This work is concerned with the financing of Chinese social entrepreneurship. China is experiencing an all-time high in terms of pollution, as well as increasing social unrest. The introduction of a market economy in the country has led to a rapid economic growth, but has left many issues unsolved. The mass lay-offs that followed therationalization of State-Owned Enterprises in the 1990s created a large unemployment,and the industrialization process has only very recently been accompanied by measures toprotect the environment. To tackle those issues, more and more are appealing to theefficiency of the very same market economy to produce sustainable and scalable solutions.To better understand the financing landscape that presents itself to entrepreneurs in needof capital, a literature and interview-based study has been conducted to summarize it interms of sources, stage, efficiency and average size. Unfortunately, few sources of capital have been found to be available to them, and none of them can be described as easily accessible. It is therefore recommended that the different actors involved in the marketwork together to lower these barriers.

published_or_final_version / Sociology / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / abstract / Public Administration / Master / Master of Public Administration

University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities / Department of Communication

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / A significant literature gap exists in our understanding of the motivating mechanisms for creation of foundations by philanthropists, a rapid paradigm shift that is occurring in many countries. This study aims to address the literature gap by discovering Chinese entrepreneurs' heterogeneous responses to the conditions that may lead to creation of their own foundations. Adopting the institutional entrepreneurship theory, which examines agency/change in breaking from an old institution, the researcher tested and operationalized four major factors derived from the institutional entrepreneurship theory--i.e. conflict, heterogeneity, institutional logic, and power--to account for the behavioral change. Through investigating 209 wealthy Chinese entrepreneurs from the 2003-2004 Top 100 Philanthropists List produced by the Hurun Research Institute, utilizing the event history analysis method, the study discovered that among the four factors only heterogeneity resulting from strategic industry intersection and the entrepreneurs' political power are the antecedents of their creation of foundations. Other factors--such as conflict, heterogeneity resulted from civil network, and institutional logic--were not relevant in this study. These results suggest that Chinese entrepreneurs who benefit from their improved political and social standing and increased capital are also making endeavors to take initiatives to contribute to the social and economic well-beings in the social areas that the entrepreneurs' industry intersect heavily. This study enriches our understanding of the creation of foundations from entrepreneurs' contextual background in an emerging market. The empirical validation of the antecedents of behavior change and civic leadership innovation also provides practical implications for policy-makers, philanthropy advisers, and nonprofit leaders.

The thesis focuses on those factors which affect firm growth in the setting of the Chinese transition economy, such as size, age, entrepreneurship, resources, and environment. As regards the complexity of the business expansion mechanism, an interdisciplinary approach combining the fields of economics and management is adopted. Using fieldwork methods, new data were gathered in face-to-face interviews with 83 owner-managers of the Chinese privately owned firms in P. R. China in 2004, as well as in follow-up telephone interviews in 2006. The unique body of qualitative and quantitative data in terms of firm operation, human resources management, finance, technology and innovation, enterprise culture and competitive environment, were collected by a specially designed survey instrument, and enabled a number of new hypotheses to be tested in both economic and managerial aspects. With respect to the modern developments of Gibrat’s Law (1931) and Jovanovic’s Learning Theory (1982) in economics, the effects of two “stylized factors”, namely size and age, along with a vector of firm-specific, environmental and selection bias variables, on firm growth, were examined in Heckman’s (1979) two-step selection model with the correction for sample selection bias and heteroscedasticity. The results indicated that the “stylized facts” that smaller and younger firms grew faster were also valid in the setting of China. This thesis also explored managerial factors contributing to firm growth – viz. entrepreneurship theory, resource-based view in strategic management, and contingency theory in organizational behaviour. A variety of statistical methods were utilized to operationalize entrepreneurial orientation (EO), intangible assets (IA), and contingency factors (e.g. structure, environment, strategy, etc), and econometric models were estimated to examine their relationship with firm dynamics. The evidence suggested that IA might be more capable of facilitating firm growth than EO. However, when both were disaggregated into a lower level of attributes, the influences on growth may vary. Further, contingency theory, originally proposed for the case of larger firms in the west, was also validated in this study on the Chinese sampled firm. The combination of organizational forms and contingency configurations presented a higher power to explain business expansion. It implied that “the good fit” of contingency factors influenced firm dynamics only in a moderate way, whereas “the badness of fit” in configuration could engender either the highest or lowest firm growth, subject to their organizational structures.