Ties That Bind: the emergence of entrepreneurs in China

The paper describes the emergence of entrepreneurship in Shanxi province based on fieldwork in the last 6 years. Employing institutional and evolutionary economics shows that both the kind of firms that emerge and the individual behaviour of entrepreneurs reflect a systematic response to the situational constraint all would-be entrepreneurs face, namely a high level of uncertainty and weak institutions. In this situation to establish firms with a weak organisational identity allows to flexibly respond to new opportunities, while a strong reputation for accountability of the owners and managers is needed to get long term business relations started. As the Shanxi sample shows accountability can be achieved by a mix of reviving old economic institutions, hijacking social organisations, and building new business practices. To the extent that old institutions, social organisations and business practices do not spread equally across China, different forms of firms and different forms of entrepreneurship can be expected within China. In short, local cultures matter.evolutionary economics;organisational change;dealing with uncertainty and risk

The Interdependence Between Political and Economic Entrepreneurship

The Chinese economy has developed rapidly despite two major constraints: ill-functioning markets and a socialist past, both of which caused an environment of unenforceable contracts. In this situation the need to pool resources and to govern relational risk was paramount to the development of a private sector. While modern organisation (transaction cost-) theory can explain why and to which extent entrepreneurship in China is based on collective agents, an analysis of the (local) political market is needed to explain why China's villages provide the much needed (and valuable) public goods in form of property rights protection and contractual security. Decentralisation and jurisdictional competition facilitate the writing of a new "common law" as well as the "discovery" of new forms of collective action.economic development;entrepreneurial economy;jurisdictional competition;organisational change

Networks In Cultural, Economic and Evolutionary Perspective

Depending on the kind of literature networks in general, and Chinese networks in particular seem to be different phenomena, or are explained by different factors leaving the interested public puzzled. Whether Chinese networks resemble Clans, Clubs, or Mafia-kind of organizations is as much disputed as the effects of networking on the economy. While some argue that networks contribute to overall factor productivity in a situation in which neither the old planning system nor the nascent markets function, others insist on their counterproductive potential for the transformation of the Chinese economy. A third group dismisses networks as a transitory phenomena that will disappear with ongoing market reforms, in particular the wider use of the price mechanism for allocating resources and co-ordinating economic activities. The following attempts to shed some light into the confusing argumentation by grouping the different approaches according to what is explained, and the explaining items. The paper will systematically compare theories that are usually classified as taking a cultural, economic, and evolutionary perspective and which can be found in China-specific or social science literature. All these approaches claim to provide explanations for (Chinese) networks. Yet they differ with respect to the phenomena that they want to explain, namely networks and/or the explanatory factors they regard as crucial. Thus, for example cultural and economic, better: Transaction cost economics (TCE) approaches focus on networks as a given organizational form, while evolutionary economics or the capability approach in management science include a further dimension, namely time, subsequently regarding network as an activity that might lead to different network forms. The approaches differ also widely according to the factors singled out – or isolated -which are claimed to be the crucial items in any explanation for networks. As will be shown the two competing models in which networks are either based on co-ethnic groups or on expected functional value are not necessarily mutually exclusive.networks;social capital;Chinese business behavior;cross cultural studies

Public Finance in China since the Late Qing Dynasty

How is "public finance" organized in China? Is China’s public finance system different from that of other countries? Can we detect features which link today’s system to the past?Public finance refers to more than annual state budgets and constitutional procedures. It includes foreign debt, state monopolies or monetary policies, all of which played a crucial role in China’s public finance during the last hundred years. A purely legislative definition obscures the fact that changes in public finance have contributed to the collapse of political regimes such as Imperial China (1911), Republican China (1927), and KMT-China (1945), as well engendered regime changes in 1949, 1961 and 1978. From a more comprehensive economic perspective public finance in China encompasses institutions, organizations and policies.public finance;China;KMT-China;imperial China;republican China

China Incorporated

The development of entrepreneurship and a private business sector in China pose various challenges to analysis. On the one hand, neo-classically based New Institutional Economics aims to find evidence that long-term investment and long-term commitment in and around firms can not be expected without deeply entrenched and state guaranteed private property rights. On the other hand, empirical studies within the China field concentrate on the political processes, in particular the interaction between the central state and local governments, at the danger of neglecting market forces, economic interests, and economic problems at stake. The empirical study on which the following is based took a different path by using a set of framing assumptions.entrepreneurship;China;privatization;institutional economics;local governments

