Management in China: Cultural, institutional roots and pragmatism. An inquiry in Shanghai

We base our work on interviews of Chinese managers living in and around Shanghai. We use the neo-institutional theoretical stream, which considers that a country’s economy is influenced by cultural and institutional phenomena. In a first part, we describe the theoretical background to the research and our method. Then, in a second part, we present the significant cultural and institutional features of China that enable us to justify several hypotheses about our topic. In a third part, we analyze eight in-depth interviews, trying to answer our research question. Our basic research question focuses on what “Performance” means for Chinese managers. Behind the word, we analyze the cultural and institutional backgrounds of their business activities, examining their behaviors and business relations. We end by drawing several conclusions, some of them quite non-intuitive