Responsiveness to a new course and new performance controls: Insights from inside a recently conglomerated Chinese state-owned enterprise

摘要

Using an institutional theory lens, our study examines how variations in responsiveness toformal organisation-wide changes bring about diversity in the functioning of the samemanagement control system in different units of an organisation. As we conducted the studyinside a Chinese state-owned enterprise’s headquarters and at three of its factories, weillustrate the use and relevance to the Chinese socialist market economy of a theoreticalframework developed from research undertaken in organisations functioning as part of theWestern socio-economic system of market capitalism. We focus on the role ofresponsiveness in distinguishing formal and informal change, the distinction in questiongiving rise to varieties in the kinds of coupling occurring simultaneously in the sameorganisation. We show that the functionings of coupling are dynamic and that assessingthem is facilitated through comparison over time in one location and with concurrentcircumstances in other locations. We suggest that some of the non-responsiveness/resistancerelates to the socio-economic system in China being community-based economic, ratherthan neo-classical economic, and how this difference is manifested in the production sphere,and investigating this further would be valuable.