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Kinship Networks, Village Industry, and Max Weber
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commercial and legal disputes and providing trustworthy access to opportunities and resources in unstable political and economic environments. Furthermore, imitated kinship relations (guanxi networks) can grow beyond the boundaries of kinship groups and operate in ever widening circles. Wong actually played down the importance of kinship networks in Hong Kong’s textile industry. “In Chinese economic conduct the crucial distinction is not that of kin and non-kin, but personal and impersonal.” “While the kin circle is finite and bound, the personalized economic network used by the Chinese can reach widely…;family ties only serve as the nucleus from which a Chinese can spin a web of ever-widening social circles.” (Wong 1988, pp.136-7).
Even though most of the above analyses were concerned with why familism
should be healthy for family enterprises rather than kinship per se, many can be extended to kinship networks. We summarize the kinship network as social capital argument in following hypothesis.
H1b. Kinship networks are positively correlated with the emergence of rural
enterprises in Chinese villages.
However, that the kinship organization itself is directly involved in the setting-up
and operation of enterprises. Rather it is the individual families within the kinship that produce the entrepreneurs. Kinship organization only provided support for private entrepreneurs and protected them against cadre predations. I use Coleman’s distinction between community and a corporate actor to distinguish kinship networks and collective organization in Chinese villages. According to Coleman (1990: 539-540), a community is the group of natural persons who may bind themselves together through collective action to pursue their common interests. “But in a corporation a new entity has been created, whose interests and resources are distinct from those who brought it into being” (p. 539). Sib organization was once the “corporate actor” in rural China as observed by Weber nearly a century ago, but collective farms replaced it. The image of village collective organization as a corporate actor was emphatically captured by local corporatism theory (Walder 1995; Oi 1999). The village collective legally owns the farmland, and sometimes operates rural enterprises, engage in real estate development and so on. The village government, as the executive office of the village corporation, may or may not act in the interests of the villagers. But it is a corporate entity with its own resources and interests. Kinship organization, on the other hand, has been reduced to a purely social and cultural community with a common identity based on blood ties. But such community has a lot of social capital, enabling its members to engage in effective collective action. One of these collective actions was to protect the property rights of its members.
H2: Kinship network has a stronger impact on private entrepreneurship than
on collective enterprises.
D
ATA
,
M
EASUREMENT AND METHOD
I use two data sources. The first data set was collected by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) as a part of its "guo qing" survey between 1991-1994. Three
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6
commercial and legal disputes and providing trustworthy access to opportunities and
resources in unstable political and economic environments. Furthermore, imitated
kinship relations (guanxi networks) can grow beyond the boundaries of kinship groups
and operate in ever widening circles. Wong actually played down the importance of
kinship networks in Hong Kong’s textile industry. “In Chinese economic conduct the
crucial distinction is not that of kin and non-kin, but personal and impersonal.” “While
the kin circle is finite and bound, the personalized economic network used by the
Chinese can reach widely…;family ties only serve as the nucleus from which a Chinese
can spin a web of ever-widening social circles.” (Wong 1988, pp.136-7).
Even though most of the above analyses were concerned with why familism
should be healthy for family enterprises rather than kinship per se, many can be
extended to kinship networks. We summarize the kinship network as social capital
argument in following hypothesis.
H1b. Kinship networks are positively correlated with the emergence of rural
enterprises in Chinese villages.
However, that the kinship organization itself is directly involved in the setting-up
and operation of enterprises. Rather it is the individual families within the kinship that
produce the entrepreneurs. Kinship organization only provided support for private
entrepreneurs and protected them against cadre predations. I use Coleman’s distinction
between community and a corporate actor to distinguish kinship networks and
collective organization in Chinese villages. According to Coleman (1990: 539-540), a
community is the group of natural persons who may bind themselves together through
collective action to pursue their common interests. “But in a corporation a new entity
has been created, whose interests and resources are distinct from those who brought it
into being” (p. 539). Sib organization was once the “corporate actor” in rural China as
observed by Weber nearly a century ago, but collective farms replaced it. The image of
village collective organization as a corporate actor was emphatically captured by local
corporatism theory (Walder 1995; Oi 1999). The village collective legally owns the
farmland, and sometimes operates rural enterprises, engage in real estate development
and so on. The village government, as the executive office of the village corporation,
may or may not act in the interests of the villagers. But it is a corporate entity with its
own resources and interests. Kinship organization, on the other hand, has been reduced
to a purely social and cultural community with a common identity based on blood ties.
But such community has a lot of social capital, enabling its members to engage in
effective collective action. One of these collective actions was to protect the property
rights of its members.
H2: Kinship network has a stronger impact on private entrepreneurship than
on collective enterprises.
D
ATA
,
M
EASUREMENT AND METHOD
I use two data sources. The first data set was collected by the Chinese Academy of
Social Sciences (CASS) as a part of its "guo qing" survey between 1991-1994. Three
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