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China’s rapid economic growth since 1978 has made the country an important place to examine. This growth, though raising 800 million people out of poverty, has also created challenges for the state, one of which is how to integrate China into the global economy, and how to create understanding between distinct business practices. Increasing trade between China and the rest of the world has made it necessary to understand different cultural business practices to avoid conflict and misunderstandings. Another challenge for China is the increasing economic independence of women, which has resulted in the need to address gender inequality in the workplace in terms of women’s experience in their careers. This is a micro-ethnographic study of a Chinese bank in a medium sized city on the east coast of China, and I collected the data between July to September 2012. This includes over 492 hours of observation in the working practices of the bank, examination of 164 documents, and interviews with 51 managerial employees. The study focuses specifically on woman managers in the bank, and examines how they made their decision to work in banking, how their career developed and how they understand gender equality in the bank. It also examines whether they experience discrimination because of their gender, in what is usually regarded as a male dominated career. The study found that the women managers negotiate their gender positions moving between the established feminine and masculine characteristics in their role as managers depending on the context. However more relevant to the female managers is the cultural context of working in a Chinese bank. Guanxi was a prominent feature in this study; this was in terms of recruitment, promotion, discrimination and job allocation. The study argues that guanxi has adapted to the political, social and economic development of China, but continues to be essential for understanding Chinese culture and gender relations in the bank, which would be relevant in other industries in China. The implication is that to work with Chinese companies, other countries need to have a deeper understanding of how guanxi operates if they are able to successfully operate in a Chinese context. Furthermore, this study also postulates that traditional Chinese cultural values promote informal flexible work for women, protect their career progress during their maternity leave, encourage cooperation at work, and encourage commitment to the bank. This study contributes to the discussion on Chinese women’s career in management and argues that categories such as collectivism, individualism, feminism, and masculinity are too narrow for the complexity of the modern Chinese professional woman.

The broad aim of this study is to understand and model the nature of the psychological contract and its breaches within the relatively un-researched context of the Chinese banking call center industry, and uses the results to arrive at recommendations for improving supervisor-subordinate relationships in these and similar situations, with a particular focus on responding to the questions regarding how employee work attitudes remain positive when negative experience arise (i.e., breach of psychological contract) within high-quality of social exchange relationship. The thesis builds upon two studies, each having its own objective: Study one seeks to investigate the contents and the structure of the psychological contract of banking call center employees in China; Study two contains two parts. In the first part, it first redefines the indigenous concept supervisor-subordinate guanxi (SSG) in the context of Chinese banking call center, and then to examine the relationship between SSG quality and its effects on employee work attitudes. Based on this, it develops and tests a mediation model in which perceived breaches of psychological contract (PCB) is hypothesized as partially mediating such a relationship; The second parts of Study two intends to investigate the moderating effect of SSG quality in the relationship between perceived PCB and employee work attitudes. The main results of this investigation suggest that the structure of psychological contract in Chinese banking call center employees exhibits three-dimensions, namely, interpersonal, development, and normal. Moreover, perceived PCB is found to partially mediate the effects of SSG quality on affective commitment, organizational identification, job satisfaction, and turnover intention. Our results also reveal that SSG quality moderates the relationship between contract breach and employee work attitudes. The findings of the present study highlight the interconnection of SSG quality and psychological contract processes. Additionally, this study also shed light on several important issues for managerial practice in the same or similar contexts.

This thesis aims to contribute to the under-researched area of China's financial system and its role of fostering firm growth. This is achieved by investigating three aspects of the efficiency of the Chinese financial system. The first aspect focuses on the suppliers of financial resources (i.e. banks) and examines the cost efficiency and productivity growth of the Chinese banking industry. The second aspect considers the recipients of finance---manufacturing firms, and investigates how source of finance in firm's capital structure affects its growth performance. The third aspect concentrates on a particular growth channel (exporting) and investigates the interaction between access to domestic finance, foreign direct investment, and the exports of private enterprises. Overall, I find that the Chinese banks lack cost efficiency, the allocation of financial resources through state-owned financial institutions is inefficient, and there is a positive association between access to finance and export market orientation.

