Making sense of organizational performance in China : a multiple perspective analysis of the manufacturing industry

Abstract

Despite the growing economic power of Chinese companies, Chinese business practices remain poorly understood and the dominant business paradigm is still not yet formed. The Chinese manufacturing industry has been going through a period with both prosperity and recession in the last 30 years. The Chinese State-Owned Enterprise Reform is an important scheme to turn these enterprises into modern companies and improve their efficiency during the transition from planned economy to market economy. The result of this plan is different to different companies. This paper reviews the impact of this reform on a large SOE, the Shijiazhuang Tractor Plant, which ended in bankruptcy, and gives an overall analysis of the causes by using Multiple Perspective Analysis. The purpose is to illustrate the use of this method to provide a deeper insight of the causes. A framework based on the Multiple Perspective Analysis is developed to find these causes and their relationships. The analysis shows that economic performance is a reflection of all the other influencing factors like technical, organizational, personal, cultural and business environmental factors. In addition, the paper also makes some suggestions of how to overcome the difficulties.