Operators of private tutoring business in Chongqing, China : entrepreneurship in multiple social cognitive inclusions

Abstract

Since the 1990s, private tutoring has quickly expanded worldwide. In China, it has evolved into a major industry that involves various walks of actors including students, parents, mainstream teachers, private tutors, policymakers, entrepreneurs, etc. Though the literature has studied private tutoring from multiple perspectives, few studies focus on private tutoring entrepreneurs (PTEs), regardless of their influence on the industry, education, and society. To address the gap to some extent, this study aims to explore the entrepreneurship of PTEs in Chongqing, China. Based on Karl Weick’s theory of organizing, this study conceptualizes private tutoring entrepreneurship as a sensemaking process of organizing. According to the theory, PTEs are simultaneously included in multiple social cognitive spaces or Spaces. Thus, due to multiple inclusion, their entrepreneurship can be understood as sensemaking in multiple spaces. A Space has four features: spatial (where), temporal (when), cognitive (what, why, and how), and social (who). It subsumes a group of actors interacting on certain themes, at a certain time, in certain places, abiding by certain rules both/either constructed by themselves and/or imposed by the contextual environment. So, the theoretical framework provides a powerful tool to explore influencing drivers that fuels private tutoring entrepreneurship. Narrative inquiry was chosen to serve the research purpose. Twenty PTEs in Chongqing were recruited for the study (maximum variation sampling). Data were collected through 36 in-depth interviews, multiple informal talks, 16-month-long observations, work documents, and websites of tutoring companies. Using critical events as pivots, twenty entrepreneurial narratives were constructed with NVivo 12. Findings reveal that PTEs enacted their businesses far beyond their tutoring organizations, thus entrepreneurship in multiple inclusions. Entrepreneurs’ sensemaking demonstrates a progressive developmental pattern. Then, a four-stage model is proposed to conceptualize offline private tutoring entrepreneurship in China. The model describes how PTEs enter the private tutoring industry (preparatory stage), how they stabilize their initial organizations (founding stage), how they expand their business from one center to multiple centers (growth stage), and how they create more configurations to battle the organizational reification (bottleneck stage). Along the processes, PTEs widely use guanxi to support their businesses. As pioneering research on PTEs in China, this study makes several contributions. Theoretically, it applies Weick’s theory to private tutoring, enriching sensemaking by exploring organizing in multiple spaces. Besides, it integrates sensemaking into networking processes, examining the interplay between human agency and contexts. The mechanisms underlying networking processes may contribute to the general discussion of social network analysis that is predominately quantitative. Methodologically, this study reveals why critical events and guanxi contacts are qualitatively more crucial than general events and contacts, the use of which is proved to be useful to validate data. Practically, the study also documents some business guidelines for prospective private tutoring operators, in-depth operation information for potential consumers, and some covert entrepreneurial practices and strategies for policymakers and inspectors who want to better regulate shadow education.