This thesis aims at investigating the financial stability of China's banking system. Since the banking system is one of the most important financial intermediaries in the financial systems, the financial soundness of banks could secure the stability of the whole financial system. Two of the factors that may significantly increase imbalance of the banking system, and hence affect financial stability of an economy is the accumulated non-performing loans of banks and the macro-economic turbulences. This fact raises the questions of how macroeconomic condition, as a determinant of systemic distress, can be assessed more comprehensively and consistently, and what the implications are for modelling it within an integrated credit risk framework. The aim of this thesis is addressing these issues. We develop a framework for macro stress-testing of China's banking system. Our estimates of the correlations between banks' stability indicators and macroeconomic factors establish significant relationships between the non-performing loan ratio and key macro-economic variables, such as GDP growth, the retail price index, the unemployment rate, total fixed investment, the money supply, interest rates and exchange rates. Further, results from the macro stress tests show that robustness, or otherwise, of the banking system is highly dependent on the source of the potential risk. Our value-at-risk tests suggest that (at a 99% confidence level) the Chinese banking system is robust with respect to interest rate shocks. However, GDP growth and exchange rate shocks exhibit a profound negative effect, indicating that significant losses become likely. We also examine the determinants of non-performing loan ratio for regional China‘s banking system, using data from 2002 to 2011 for 31 regions in China. Our estimations suggest that the non-performing loan ratio worsens with decreasing economic growth, shrinking export and property market depression. Further, with the help of a probit model, we identify the leading indicators of banking distress and estimate the banking distress probability for regional China. Moreover, this study provides an overview of banking system stability in the geographical distribution of these indicators. The findings show there are significant relationships between the regional banking distress indicator and key macroeconomic variables, such as GDP growth, the consumer price index, the unemployment rate, and house price. Based on the findings, we designed an early-warning system to monitor banking stability of regional China. These results should prove informative for policymakers and regulators alike, regarding awareness of loss-limitation in China‘s banking system, the banking distress signals and macro-prudential perspectives to monitor the potential risk exposure of the banking system in China's regions.

In contrast with conventional economic, political and institutional studies of corporate governance, the present thesis brings together varieties of capitalism (VoC) and discursive institutional approaches in order to analyze how corporate governance is constituted in Chinese banking organizations. The discursive institutions which produce and reproduce national arrangements of corporate governance in banking are analyzed as operating across three related levels; namely, legitimacy, paradigm, and frame. By comparison with the existing national models of corporate governance in banking, the thesis holds that the corporate governance of Chinese banks has a hybrid form that combines elements of the Continental stakeholder model, the Anglo-Saxon shareholder model, and the State-affected model. The thesis finds that the Chinese discursive institutional configuration largely shapes bank governance and is thus crucial to establishing a governance structure that is clearly distinguishable from other models. Specifically, the thesis demonstrates that the embedded discursive institutions that legitimate relations between banking and the national economy, forms of financial regulation and legal provisions in the Chinese context also legitimate a particular form of corporate governance in Chinese banking organizations. In terms of paradigm, the thesis shows how the legitimacy discourse is manifested in the competing paradigmatic shareholder and stakeholder models which are combined and integrated in the Chinese context. At the frame level, the present study elaborates on the key practical discourses in bank corporate governance in China - the board of directors, regulation of executive pay, risk management, and legal obligations, and finds that they are broadly consistent with the distinctive national discourses of the legitimacy and paradigm. For instance, implicated by the enhanced shareholder model and the stakeholder model, the bank board is oriented towards sustainable profitability to the shareholders, active support for economic development, and balance of interests of various stakeholders. The composition of the bank executive pay and specific regulatory measures, on the other hand, reveals the influence of close financial regulation and the state as the controlling shareholder in Chinese context. In risk management, echoing the paradigm of the stakeholder theory, Chinese banks have moderate risk appetites and concentrate on long-term profitability, real economic investment and sustainable development, which also represents the concerns for the financial stability by the regulators and their close supervision of the banks. For legal duties, which include the compliance duty and the fiduciary duty, the manifestation of a strong financial regulation is present, typically exemplified in shaping various standards and qualifications of legal duties.

