ABSTRACT
At the beginning of Chapter 7, we remarked that there were not many formal studies of how Chinese firms do marketing. The same cannot be said of organisations and human resource management. Here there has been a positive flood of recent works by both Chinese and Western scholars on the nature and culture of Chinese business organisations. Views range from the notion that Chinese management is rapidly adapting Western methods of organisation and people management, to the exact opposite, that China is distinct and will remain so. A third alternative suggests that both are true and that what is emerging instead is a synthesis which will incorporate key features of Western and Chinese-style management and create a new model or paradigm. But that reconciliation of paradox is not Daoist. The fourth, and probably most likely, alternative has the two philosophies existing side by side and without reconciliation in much the same way that Western and Chinese medicine co-exist in China.
