Essays on the rise of Chinese synthetic dye industry, 1978-2008
Abstract
This dissertation inquires how late entrants in emerging economies build up their capabilities to compete in technologically mature industries at the global level by examining the rise to global leadership of new Chinese synthetic dye enterprises since 1978 as example. 59 interviews were conducted and a large amount of archival data was collected, both of which were coded and analyzed using NVIVO 8. Overall, this dissertation contributes to evolutionary, institutionalist, and social network literature by providing a nuanced interpretation of industry migration and start-up growth by combining the above three views together. To provide a background for later chapters, the first chapter investigates the post-1978 changes in four Chinese institutions and differences in their speed of change at national and regional levels. In the second chapter, I examine the role of four institutional arrangements in shaping the ownership-based competitiveness of local dye enterprises and the migration of dye manufacturing in China. It documents for the first time that the migration of leadership from state-owned enterprises to collectively-owned enterprises and then to private enterprises was accompanied by a concurrent leadership migration from one region to another. To explain the two simultaneous leadership migrations, an institution-based evolutionary model has been proposed in the study. The model is likely to apply to all the Chinese manufacturing industries, which existed prior to 1978, but subsequently, neither experienced significant technological changes nor were highly protected by the government. In my third chapter, I focus on six cases of private dye start-ups in Zhejiang after 1978, to explore the two understudied questions: (i) what knowledge is acquired by new venture start-ups through their founders' network relationships with employees of incumbent firms? and (ii) what knowledge acquired through this mechanism, during foundation, underlies the long-term success of such start-ups? From the focal context, I find ...
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