Changing behavioural logics of Chinese service organisations : how guanxi matters to the county-level trade union organisation in China

Abstract

Guanxi is found to be an essential factor that shapes organisational behaviour in the Chinese context. However, whether guanxi still matters in organisations that have been through market transition is a question under debate. One camp (e.g. Guthrie, 1998, 2002b; Nee & Opper, 2012) contends that marketisation in China brought about the triumph of instrumental logics in organisational behaviour which led to the decrease of guanxi practice in organisations. The opposition offers alternative empirical data to prove that guanxi practice remains salient to organisational behaviour, if not grows stronger (e.g. Bian, 2018; Bian & Huang, 2015; M. M.-H. Yang, 2002). The debate is based on qualitatively different views about guanxi and its operating mechanisms. When instrumental organisational logics meet guanxi in a formal organisation, how do they collectively produce certain behavioural patterns of the CCFTU? How did these behavioural patterns change with China’s progressive market transition? This thesis uses the case of Central County Federation of Trade Unions (CCFTU), a state-sponsored service organisation, as an average case of service organisations under transition, to answer the aforementioned questions. Based on a 10-month ethnographic investigation and archival research, I propose an interactive multiple-process behavioural model for the analysis of organisational behaviour of Chinese service organisations. My study shows that the CCFTU’s behaviour was collectively shaped by formal and informal institutional conditions. Under given formal institutional conditions broadly defined by the state through its social management systems and fiscal policies, guanxi, as normative systems and social networks, create informal institutional conditions that further shape organisational behaviour. The state and guanxi together produce rules for individuals and groups to observe while they are performing multiple social roles in the action arena consisting of concrete stakeholders and social settings. By probing into three dimensions of organisational behaviour, there appears to be a change of behavioural patterns that occurred around the mid-1990s in relation to the duality of guanxi property. In terms of collegial relations, the CCFTU witnessed a tendency shift from fraternal solidarity based on Confucian family values to instrumental solidarity based on actual and ritualised kin ties. A similar tendency was also observed in leadership and management patterns. Around the mid-1990s, when neo-traditional authority became the prevailing norm in lieu of charismatic authority, egocentric control over the CCFTU replaced paternalistic control established by the previous administrations. Lastly, the change of internal guanxi dynamics also made impacts on the CCFTU’s acquisition and mobilisation of instrumental organisational resources. Before the mid-1990s, the CCFTU workers capitalised on Confucian values to develop sentimental or sentiment-derived instrumental guanxi ties to bargain for instrumental organisational resources and demobilise labour contentions. Afterwards, they began to maximise their guanxi networks to co-opt different stakeholders, which gave rise to institutional co-optation and relational demobilisation. This thesis hopes to contribute to the current literature in three ways. First, it engages with the study of organisational behaviour by bringing the state and guanxi together to understand decoupling practices in organisations. Second, it proposes an interactive multiple-process behavioural model as an alternative framework for the studies on Chinese Trade Unions which were primarily constructed on state corporatism or civil society series. Lastly, it may contribute to the whether-guanxi-still-matter debate in guanxi research. The duality of guanxi property — guanxi as normative systems and as social networks — is highlighted. On this basis, I further suggest a situational guanxi practice perspective as a respondent to this theoretical debate.