Dave Flynn

Small Business Survival

Abstract Previous evidence given for some of the significant costs of survival for private enterprises in Guangzhou suggested that entrepreneurs may pay a significant amount in the form of dinners, gifts, and other offerings to insure survival. As a follow-up to that preliminary study, data have been collected from a cross-section of industries formally operationalizing the “costs” of survival as the means for maintaining legitimacy. The cultural context for such costs/offerings is hypothesized to be through guanxi, a traditional way of establishing social and business networks. The analyses herein suggest that guanxi costs are significantly higher for private enterprises versus all other enterprises types, i.e., state, private, township and village, domestic and foreign enterprises. Also, consistent with its cultural context, quanxi is consider to be equally important in business as in life for all types of Chinese enterprises.

The Impact of National Culture on the Continuous Learning Environment

Abstract Companies spend billions of dollars on formalized training, and other less formal methods of learning are perhaps even more pervasive. For these expenditures to be fruitful, organizations must ensure that their employees continually learn from an appropriate mix of sourcestraining and otherwise-and that the work environment encourages the acquisition and application of new skills and ideas. This exploratory research examined the continuous learning environment in four countries: United States, Japan, Korea, and China. The goals of this research were to (1) examine whether a continuous learning environment survey developed in the United States would translate well into other languages, and (2) gather initial data on the patterns of factors that influence continuous learning in these countries. Results suggest that the importance of learning, the sources of learning, and the conditions under which continuous learning is enhanced differ among countries. Implications for future research are presented.