Performance appraisal is one of the most popular and widely studied areas in human resource management, industrial relations and organizational psychology. However, most research in this area has been conducted in the USA or UK and reflects a Western context. Some studies on performance appraisal in Chinese organizations have been carried out, but, in the main, these concentrated on the periods of command economy (1949-1984) and transitional economy (1985-1997). In recent years, more and more Chinese state-owned companies and private companies have started to reform their performance appraisal system, by adopting Western style performance appraisal systems. However, there has to date been no academic research on performance appraisal system in Chinese companies with different types of ownership in a market context. The Chinese cultural factor “guanxi” has been found to be one of the most important cultural factors which influences performance appraisal in Chinese organizations. Nonetheless, no study has clearly analysed how guanxi influences performance appraisal in Chinese companies, leaving a significant research gap in our understanding of the impact of guanxi on appraisal and its outcomes. Therefore, this thesis conducted in-depth case studies, consisting of both quantitative (employee survey) and qualitative research (interviews) methodology, on the performance appraisal system in three banks with different ownerships in China, exploring a range of research objectives drawing on performance appraisal theories, justice theories, and guanxi and guanxi practices theories. Based on the results of the pilot study, a scale, which includes two factors “guanxi’s impact on outcome” and “guanxi’s impact on communication”, was developed to measure the impact of guanxi on performance appraisal in Chinese organizations. The statistical analysis of the employee survey indicated that guanxi’s impact on appraisal outcome was negatively related to employees’ perceptions of distributive justice, procedural justice, satisfaction with performance ratings and trust in supervisors; while no significant relationship has been found in this study between guanxi’s impact on communication and employees’ attitudes and behaviour. According to the comparative study of the appraisal system in the state-owned bank, foreign bank and city bank, significant differences of employees’ reactions to guanxi in appraisal, appraisal fairness and appraisal itself were found among these three banks. The employees in state-owned banks perceive less fairness and satisfaction with appraisal, but greater and stronger guanxi impact on appraisal, compared to employees in the foreign and city banks.

China's banking sector has undergone remarkable changes during the last two decades, and banks in China today face more competitive pressure than ever before. The objective of this thesis is to investigate the efficiency and competition of the major Chinese banks over the period 1985-2002. After reviewing the evolution of the banking sector over the past half-century, the thesis addresses an important aspect of competition: X-efficiency and its potential correlates. X-efficiency is found to be as low as 40%-50% on average, suggesting that it is an important issue which should receive more attention from researchers, bank regulators and managers. State-owned banks are found to be less X-efficient than joint-stock banks, confirming the need for a shift in favour of shareholder owned banks. X-efficiency is also found to be more pronounced in the first stage of banking reform, implying that further interest rate liberalisation is necessary to help bank managers to be better able to control their costs. Tests for the presence of economies of scale and scope follow. The evidence is mixed but suggests that banks' cost structures may improve if the law prohibiting universal banking is relaxed. Finally, both the market-power and efficient-structure hypotheses are examined using a random effects panel data model. Some evidence is found to support the relevant market-power hypothesis and the X-efficiency version of the efficient-structure hypothesis for banks in the first and second reform stages, respectively, suggesting that the government's gradual approach to reform has improved the competitive structure of the banking sector. However, policy should be directed at enabling the more efficient banks to gain larger market shares. For example, the expansion of the joint-stock banks should be encouraged. There is little evidence of a 'quiet life' for the big four (state-owned) banks. However, while interest rate liberalisation should improve bank efficiency, policy makers must be aware of possible negative effects such as excessive market power, 'quiet life' effects, and other anti-competitive behaviour.