ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to make sense of enterprise reforms in the Chinese state-owned steel industry. In particular, we examine the progress made to date in those state-enterprise experimental reforms that have been developed under the rubric of the Modern Enterprise System (MES) and Group Company System (GCS), and the effects of the successive rounds of workforce downsizing which have accompanied them. In so doing, we develop a line of analysis in concert with both the ‘old’ (DiMaggio and Powell 1991) and ‘new’ (Nee 1998) paradigms of institutional theory in sociology and organization theory, in that we explore the ways in which institutions, as systems of rules, serve to constrain or encourage organizational action, using an empirical case study to examine particular dynamics and outcomes of reform.
