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

Reasoning with Partial Knowledge

We investigate how sociological argumentation differs from the classical first-order logic. We focus on theories about age dependence of organizational mortality. The overall pattern of argument does not comply with the classical monotonicity principle: adding premises does not overturn conclusions in an argument. The cause of nonmonotonicity is the need to derive conclusions from partial knowledge. We identify meta-principles that appear to guide the observed sociological argumentation patterns, and we formalize a semantics to represent them. This semantics yields a new kind of logical consequence relation. We demonstrate that this new logic can reproduce the results of informal sociological theorizing and lead to new insights. It allows us to unify existing theory fragments and paves the way towards a complete classical theory.logic of theory building;non-monotonicity;organizational mortality respectively;social science methodology

Foundations of a Theory of Social Forms

In the early transition era in Russia entry barriers for commercial banks were about absent. It resulted in the mushrooming of hundreds of small, poorly-endowed and inexperienced banks. In this paper we address the question whether the claimed benefits of low entry barriers - competition and market dynamics - have resulted. We use a sample of commercial saving banks for the 1994-97 period. We conclude that there were important mobility barriers and that the removal of entry barriers did not lead to intensified competition.forms;foundation of organization theory;identity;populations

Reasoning with Partial Knowledge

We investigate how sociological argumentation differs from the classical first-order logic. We focus on theories about age dependence of organizational mortality. The overall pattern of argument does not comply with the classical monotonicity principle: adding premises does not overturn conclusions in an argument. The cause of nonmonotonicity is the need to derive conclusions from partial knowledge. We identify meta-principles that appear to guide the observed sociological argumentation patterns, and we formalize a semantics to represent them. This semantics yields a new kind of logical consequence relation. We demonstrate that this new logic can reproduce the results of informal sociological theorizing and lead to new insights. It allows us to unify existing theory fragments and paves the way towards a complete classical theory

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

Foundations of a Theory of Social Forms

In the early transition era in Russia entry barriers for commercial banks were about absent. It resulted in the mushrooming of hundreds of small, poorly-endowed and inexperienced banks. In this paper we address the question whether the claimed benefits of low entry barriers - competition and market dynamics - have resulted. We use a sample of commercial saving banks for the 1994-97 period. We conclude that there were important mobility barriers and that the removal of entry barriers did not lead to intensified competition

Age-Related Structural Inertia: A Distance-based Approach

This paper proposes a distance-based characterization of age-related structural inertia as an increasing constraint on the speed of change as organizations age. Our framework regards organizations as points in multidimensional metric spaces of architectures. Organizational change means movement in this space. The speed of change is the ratio of the distance between positions in a space and the time it took for the organization to make the move. We illustrate how our distance-based approach can be used to formulate theories of age-related organizational inertia by using this representation to develop a model for a possible mechanism: age-related cultural resistance to change based on the dynamics of exposure of organizational members to architectural features. Our proposed mechanism is distinct from prevailing explanations and leads to new predictions. We also illustrate the value of our distance-based approach in a reanalysis of Sørensen and Stuart’s study of age variations in firms’ patenting behavior [Sørensen JB, Stuart TE (2000) Aging, obsolescence, and organizational innovation. Admin. Sci. Quart. 45(1):81–112]. On the basis of patent citations, we construct a space that allows us to characterize the positions of organizations and the speed at which they change. We find that organizational age has a negative effect on the speed of change

The case for formal theory

The article introduces this issue of "Academy of Management Review" which focuses on topics such as the performance differentials between diversified companies and new business enterprises, the prediction of business mortality that is based on the industry conditions at the time of the company's founding, and the free-rider problem