Abstract
No Western industry commentators could have predicted that Chinese aerospace innovation would reach the technological frontier in the twenty-first century. To understand re-combinative innovation among aerospace conglomerates AVIC, CASC, CASIC and COMAC, we discuss the relevant contextual factors. We explore the contested concept industrial democracy from a socio-economic perspective and introduce the technology accumulation that has fuelled the innovation of the indigenous industry. We highlight the marketization and corporatization of Chinese aerospace SOEs and look at the forms of industrial democracy, including trade unionism and employee involvement within global firms.
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Notes
- 1.
Akers (2010) pointed out that the transition to post-industrialism in the UK and the dominance of the Conservative Party opened up employee involvement as the new option for management as a form of industrial democracy.
- 2.
The listed firm Twenty-first Century Aerospace Technology Company Ltd was established as a private firm in 2006. It is majority owned by Beijing based SOEs, i.e. Beijing Twenty-first Century Science and Technogy Development Company Ltd., Beijing Industrial Developing Investment Co. Ltd. and China Gaoxin Investment Group Corporation (See 二十一世纪空间技术应用股份有限公司 2015 Annual Report). The three Beijing SOEs were established in the 1990s to take opportunity and invest in emerging indigenous industries.
- 3.
The participation rate of trade union in the UK was 14% in the private sector and 54% in the public sector in 2015 (See BSI 2016).
- 4.
Cheng (2014) utilized the dataset from the 2006 Chinese General Social Survey.
- 5.
See China’s: The state-owned zombie economy by Gabriel Wildau, The Financial Times, 29 February 2016.
- 6.
AVIC began as a supplier of cargo doors for Boeing 757 in 1990.
- 7.
Schumpeter (1942/2010) discussed the role of R&D within large American firms in the first half of the twentieth century as the key to technological innovation; this contrasted with his earlier view in the Theory of Economic Development that the pattern of innovation in late nineteenth-century Europe characterizing innovative small firms benefitting from the ease of entry to existing industries. Hence, he concluded that new entrepreneurial small firms with new ideas, new products or new processes are important for innovation.
- 8.
Approximately 20,000 BOEING employees belonged to SPEEA. Its goals include: 1. Providing a strong vibrant organization founded on membership involvement that is respected as professional and value added while improving our member’s future; 2. Bargaining respectable contracts; 3. Representing our members in the workplace; 4. Being involved in the processes that affect our members; 5. Promoting Professional and Technical growth; and 6. Demonstrating the value of Union representation. (See “Boeing engineers overwhelmingly back new labor contracts”, Reuters, 18 February 2016 as well as membership information SPEEA, accessed on 27 August 2016 from www.speea.org.)
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Tsang, D. (2017). A Catalyst for Chinese Aerospace Innovation. In: Industrial Democracy in the Chinese Aerospace Industry. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58023-8_1
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