Research has often overlooked the role of digital innovation in driving social transformation, especially in underserved rural areas, but the integration of digital technology is promoting rural high-quality development through the establishment of digital entrepreneurial ecosystems. Approaching from a complex systems perspective, this study contends that these ecosystems navigate multiple routes to enhance total factor productivity (TFP) in rural settings. Performing a configurational analysis of a sample of 60 demonstration counties for rural revitalization in China, this study identifies three primary pathways yielding high TFP: an investment-led model under government stewardship, a collaborative model steered by both government and social capital, and a talent-centric model governed by digital market forces. Conversely, this study also pinpoints a pathway that does not yield high TFP. Theoretical and practical insights are offered for researchers and practitioners exploring digital innovation and its implications for rural entrepreneurial ecosystems.

Local communities and their opinion on shale gas exploitation (SGE) play an essential role in the implementation of energy policies, while little is known about the reasoning process underpinning the acceptance of SGE. The present study develops a conceptual framework to examine the psychological process of residents’ acceptance of local SGE, in which the impacts of trust, knowledge, and fairness are mediated by risk and benefit perceptions. Structural equation modeling has been applied to analyze the hypothesized relationships based on a dataset of 825 households in China’s largest shale gas field. Our results indicate that residents’ perceived fairness and trust positively affect their benefit perceptions and negatively affect their risk perceptions, which results in positive influences on acceptance, and knowledge of SGE’s environmental impacts positively affects perceived risks, which results in a negative influence on acceptance. Moreover, residents’ acceptance is primarily determined by their benefit perception, followed by perceived fairness, and knowledge is the least important determinant. Thus, our study contributes to the literature by exploring the structural relationships between various psychological predictors and the acceptance toward SGE, and the results from our empirical survey provide insight into designing appropriate strategies in the process of generating and communicating shale policies.

Joining the ongoing academic debates around medical students’ alternative career choices, this research examines the role of family in medical school attendees’ entrepreneurial intention (EI). Specifically, this study decomposes the multidimensionality of family embeddedness and highlights the mediated nature of the family–EI relationship. The empirical analysis relied on data from graduation year medical students from diverse geographical locations and from different institution types in China. These data were collected from a total of 687 questionnaires covering the basic information of individual, parents, and family composition, as well as the measuring scale of EI. Examining medical students’ EI and its antecedents provide a dual-missing-link in the extant knowledge, i.e., it adds the medical school piece to the overall picture of university students’ EI, and equally important, it de-trivializes entrepreneurship from the extant theorizations of medical students’ career choices. This study also bears implications for educators, practitioners, and policymakers interested in better understanding EI of medical school attendees and family embeddedness.