🎉   Please check out our new website over at books-etc.com.

Seller
Your price
£30.26
RRP: £48.00
Save £17.74 (37%)
Printed on Demand
Dispatched within 7-9 working days.

Dragon in a Three-Piece Suit

The Emergence of Capitalism in China

By (author) Doug Guthrie
Format: Paperback / softback
Publisher: Princeton University Press, New Jersey, United States
Published: 15th Jan 2002
Dimensions: w 156mm h 234mm d 17mm
Weight: 449g
ISBN-10: 0691095191
ISBN-13: 9780691095196
Barcode No: 9780691095196
Trade or Institutional customer? Contact us about large order quotes.
Synopsis
Dragon in a Three-Piece Suit is an innovative sociological examination of what is perhaps the main engine of economic reform in China, the large industrial firm. Doug Guthrie, who spent more than a year in Shanghai studying firms, interviewing managers, and gathering data on firms' performance and practices, provides the first detailed account of how these firms have been radically transformed since the mid-1980s. Guthrie shows that Chinese firms are increasingly imitating foreign firms in response both to growing contact with international investors and to being cut adrift from state support. Many firms, for example, are now less likely to use informal hiring practices, more likely to have formal grievance filing procedures, and more likely to respect international institutions, such as the Chinese International Arbitration Commission. Guthrie argues that these findings support the de-linking of Western trade policy from human rights, since it is clear that economic engagement leads to constructive reform. Yet Guthrie also warns that reform in China is not a process of inevitable Westernization or of managers behaving as rational, profit-maximizing agents. Old habits, China's powerful state administration, and the hierarchy of the former command economy will continue to have profound effects on how firms act and how they adjust to change. With its combination of rigorous argument and uniquely rich detail, this book gives us the most complete picture yet of Chinese economic reform at the crucial level of the industrial firm.

New & Used

Seller Information Condition Price
-New£30.26
+ FREE UK P & P

What Reviewers Are Saying

Submit your review
Newspapers & Magazines
"[Guthrie] provides an admirably clear and detailed exposition of who runs what in reformera industry in China, complete with diagrams... This book is essential reading for anyone interested in China's economic reforms and in transition economies more generally, and it will stand comparison with anything else in the field."--Jackie Sheehan, The Times Higher Education Supplement "A splendid book... Dragon in a Three-Piece Suit provides a comprehensive examination of an important and timely phenomenon. The question is important. The data are not only unique, they are also remarkably comprehensive... [It is] likely to stimulate both discussion and additional research."--Lisa A. Keister, Contemporary Sociology