Next month, I’ll be presenting a co-authored paper at at the Connecting Eastern & Western Perspectives on Management, Warwick Business School. The conference, which has been organized by the Society for the Advancement of Management Studies, takes place 21st-23rd March 2016. The keynote speakers for this year’s conference are confirmed as Professor Paul Beamish (Ivey Business School) and Professor Yadong Luo (University of Miami). The central theme of the conference is “The exchange of academic knowledge increasingly flows in both directions, from West to East and East to West. This conference seeks to help establish a foundation for further development of this fertile exchange of ideas between East and West. We hope also to develop not only how the East may form boundary conditions to the established theories in the West, but also help to lay the foundation for indigenous theory building from the East.” For more details about the Special Issue of JMS that will come out of this conference, see here.

Our paper addresses this theme, although we also seek to problematize the concepts of East and West with our paper. I’ve pasted the abstract below.

Unfortunately, my wonderful co-author Miriam Kaminishi of the School of Business at the   Macau University of Science and Technology cannot come to Warwick for the conference, so I will be presenting solo. (I will be presenting alongside Miriam about a week later at the Business History Conference in Oregon, where we will be speaking about a very different co-authored paper we have been working on). Miriam (see picture below) is a fantastic research collaborator who is at the start of her academic career and who will doubtless make important contributions to management research and to the fields of economic history and the history of entrepreneurship.

Recurring Debates in English-Language Analysis of Chinese Entrepreneurship: Towards A Genealogy of Theoretical Frameworks

Abstract:

This paper compares how Chinese entrepreneurship was represented in English-language texts published in two historical periods: 1842-1911 and post-1978. During the first period, Western expatriates advanced a variety of competing explanations for why entrepreneurship was (apparently) less developed in China than in the West. These opinions were shared through the media of books, consular trade reports, newspapers, and learned journals. Since 1978, China has once again been integrated into the world economy and Westerners have resumed their debates about Chinese entrepreneurship. This paper shows that ongoing academic discussion of entrepreneurship in China and other Chinese societies exhibits some striking parallels with the discourses of the pre-1911 period. Our Foucauldian genealogy shows that all lenses for viewing entrepreneurship have historical roots and philosophical foundations of which the scholar may be unconscious. By historicizing present-day theories of entrepreneurship, this paper should encourage greater scholarly reflexivity.

Authors: Andrew Smith*, University of Liverpool Management School; Miriam Kaminishi, School of Business, Macau University of Science and Technology.

Key words: entrepreneurship theory; Chinese entrepreneurship, postcolonialism; Weber; Redding ;Foucauldian genealogy; institutions; culture; religion; Confucianism