Enterprise, organization, and technology in China: A socialist experiment, 1950-1971

8Citations
Citations of this article
16Readers
Mendeley users who have this article in their library.
Get full text

Abstract

Given the near-silence in technological and business history about post-World War II socialist enterprises, this book gives voice to a generation of Communist China’s managers, entrepreneurs, cadres, and workers from the Liberation to the early 1970s. Using recently-opened online archival resources, it details and assesses the course of technical and organizational experimentation at state-owned, cooperative, and private enterprises as the PRC strove to construct a socialist economy through trial-and-error initiatives. Core questions treated are: How did Chinese enterprises operate, evolve, experiment, improvise and adjust during the PRC’s first generation? What technological initiatives were crucial to these processes, necessarily developed with limited expertise and thin financial resources? How could constructing “socialism with Chinese characteristics” have helped lay foundations for the post-1980 “Chinese miracle,” as the PRC confidently entered the 21st century while Soviet and Central European socialisms crumbled? And what might current-day Western managers and entrepreneurs learn from Chinese practice and performance a half-century ago? Readers can anticipate a granular, bottom-up analysis of how businesses worked day-to-day in a planned economy, how enterprise practices and technological strategies shifted during the first postwar generation, how managers and technicians emerged after the capitalist exodus, how organizations experimented and adapted, and how the controversies and convulsions of the PRC’s early decades fashioned durable technical and organizational capabilities.

Cite

CITATION STYLE

APA

Scranton, P. (2018). Enterprise, organization, and technology in China: A socialist experiment, 1950-1971. Enterprise, Organization, and Technology in China: A Socialist Experiment, 1950-1971 (pp. 1–395). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00398-2

Register to see more suggestions

Mendeley helps you to discover research relevant for your work.

Already have an account?

Save time finding and organizing research with Mendeley

Sign up for free