This symposium explores Chinese people-management as an academic subject, looking at where it is currently going and the likely direction of its progress. After the economic reforms introduced by Deng Xiaoping in 1978, China saw the introduction of Human Resource Management (HRM). This book discusses the specific issues which are relevant to its evolution in China, in particular whether there is a dominant ‘paradigm’ in the field and whether there might be a new one in the making. It looks at the possibility of a ‘theory of Chinese management’ or ‘Chinese theory of management’. This comprehensive volume covers a wide range of topics, including charismatic leadership, employee commitment, creativity, ‘guanxi’, job security, knowledge-generation, mentorship, national identity and organizational innovation, all in the context of Chinese HRM. The contributors are experts in their respective fields of management, organizational behaviour, psychology, sociology and related disciplines, and cover a wide range of themes, models and specialisms. This book was originally published as a special issue of The International Journal of Human Resource Management.

This symposium explores Chinese people-management as an academic subject, looking at where it is currently going and the likely direction of its progress. After the economic reforms introduced by Deng Xiaoping in 1978, China saw the introduction of Human Resource Management (HRM). This book discusses the specific issues which are relevant to its evolution in China, in particular whether there is a dominant ‘paradigm’ in the field and whether there might be a new one in the making. It looks at the possibility of a ‘theory of Chinese management’ or ‘Chinese theory of management’. This comprehensive volume covers a wide range of topics, including charismatic leadership, employee commitment, creativity, ‘guanxi’, job security, knowledge-generation, mentorship, national identity and organizational innovation, all in the context of Chinese HRM. The contributors are experts in their respective fields of management, organizational behaviour, psychology, sociology and related disciplines, and cover a wide range of themes, models and specialisms. This book was originally published as a special issue of The International Journal of Human Resource Management.

China has become one of the fastest-growing economies ever seen in the world in recent times. In the last three decades, China has transformed itself from a command economy to a market one, albeit a nominally socialist one, and its management systems have been reformed accordingly. In the light of these changes, Malcolm Warner, one of the leading authorities on management in China, explores the past, present and future of Chinese management. The first part of the work examines the history of management practices in the ‘Middle Kingdom’, outlining the influence of traditional Chinese values, especially the Confucian inheritance, and the legacy of the imperial bureaucracy with its meritocratic examination system, as well as the role of industrialization and the influx of foreign-owned businesses in the late nineteenth century and the twentieth century. It next goes on to consider the current state of China’s management, showing how a new breed of manager has evolved since the beginning of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in the late 1970s and 1980s. The resulting impact of this strategy which has continued into the 1990s and the 2000s, up to the present day, is then examined. The final part of the book concludes with reflections on how management in China is likely to develop in the near future, especially on how far it will converge with global practices or to what degree an indigenous form of management 'with Chinese characteristics' will prevail.

Does guanxi still matter in 21st century Chinese business and management? Is it really still a culturally distinct form of social interaction, impenetrable by outsiders? Or does it simply resemble the countless other elite networks embedded in business and political spheres across the globe? This book answers these questions through a combination of new empirical insight and nuanced conceptual development. Research examples include investigations of multinational enterprise corporate performance, governance structures in Chinese private firms, organisational justice in Chinese banks, entrepreneurial learning and knowledge acquisition, and the gendered and sexualized nature of guanxi in the workplace. In terms of firm performance, there is still much to be gained by MNE and Chinese firms through cultivating guanxi in different domains, including the political sphere at both the local and national level. However, in terms of employee performance, there is evidence that some younger employees have a strong desire to move towards more merit-based systems and resent being judged on guanxi connections. Similarly, some women may find themselves shut out when attempting to navigate conventional guanxi relationships based on Confucian paternalism. In brief, these practices may also exclude a large pool of emerging talent. This book clearly shows that guanxi is a complex concept that holds a persistent power in Chinese societies. To understand it fully we must acknowledge the dynamic nature of both its dark and light sides. The chapters in this book were originally published in a special issue of the Asia Pacific Business Review.

This volume looks at the relationship between society and human resource management (HRM) in China. In doing so it asks how representative the latter is of the former. The contributors argue that there needs to be a minimum degree of consonance between these two variables if HRM is to be sufficiently underpinned by social reality. It is only in a wider framework that ‘people-management’ in general – and in China in particular – can be fully understood, whether through theory or through practice. Society and HRM in China explores the changes in Chinese society over the last century and then goes on to analyse how these changes have shaped China’s HRM. Arguably, HRM did not emerge from the void; it was shaped by the societal culture from which it sprung and the economic forces influencing its institutions and organizations. However, there is very little academic literature about the relationship between contemporary Chinese society and its HRM which isn’t extremely specific. As such, much of the research in this collection is not only relatively representative but also highly cross-sectional. The contributions are all drawn from experts in the field across the disciplines, hailing from a diverse range of national origins and educational institutions. They cover a wide range of topics, approaches and emphases. This book was originally published as a special issue of The International Journal of Human Resource Management.

Suggests important ramifications for both Western and Eastern Human Resources Practices and is the first research of its kind to empirically investigate the effect of Chinese core values, which originated from Chinese traditional thinking, on HRM practices in China.