Building Organizations as Community: The Legacy of Organization Design from Socialist China

• In Event: 413 - Section on Organizations, Occupations and Work Refereed Roundtable Session. Table 01. Culture and Organizations
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 01. Culture and Organizations

Abstract

The phenomenon that many Chinese business organizations incorporate social function units into their structures and employee welfare into their practice, surprisingly, received insufficient attention in organization studies. To theorize an organizational model that originated in state-owned enterprises and diffused to privately owned and foreign-invested enterprises throughout China, we empirically studied this phenomenon and explained it from a sociohistorical perspective. Our research focuses on organizations as units of analysis yet borrows from features of community studies to shed light on Chinese organizational studies and generate a new conceptual schema through which to view organizations as communities. In our statistical analyses of randomly selected manufacturers in twelve representative cities as well as in our case studies of five firms in four cities, we study how institutional and imprinting factors influence Chinese firms to choose between modern enterprise governance and community model of organization. We use the findings of our case studies to show the effects of community capital on employee well-being and organizational sustainability. We also discuss the generalizability of the community model of organizations and some practical implications of our research.

Author

• Yi Han, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics