English significantly improved the Indian subsidiaries’ position in the MNE’s network. Through retrospectively analyzing the experience of the authors in top and middle management roles with Cummins in India and utilizing a range of publicly available information, we also identified the significant role of English in fostering inclusion in India, where the broad societal context of diversity and inclusion is very different from that prevailing in the MNE’s home country.

Diversity and inclusion scholarship addresses inequality at work across categories of difference marked with historical disadvantages such as gender, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, and class or categories meaningful for the industrial, organisational or local settings. This scholarship has not considered political ties to be a diversity strand. However, political ties are a considerable source of uneven power relations, unearned privileges, and unjust discrimination in many contexts. Similarly, political ties could be sources of disadvantage, exclusion and discrimination for individuals with weak, absent or oppositional political affiliations. Our paper focuses on the Asian context, where political ties are often a legitimate human and institutional resource that can shape individual choices and chances at work. By defining political ties as a diversity and inclusion strand, we critique the legitimacy of political ties as a dominant and desirable resource and present political tie discrimination as a wicked social problem that entrenches uneven relations of power and authority in workplaces. Highlighting how political affiliation manifests across different national contexts in Asia, we explore the utility of adding political ties to the Asian vernacular to regulate workplace diversity and inclusion. Asia provides an interesting context in which the interplay between political affiliation and workplace relations is often culturally endorsed, remains unregulated and unscrutinised through ethical and anti-discrimination regulations. Thus, Asia provides an ideal setting to explore the emergence of political tie diversity and inclusion at work. We illustrate this through country-specific examples, illustrating the cross-national varieties of political tie diversity in the Asian business context. We also suggest a roadmap to manage political tie diversity and inclusion for this context.

Recently, word of mouth (WOM) has gained increasing strategic importance. The rising prevalence of communication via social media has made information retransmission through WOM a new norm. However, although several WOM studies have revealed that information becomes distorted as it is disseminated and that WOM retransmission tends to distort information, the phenomenon of information distortion in the WOM retransmission context remains relatively underexplored. This study examined the role of two key factors (retransmitter intention and source expertise) in WOM retransmission and how they influence the distortion of WOM information in terms of information sources and content. Two carefully designed experiments revealed that a retransmitter's persuasive (vs. informative) intention increases (1) information distortion, including exaggeration of its content, and (2) information source distortion when the source has relatively less expertise. These findings expand the scholarly understanding of WOM communication and offer managerial insights into viral marketing strategies.

Asia differs from other regions of the world with respect to its unique and longstanding cultural, social, economic, and technological attributes, all of which have eluded systematic exploration by entrepreneurship scholars, representing a unique entrepreneurial context. However, such uniqueness should not be restricted to assertions about (among other things) institutional voids, increased difficulty financing new ventures, underdeveloped technology transfer, or undertrained entrepreneurs. This special issue takes up this thread and explores several key attributes—culture, social structure, economic policy, and technology—that represent parts of the broader domains that provide insights for future theory development. Philosophically, it is a perfect Being with its otherness, floated in either East or West, soaked up into itself, that is essential for us to clinch and to get some light on truth.

Extrapolating from modern international understanding of corporate Japan’s distinct form of managerial capitalism, we elaborate on the growing momentum of shareholder activism in Japan leading up to the COVID-19 health crisis, so as to inform the subsequent discussion on the relevant primary considerations that belie the future direction of shareholder activism in Japan post-COVID-19. On an initial logical extrapolation, it appears probable that COVID-19 could mark the peak of Japanese activism. However, it is crucial to acknowledge that the success of Japan’s managerial capitalism have also declined, which poses a question on to which direction Japanese corporate governance may be shifting. Finally, we point out how corporate Japan’s impeding market developments will provide a useful case-study for global financial discourse.