1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910337788503321

Autore

Scranton Philip

Titolo

Enterprise, Organization, and Technology in China [[electronic resource] ] : A Socialist Experiment, 1950−1971 / / by Philip Scranton

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Cham : , : Springer International Publishing : , : Imprint : Palgrave Macmillan, , 2019

ISBN

3-030-00398-1

Edizione

[1st ed. 2019.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (401 pages)

Disciplina

338.040951

Soggetti

Management

Industrial management

Entrepreneurship

China—History

Leadership

Innovation/Technology Management

History of China

Business Strategy/Leadership

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di contenuto

1. Introduction -- 2. Agriculture: Organization for Self-reliance -- 3. Infrastructure as Labor Intensive Development -- 4. Commerce and Socialist Construction -- 5. Industry: From Trial-and-Error to Technology Reform -- 6. Agriculture as the Foundation -- 7. Infrastructure: Reappraisal and Reorientation -- 8. Commerce and the Market Surge -- 9. Consolidating Industry -- 10. Business Practice and the Cultural Revolution -- 11. Afterword.

Sommario/riassunto

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. .