Building China’s Monsanto: Organizational Forms in Nationalist Knowledge Economy

• In Event: Chinese State Capitalism: Labor, Corporate, and International Strategic Issues

Abstract

Why would—and how can—an organization be plural things at once? As industrial policies like Made in China 2025 and Xi Jinping’s recent emphasis on “self-reliance” highlight, China’s high-tech development efforts are both colored by nationalist sentiment and structured by the dual institutional logics of market profit and regime legitimacy. Within China’s domestic biotechnology industry, academic entrepreneurs and officials strive to render economic gain, technological development, and authoritarian regime stability mutually reinforcing, while firms, irrespective of ownership structure, establish themselves as committed Chinese actors by engaging in varied nationalist displays. While these alignment efforts often blur boundaries and foster symbiosis among science, industry and the state, they are not always successful. Market principles and political goals sometimes conflict, while actors embedded in different state institutions and tiers of government often disparately interpret and implement state policies. Consequently, while China’s knowledge economy is irrefutably constructed along a Chinese/foreign axis, it is also wrought with ever-fluctuating and potentially cacophonous signals.

This paper analyzes the curious organizational forms emerging within this complex ecosystem. Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Chinese agrobiotechnology firms, 37 in-depth interviews with key entrepreneurs, scientists and officials in the industry, and textual analysis of various policy, legal, and media documents, I argue that ritualizing the national border within China’s domestic knowledge economy renders the moral—and operational—boundaries around other ontological categories—such as private/state-owned firms and academic/commercial organizations—fungible. Specifically, I show that structuring technological development along a Chinese/foreign axis drives the emergence of an phenomenon I call “organizational chimerism”, whereby Chinese technology firms adopt indeterminate organizational forms, concurrently expressing the characteristics of—and functioning as—commercial companies and academic laboratories. These firms behave like the organizational equivalent of Schrodinger’s cat. They inhabit plural states simultaneously and collapse into different identities according to the demands of the context in which they “measured”.

This paper has three parts. First, I document the mechanisms driving the emergence of these unusual organizations. I argue that organizational chimeras’ indeterminacy is an asset leveraged by individual firms, entrepreneurs, and local officials as they navigate a political economy perennially defined by the dual—and sometimes conflicting—logics of the market and party-state stability. Claiming different organizational identities at different moments enables these enterprises to negotiate mutually beneficial deals with an ever-rotating array of local officials, take on higher risk, long term projects of national significance, and avoid being tainted by the state’s legitimacy crises as they strive to survive—if not thrive—in an uncertain institutional ecosystem. When an environment is perpetually structured by plural contending logics, I argue, organizational chimerism constitutes strategic action. Second, I show how organizational chimeras sustain their dualistic existence by implementing paternalistic technologies of governance to maintain internal discipline and by deploying cues for a nationalist frame of meaning that situates all of the firm’s activities—whether academically or commercially oriented—as sacrifices for the good of the nation. Finally, I contend that the very fluidity optimizing firms’ performance with China’s borders also contributes to these enterprises’ “domestication” by the state, as these organizations’ undefined identities are not intelligible within other ontologies of state-market-relations. When the organizational chimera tries to leave its native habitat, it becomes a hybrid monster of mythic proportions.

The existing political economy and sociology of organizations literatures have highlighted how hybridity, ambiguity, and flexibility can behoove organizations navigating highly competitive and/or transitional environments. By illustrating the dynamics of chimerism, however, I introduce the notion of organizational indeterminacy to these literatures and define the scope conditions under which the adoption of such a fluid form benefits firms. Moreover, while much of the literature on the biotechnology industry’s rise articulates how divisions between academic science and the market have blurred and moved, I show how these distinctions can be erased by drawing new moral boundaries across other ontological axes.

Author

• Abigail E. Coplin, University of Pennsylvania