This book explores social innovation and entrepreneurship in China. Focusing on selected social enterprises and processes, it addresses the question of "why China?", not in terms of military, economic or political ambitions, but in the terms of social innovation and welfare policies. The analyses range from detailed ethnography to discussions of broad global trends. Despite vastly improved social conditions in the country, there are still unresolved issues that social enterprises address. The study elaborates on the complexities involved in their positioning between the state and their beneficiaries. Adding to the complexity is China’s dual system of circulation and the moral economy of ethnic minorities. The theoretical foundation of the study is the Durkheimian concept of the social contract. Its content is viewed as comprised of Maussian total social facts or guanxi, a similar Chinese framing, operationalised to particular socio-cultural configurations. The empirical cases document how social enterprises reposition elements in the various configurations in order to mobilise resources from their stakeholders. The book concludes that the discursive topology is altered in the process and the social contract is renewed in culturally meaningful, if paradoxical, ways. This book will be of interest to researchers, students and academics in the fields of business and social entrepreneurship, especially to those with a particular interest in the Chinese case.

This book incorporates theoretical framework and management cases in discussions on social enterprise in China. The authors look to address two fundamental questions about social enterprises in China that have been very controversial over the years. First, what is social enterprise? This book proposes a framework that defines Chinese social enterprises based on social entrepreneurship, and includes ten case studies for justification. Second, who are well-performed social enterprises with financial viability and proved social impact? The book describes in detail some of the leading social enterprises in China. It is aimed at a wide target audience. Practitioners will learn experience and lessons from the case studies. Academics can use the cases in different teaching contexts, and gain research inspirations from our framework and case studies. Policy makers, accreditation agencies, professional service providers, and institutional investors will learn to identify and evaluate promising social enterprises.

With business advice from an expert entrepreneur, learn how to identify and leverage the key factors that will bring sustainability and success to your startup. Kathleen Kelly Janus, a lecturer at the Stanford University Program on Social Entrepreneurship and the founder of the successful social enterprise Spark, set out to investigate what makes a startup succeed or fail. She surveyed more than 200 high-performing social entrepreneurs and interviewed dozens of founders. Social Startup Success shares her findings for the legions of entrepreneurs working for social good, revealing how the best organizations get over the revenue hump. How do social ventures scale to over $2 million, Janus's clear benchmark for a social enterprise's sustainability? ​Janus, tapping into strong connections to the Silicon Valley world where many of these ventures are started or and/or funded, reveals insights from key figures such as DonorsChoose founder Charles Best, charity:water's Scott Harrison, Reshma Saujani of Girls Who Code and many others. Social Startup Success will be social entrepreneurship's essential playbook; the first definitive guide to solving the problem of scale.

‘Shaping Social Enterprise’ helps researchers, policymakers, practitioners, and international development actors better understand various institutional paths of social enterprise development and where institutional strengths and weaknesses may be located.

Wang offers an empirically based exploration into work-integration social enterprises as a means for delivering social services in China. Focusing on the political economy of social enterprise development in China, Wang examines the nature of the relationship between the state and social enterprises and the implications of such relationships for their institutional effectiveness. She adopts a bottom-up approach that investigates indigenous practices embedded within the local political context. Common ground has been established internationally that the social enterprise model provides new ways of social service delivery that could potentially change and restructure the social welfare economy. However, the development path differs across social contexts, especially in an authoritarian country like China. This study provides insights into China's efforts to develop its social welfare sector and reinvigorate customary ideas about how public services could be better offered given the country's political economy. This book will be of great interest to both scholars of China’s political economy and those with an interest in the development of the social enterprise sector looking to see how this works in a Chinese context.

Written by one of the most distinguished experts on China's economic and business history, China and Capitalism provides a highly original and at the same time clear and readable approach to understanding the development of business in China from 1500 to the 1990s. David Faure then uses the picture he has assembled to shed new light on the strengths and weaknesses of Chinese business today. The book is written to be accessible to people with little background in China or Chinese business practice. Dr Faure describes three phases in the development of Chinese business from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. In the traditional phase, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, Chinese business relied on contracts as well as on ritual propriety. In the modernizing phase, from the second half of the nineteenth century to the first half of the twentieth century, Chinese business had to adapt to the introduction of company law and legal standards of accounting. In the contemporary phase, from the middle of the twentieth century to the present day, China emerged from a control economy to a vibrant market by embracing once again the changes introduced in the modernizing phase. General readers, including students and teachers in courses touching on but not primarily devoted to the Chinese experience, will find in this book the most comprehensive account of China's business development in the last five centuries and many insights into the workings of China's modern business scene. Specialist readers will find a highly original approach to the history of business in China.

When, how, and why did the state enterprise system of modern China take shape? The conventional argument is that China borrowed its economic system and development strategy wholesale from the Soviet Union in the 1950s. In an important new interpretation, Bian shows instead that the basic institutional arrangement of state-owned enterprise--bureaucratic governance, management and incentive mechanisms, and the provision of social services and welfare--developed in China during the war years 1937-1945.

This volume assesses the evolving role of guanxi (social networks) in China's transforming society.

Social enterprises represent a new kind of venture, dedicated to pursuing profits for owners and benefits for society. Social Enterprise Law provides tools that will allow them to raise the capital they need to flourish. Social Enterprise Law weaves innovation in contract and corporate governance into powerful protections against insiders sacrificing goals such as environmental sustainability in the pursuit of short-term profits. Creating a stable balance between financial returns and public benefits will allow social entrepreneurs to team up with impact investors that share their vision of a double bottom line. Brakman Reiser and Dean show how novel legal technologies can allow social enterprises to access capital markets, including unconventional sources such as crowdfunding. With its straightforward insights into complex areas of the law, the book shows how a social mission can even be shielded from the turbulence of an acquisition or bankruptcy. It also shows why, as the metrics available to measure the impact of social missions on individuals and communities become more sophisticated, such legal innovations will continue to become more robust. By providing a comprehensive survey of the U.S. laws and a bold vision for how legal institutions across the globe could be reformed, this book offers new insights and approaches to help social enterprises raise the capital they need to flourish. It offers a rich guide for students, entrepreneurs, investors, and practitioners.

The emergence of China as a major world economy is of great importance to the global political economy and to international business. There has been much research on the macro level of institutional reform but little detailed work on the grassroots level of entrepreneurship in China. This innovative book addresses this gap by investigating how an economic system dominated by central plans, communist ideologies and suppressing bureaucracies could generate such energy from the bottom of society, fuelling the country's economic growth. Keming Yang’s theory of entrepreneurship is based on two interrelated concepts: double entrepreneurship and institutional holes. He argues that the two concepts bridge a gap between the neo-classical institutionalism of economic development and entrepreneurship studies that emphasize individual choice. The rigorous theoretical framework is supported by substantial empirical research, offering statistical analyses of survey data as well as detailed case studies. This timely book will appeal to an interdisciplinary readership in sociology, economics, business studies and Chinese and Asian Studies.