Overview
- First book to examine business practices in Communist China, as opposed to capitalist China
- Examines the how and why of business and technical initiatives
- Explores the cycles of experimentation, failure, learning, and renewed experimentation that formed the key middle landscape between planning and results
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Table of contents (11 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Business Practices from Liberation Through the Great Stumble, 1950–1961
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Front Matter
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Recovery, Reversal, Resilience: Business Practices, 1962–1971
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
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.
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Philip Scranton is Board of Governors Professor Emeritus, History of Industry and Technology, at Rutgers University. His publications include eighteen books and over eighty scholarly articles.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Enterprise, Organization, and Technology in China
Book Subtitle: A Socialist Experiment, 1950−1971
Authors: Philip Scranton
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00398-2
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Business and Management, Business and Management (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-00397-5Published: 23 January 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-00398-2Published: 13 December 2018
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XV, 395
Number of Illustrations: 6 b/w illustrations, 1 illustrations in colour
Topics: Innovation/Technology Management, Entrepreneurship, History of China, Business Strategy/Leadership