Building on the social network and strategic entrepreneurship literature, we investigate the overall relationship between returnee entrepreneurs' networks in different periods and locations, domestic resource acquisitions and firm performance. While the labor mobility literature emphasizes the "gone but not forgotten" networks in the prior location of migrants, other studies argue that returnees suffer from a lack of local networks. Our findings show that returnee entrepreneurs are different in the extent of their home country embeddedness while they are overseas, which indicates different degrees of enduring networks in the home countries. The effect of home country embeddedness improves the performance of returnee entrepreneurship via domestic resource acquisition, and this effect could be substituted by pre-overseas local ties and the presence of local top management team (TMT) members. This study extends returnee research by shedding light on the importance of network maintenance in determining whether the home country's network endures or decays and by highlighting the interactions of ties in the different periods of pre-overseas, during overseas, and after return.

The management paradigms in the West mainly rely on legal contracts and explicit rules (formality), while the management traditions in the East emphasize social relationships and implicit norms (informality). In an era of ‘West-meets-East’, balancing formality and informality is becoming critical for firms, especially those facing institutional differences in transnational contexts and institutional transitions. In this research, we conducted a comparative multicase study on returnee entrepreneurs and local entrepreneurs in China. We found that at the early stage of venturing, returnee entrepreneurs emphasized formality more than informality, while local entrepreneurs stressed informality more than formality. However, the formality-informality balance among both returnee and local entrepreneurs converged over time in line with the institutional transition in China. Returnee entrepreneurs increased the emphasis on informality (but kept the dominant position of formality), whereas local entrepreneurs gradually shifted from informality to formality. The spatial pattern of asymmetrical balancing and the temporal pattern of transitional balancing are both rooted in the Chinese philosophy of Yin-Yang balancing.

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We examine the extent to which the impact of the overseas business knowledge transferred by returnee entrepreneurs on firm performance is conditional on institutional factors. The findings show that informal institutional differences between the home and host countries strengthen the positive impact of overseas business knowledge on the performance of returnee-founded firms. There is a complementarity between informal institutional differences and local government policy support which jointly enhance the positive impact of overseas business knowledge. However, a well-developed local business infrastructure substitutes for the impact of informal institutional differences on the relationship between overseas business knowledge and returnee venture performance.