What is Chinese about Chinese Family Business? And How Much is Family and How Much is Business?

Abstract

The questions posed in the title are a way of identifying the main contending models of cause and effect that may be used to explain the phenomenon labelled ‘Chinese family business’. Simply put, these are (i) the culturalist position which would argue for the primary determinants being Chineseness and the associated transfer of values into stable patterns of action; (ii) theories which begin with the premise that the family stage of organizational emergence is consistent across cultures and that Chinese family business is the same as other family business; and (iii) more complex theories of the emergence of business systems which bring into play a much wider set of determinants, principally those of surrounding institutions, but also allowing for societal embeddedness, borrowing and constant adaptation. The considerations are then used to reflect on the issue of the globalization of the Chinese family enterprise. Another model exists based on the universalist and ‘under-socialized’ assumptions of economic theory; but as this tends to be based on selected and isolated ‘facts’ and is weak in dealing with complex interactions, reciprocal determinacy and multiple patterns of causation, it will be left out of this account. Instead, the focus will be on work that has dealt with the Chinese family organization as the unit of analysis and attempted to explain why it is so.