ABSTRACT
From modest beginnings as commune and brigade enterprises (CBEs) the rurally based TVEs have emerged to be a crucial element in China’s economic development. In 1984 when TVEs were formally established there were 6.06 million enterprises, employing 52 million rural residents and generating 171 million RMB. Some 15 years later, on the completion of the ninth-year plan in 2000 there were 20.84 million enterprises, employing 128.12 million and generating a total output of 11.62 billion RMB – representing over 34 per cent of GDP (China Statistical Yearbook, 1990, 2001). Throughout this period annual growth rates have varied from 8 to 40 per cent and typically have averaged 19 per cent. It is against this background of remarkable growth that the chapter explores the reality of how this has happened from one particular perspective. Although originally a poor relation to state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in terms of their interest to academic researchers the last ten years has seen increasing attention paid by scholars to TVEs to help understand their success (e.g. Byrd and Gelb, 1990; Naughton, 1992; Dong and Putterman, 1997; Jefferson, 1999; Luo, 1999; Tong, 1999; Fu and Balasubramanyam, 2003). Mainly these significant contributions are predominately economic analyses concerned with
aggregations of enterprises. However, in this research we were interested in the individual organization as the unit of analysis, and in particular the processes within the enterprise that help explain their strategic development. To do this the chapter is organized into five sections. In the following section some additional background, including a historical perspective, on TVEs is given. The sections on Approach and Theory explain the approach to the research and the theoretical framework. The section on Case narratives 5 describes the individual narratives for each of the three case organizations. Finally, in the penultimate and concluding section we provide the interpretation of the narratives in theoretical terms and some issues for the future.