The Strawberry Growth Underneath the Nettle: the emergence of entrepreneurs in China

Chinese entrepreneurs innovatively manage organisations in the absence of strong economic institutions, under conditions of high environmental and technological uncertainty. This paper presents the findings of an empirical study designed to investigate how Chinese entrepreneurs can be successful in such an environment. We found that Chinese entrepreneurial activity relies on social institutions rather than on economic institutions. We offer a sociological theory which explains why the reliance on social institutions leads to such an unprecedented success. We conclude that the strong rule-enforcement mechanisms generate reliable behavioral patterns, and that these in turn efficiently reduce uncertainty to tolerable levels.networks;social capital;evolutionary economics;Comparative business systems;private sector in China

China’s Institutional Architecture: A New Institutional Economics and Organization Theory Perspective on the Links between Local Governance and Local Enterprises

We start our exploration of China’s institutional change by asking what the China experience can tell us about institutional economics and organization theory. We point to under-researched areas such as the formation of firms and the interplay between firms and local politics. Our findings support the dynamic capability approach which concentrates on activities rather than on pre-defined groups and models institution building as a co-operative game between the local business community and local government agencies. We find that the analysis of firms has to set in before they are formed by entrepreneurs and networks and we identify political management as a core competence of these two groups. While this contradicts the conventional view of clientelism or principle agent relations as institutional building blocks, we don’t propose competing models. Instead, we suggest focusing on a dynamic process in which the role of players can change. Faced with the spontaneous emergence of institutions, our concept of institutional architecture captures the fact that the two models can co-exist side by side and that, once the dichotomy between formal and informal institutions is given up, there can be a transition from local patron-client relations to local business-state coordination.entrepreneurship;dynamic capabilities;networks;institutional change;diversity and convergence of institutions

Entrepreneurship in Transition: Searching for governance in China’s new private sector

Entrepreneurial activities in transition economies go beyond (technical) entrepreneurship. In an environment of institutional and procedural uncertainty entrepreneurs need to select business partners, choose a mode of governance that stabilizes long term business relations, and settle for such property rights regime that best matches the entrepreneurial endeavour. Bases on fieldwork in China the paper shows how entrepreneurs combine their predisposition for social relations with economic reasoning when they embed firms in one location, in mixed forms of relational and contractual governance, and specific ownership structures. The empirical research points to alternative economic concepts which allow further analysing the interaction between individual entrepreneurship and the emergence of market conforming institutions.entrepreneurship;embeddedness;governance and institutions

Entrepreneurship by Alliance

Recent years have seen the introduction of markets and a system of private property rights in China with a view to changing the composition of production and demand and enhancing welfare. Central to the success of these reforms is the rise of entrepreneurship with its potential to set the economy on a higher growth path by supplying the products which consumers need and want, creating new employment opportunities, and introducing new and more efficient technologies of production. But to what extent can we expect to see entrepreneurs in China behaving like their counterparts in the advanced industrial economies of Western Europe, Japan, and the United States? This is the question we address in this chapter. In our view, the reform programme has, indeed, opened up new opportunities for private enterprise activity; but idiosyncrasies of the business environment are at the same time generating novel institutional arrangements in support of entrepreneurs' investments. We agree, therefore, with Herrick and Kindleberger when they assert that "Development ought not to be viewed as a monotonic, stylized path, ever onward and upward, historically established and invariably repeated" (1983, p.62).entrepreneurship;economic growth;economic development;business networking;Western economies

Framing China: Transformation and Institutional Change

The paper offers a frame for investigating the extent to which decentralisation, and subsequent locally chosen institutions shape private organisational and institutional innovation. To include the numerous locally based “economic regimes†matters as the resulting business system reflects political institution setting and private organisational innovation. Such a frame is a necessary first step for empirical studies attempting to explain the heterogeneity of China’s business systems, the emergence of hybrid organisations, and last but none the least, the different growth rates that can be observed across China.Transition Economy;Institutional Change in China;Private Business Sector