Re: [spam?] Greg Chin's diss

[Jonathan Lassen <jlassen@clarku.edu>]

Steve,

It's a little hard to compare the two findings this way, I think, since Greg
based his conclusions on joint ventures, while Hassard et al look exclusively at
large SOEs. I see only complementarity between the two conclusions.

Cheers,

Jonathan

On Sat, 28 Aug 2004 12:57 , Stephen E Philion <philion@hawaii.edu> sent:

>
>Using more data than Greg accessed, Hassard et al came to a different
>conclusion:
>
>Policing the Slow Commotion:
>Corporate Transformation and Its Consequences in the Chinese State-owned
>Steel Industry
>
>Abstract 
>	The Chinese economic reform process of the last two decades has
>engendered significant changes in the structure and management of
>large-scale work organizations. Central to the reform process has been
>the “corporatization” of large state-owned enterprises (SOEs). This
>article examines the progress made in the most recent round of
>state-enterprise reform in China - the introduction of the Modern
>Enterprise System and Group Company System experiments. This reform
>program is intended, by 2010, to transform 156 of China's largest SOEs
>into internationally competitive corporations which, while still
>remaining in overall state ownership, will more closely resemble typical
>Western corporations in their structures and processes, with Boards of
>Directors accountable to shareholders rather than being subject to the
>political authority of the Chinese Communist Party. Drawing primarily on
>interview data from three rounds of field visits to eight SOEs in the
>steel industry, we assess the extent to which three key goals of the
>reform process - reducing government interference in the running of
>SOEs, improving managerial competence, and achieving cost reductions and
>productivity improvements through large-scale workforce reductions -
>have been achieved in the present reform-induced climate of labor unrest
>and incipient political instability. We argue that, to date, the
>majority of SOEs in our sample appear unable to achieve much more than
>reform internally, as far as they are able, whilst waiting for movement
>in the political-institutional environment that will allow them to
>embark on more far-reaching phases of corporate change. On analysing the
>apparent inability of our SOEs to embrace reform, we highlight the
>influence of two factors - the failure of ministries to produce firm
>strategies for channelling surplus labor and the inability of government
>agencies to offer a sense of managerial autonomy to SOE executives.
>Overall we identify problems inherent in managing, or perhaps better
>policing, this slow experimental process, and focus on the principal
>question to arise from it: how best to handle the surplus labor problem?    
>
>
>