Organizational boundaries in transformation: China's book publishing industry under economic reform.

摘要

This dissertation is an effort to understand how a society undergoing fundamental economic transformation arrives at its distinctive configurations of governance structures that order the economic activities in one of its industries. Governance structures are broadly defined here as the political, economic, and social arrangements between economic actors in an industry or segment that govern the way economic processes are organized and coordinated. Why are there different ways to govern economic activities? What are the conditions under which one form of economic governance changes into another? Economists and sociologists have adopted diverse positions on these questions. While existing literature addresses the organization of economic activities in the institutional environment of a market economy, I try to decipher what happens when the institutional environment is characterized by a mix of market and hierarchical principles. By studying changes in organizational boundaries in the context of China's transformation to a market-oriented economy, I analyze patterns of economic organization as a result of the coexistence of and the interaction between multiple governance mechanisms. My attention to both the process of governance transformations and the institutional context surrounding such transformations also helps us answer the question of "how" governance structures change. Drawing upon a large number of semi-structured interviews as well as a variety of other data sources (official documents, archival records, industry journals and newspapers, business contracts, non-participant observations), I examine the following topics: the institutional context of economic transformation in China's book publishing industry, the industry-wide move toward vertical integration, the reorganization of local industries, the redefinition of industry boundaries with the entry of secondary channel publishers, and the boundaries between government and enterprise.