Institutional change of village enterprises in southern Jiangsu (China).

摘要

Many theories have been developed to interpret the rapid growth of rural industries in China. While most scholars have paid attention to the driving forces of the success, the evolution of rural industrial organization is neglected. The focus of this study, however, is the organization form of village enterprises and its changes. The crucial question that I am concerned with, therefore, is the historical development and transformation of village enterprises in terms of both ownership structure (i.e., the organization of collective ownership) and their external relations with the local community. In so doing, this study provides a sociological and community-level of analysis of the institutional changes in the organization of village enterprises and the resulting local community in southern Jiangsu since late 1970s.; The research interest of the present empirical study grows out of the contradictory experience of village enterprises in southern Jiangsu, i.e., ambiguous organization on the one hand and unexpected success on the other. In order to reconcile the obvious incompatibility and inconsistence between the literature on contemporary China and Western economic sociology, I develop an alternative economic sociological approach, “constrained adaptation” view of organization, by highlighting the importance of socialist ideology and its ambiguity in shaping the institutional and organizational environment in a transitional economy which, in turn, structures the organizational form of village enterprises. I argue that village enterprises are not only ideologically and politically constrained, but also ideologically adapted to the broader institutional, ideological and policy environment. I also point out that there is an increasing shift of village enterprises to adapt to market situation after the property-rights reform. The future of rural collective ownership (i.e., neo-collectivism) is also discussed.; This study draws on my field research in southern Jiangsu conducted between 1999 and 2000. Two types of village industrial enterprises are selected to illustrate the explanatory framework of “constrained adaptation.” The extended case method is employed to analyze the data collected basically from in-depth interviews.