Abstract
Drawing on imprinting theory and the attention-based view of strategy, this study extends previous literature on the implications of imprinting for opportunity selection by examining how Chinese entrepreneurs’ socialist imprinting from their formative experiences in the Danwei system guides them to pursue lucrative policy-induced opportunities arising from government deregulation, reform, and incentives in certain industries. Using data from 3803 privately owned enterprises in China, we find that (1) privately owned enterprises with entrepreneurs bearing the socialist imprint are more likely to act on policy-induced opportunities to make a quick profit; (2) the relationship between socialist imprinting and the selection of these opportunities is mediated by the entrepreneurs’ attention to government policies; (3) the positive association between socialist imprinting and the selection of these opportunities is less salient for privately owned enterprises located in regions with higher institutional development.
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Notes
Shepherd, McMullen, and Ocasio (2017) also use the term “knowledge structures”.
Note the deregulation was not prevalent in all sectors. According to Huang (2008), at least in some industries, Chinese government posed more intensive regulations rather than deregulations. In this paper, we choose to look at the financial and real estate sectors because these sectors experienced very dramatic deregulations, which make them appropriate for testing our theory.
The planned economy ear refers to the time period of 1949 through 1992. In the year of 1992, the 14th China Communist Party Congress established the goal of building socialist market system, which became the point of departure for China to shift to a market economy.
We explore the possibility of political ties as the mediating variable in the post-hoc analysis and discuss this issue in the discussion section.
To be exactly, 513 POEs (13%) in our sample entered both the real estate and private lending businesses; 640 POEs (17%) entered the real estate industry exclusively; 631 POEs (17%) entered the private lending exclusively. Overall, 1784 incumbent POEs (47%) in our sample pursued opportunities that emerged in the real estate and private lending businesses in China.
The survey conducted in 2008 does not contain relevant questions concerning entrepreneurial attention to government policies.
We thank the reviewer for his/her insightful comment on this point.
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Acknowledgements
The study is partially supported by the Nation Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant # 71672168; # 71202173; # 71502160; # 71402056), the Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang Province (Grant # LY16G020020), the Soft Science Research Program of Zhejiang Province (Grant # 2016C35017), as well as the Key Research Base of Philosophy and Social Science of Zhejiang Province (Grant # 15JDZS03YB).
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Dai, W., Liu, Y., Liao, M. et al. How does entrepreneurs’ socialist imprinting shape their opportunity selection in transition economies? Evidence from China’s privately owned enterprises. Int Entrep Manag J 14, 823–856 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11365-017-0485-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11365-017-0485-0