Reciprocity and Control: The Organization of Chinese Family-Owned Conglomerates

Gary G. Hamilton

Chapter 3 in Globalization of Chinese Business Firms, 2000, pp 55-74 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract To poke fun at themselves and at their own branch of science, aeronautical engineers once proved that bees could not fly. With considerably more seriousness, organization specialists, applying sound principles of management, have demonstrated that Chinese family-owned firms cannot grow large and cannot undertake sizeable and complex projects. This reasoned conclusion leads to a second one: because Chinese firms cannot succeed in enterprises requiring scope or scale, those economies in which large Chinese family firms are found in some numbers must, therefore, be examples of ‘ersatz capitalism’ (Yoshihara, 1988) — speculative economies that are hollow at the core. This conclusion implies that an economy organized by Chinese firms cannot flower and bear the fruits of a capitalist way of life. Both conclusions, however, ignore the simple reality that Chinese family-owned firms do grow very large, that they do undertake sizeable and serious projects, and that the economies in which they exist have flourished in the last quarter of the twentieth century and will continue to flourish in the twenty-first. Like the allusion in Peyton Houston’s wonderful poem, the impossibility of the existence of large Chinese family firms belies their success throughout much of the capitalist world. Clearly, there is a gap between theory and fact.

Keywords: Family Firm; Family Business; Business Group; Chinese Family; Chinese Firm (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2000
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-59992-5_3

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9780230599925

DOI: 10.1057/9780230599925_3

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Palgrave Macmillan Books from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().