Confucian Entrepreneurship: Towards a Genealogy of a Conceptual Tool

• Date: 01 January 2020
• Author: Andrew Smith,Miriam Kaminishi
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12439
• Published date: 01 January 2020

© 2019 John Wiley & Sons Lt d and Society for the Adva ncement of Management Stud ies

Confucian Entrepreneurship: Towards a Genealogy of

a Conceptual Tool

Andrew Smitha and Miriam Kaminishib

aUniversity of Li verpool Management School; bMacau Uni versity of Science and Technolog y Business

School

ABST RACT The concept of the ‘Confucia n Entrepreneur’ is now used by many scholars to

understand entrepreneur ship in China and other East Asi an countries. This paper traces t he

development of this concept from its roots i n the writings of nineteenth- century Western

authors to its use in modern ma nagement journals. We show that while this conce ptual tool

has been adapted over time, t he claims associated with it have rema ined largely similar. Use of

the term Confuci an entrepreneur implies belief that Confuc ian ideas induce Chinese entrepre-

neurs to behave dif ferently than t heir Western counterpar ts, a claim for which the empirical

foundations are weak. We do not go so far as t o say that those who research Chinese entrepre-

neurship should di scard the concept of the Confucian entrepreneur si mply because of its

historical or igins in colonialism. However, we do cal l on researchers to reflect on the hist orical

origins of t heir conceptual tools. By historicisi ng our theories of entrepreneurship, this paper

should encourage greater sc holarly ref lexivity and thus the development of entrepreneurship

and management theor y with greater predictive power.

Keywo rds: Chinese entrepreneurship, Con fucianism, Foucauldian genealog y, G ordon

Redding, Max Weber, meta-theor y

INTRODUCTION

Since 1990, the concept of the ‘Confucian Entrepreneur’ has been used extensively by

academics who study entrepreneurship in China and other East Asian countries (e.g.,

Li and Liang, 2015; Redding, 1990; Zhu, 2015). The use of this term implies belief that

Confucianism induces significant dif ferences in behaviour between entrepreneurs in

Confucian countries and their Western counterparts. This conceptual tool now inf lu-

ences how non-academics perceive the world, as the term Confucian entrepreneur has

Journal of Man agement Studi es 57:1 January 2020

doi:10. 1111/jo ms.1 2439

Address for re prints : Andrew Smit h, University of Liverp ool, Chatham Street, L iverpool L69 7ZH, UK

(adasmith@liverpool.ac.uk).

26 A. Smith and M. Ka minishi

© 2019 John Wiley & Sons Lt d and Society for the Adva ncement of Management Stud ies

migrated from Engl ish-language scholarly journa ls to texts read by business practitioners

in both the West (e.g., Financial Times, 2012) and East Asia (e.g., EEO, 2018). In 2018,

there were more than 15,000 references to Confucian entrepreneurship儒商rushang in

the Chinese media. A recurring idea in these texts is that Confucian entrepreneurs

are more eth ically constrained than non-Confucian ones.1

The term ‘Confucian entre-

preneur’ has even been used to frame trade shows and other business gatherings (PR

Newswire, 2018). In sum, the concept of the Confucian entrepreneur inf luences how

many people think about business in Ch ina and other East Asian countries.

When the concept of the Confucian entrepreneur appeared in management re-

search in the 1990s, its value as a tool of interpretation was questioned by scholars who

charged that Western academics had over-estimated the impact of Confucianism on the

behaviour of East Asian businesspeople (Dirlik, 1997; Greenhalgh, 1994; Hill, 2000).

Despite the publication of such criticisms, this conceptual tool continued to be used by

researchers. In recent years, however, scholars have once again called into question the

utility of the concept of the Confucian entrepreneur. For instance, Chuah et al. (2016,

p. 1095) expressed scepticism about the value of this concept when they reported that

they had found ‘no evidence’ to support the claims that Confucian ideas influence actual

Chinese entrepreneurial behaviour. These authors suggest that since the theories built

using the concept of the Confucian entrepreneur lack predictive power, we should cease

using the concept. Chuah et al. imply that while the ‘Confucian entrepreneur’ is a pop-

ular conceptual tool, its continued use by researchers may be a barrier to understanding

business phenomena in China.

This paper contributes to these ongoing efforts to problematize the concept of the

Confucian entrepreneur. Thinking critically about this concept is important because the-

ories such as the theory of Confucian capitalism have been built upon it (e.g., Yao, 2013).

This paper problematizes the concept by documenting its origins and explaining how

it became widespread. Our paper shows that this conceptual tool emerged from texts

produced by nineteenth-century Western missionaries, merchants, and other observers

of China whose worldviews were coloured by colonialism. In this paper, colonialism de-

notes an intellectual system that represent non-Westerners as profoundly different from,

and inferior to, Westerners (Boussebaa et al., 2014). Colonialism is a discredited intel-

lectual system that is associated with very low predictive power (Özkazanç-Pan, 2008).

Many researchers who today use the conceptual tool of the Confucian entrepreneur ap-

pear to be unaware of its historical origins in colonialism. These scholars need to become

aware of the concept’s origins because, as Birkinshaw et al. (2014) have persuasively

argued, lack of awareness of the historical origins of their concepts reduces the ability of

management scholars to make theoretical advances, a point reinforced by Rowlinson et

al. (2014). By raising awareness of the origins of a frequently employed conceptual tool,

this paper will help researchers to produce more self-reflexive research that has greater

predictive power. As Zahra (2007, p. 452) has argued, becoming aware of the social pro-

cesses that inform theory development can allow entrepreneurship scholars to engage in

more ‘effective theorizing’.

We do not go so far as to say that those who research East Asian entrepreneurship should

discard the concept of the Confucian entrepreneur simply on account of its historical

origins in colonialism. However, we do argue that researchers should use considerable

Confucian Entrepreneurship: Towards a Genealog y of a Conceptual Tool 27

© 2019 John Wiley & Sons Lt d and Society for the Adva ncement of Management Stud ies

caution in operationalizing theories derived from the writings of colonialist authors. The

findings presented in this paper will be of interest to a wide range of management re-

searchers who use the concept of Confucian entrepreneurship to understand phenom-

ena in China and other East Asian countries. The importance of Chinese entrepreneurs

in the global economy has increased according to a wide range of metrics, such as the

percentage of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs who are Chinese (Flannery,

2018). In view of the growing global importance of Chinese entrepreneurs, it is surely

important for academics to reflect on whether they are using the right conceptual tools to

research this topic. In our view, the users of this conceptual tool need to be alerted to its

origins so they can make an informed decision about whether to continue using it.

Literature Review and Theory

In this section, we discuss the theoretical underpinnings of the paper. We begin with

a discussion of the dif ferent theoretical lenses that academics now use to understand

Chinese entrepreneurship. We identify two rival approaches for understanding Ch inese

entrepreneurship, one of which concentrates on the formal institutions that are the cen-

tral focus of the New Institutional Economics, the other of which focuses on cultural-

cognitive phenomena such as religion.

Rival Appr oaches to Understanding Entrepreneurship

Our primary concern is the evolution of the conceptual tools that scholars use to un-

derstand Chinese entrepreneurship. However, it is useful to frame that discussion by

briefly considering the theories in use in the field of entrepreneurship as a whole. We

know from recent state-of-the-field papers that entrepreneurship remai ns a diverse field

populated by researchers who use a wide range of methodologies to answer an array

of research questions (Aldrich, 20 00; Shepherd et al., 2019; Terjesen et al., 2016). As

a strategy scholar once observed, entrepreneurship has ‘many different DVs [depen-

dent variables]’ while the field of strategy is focused on just one DV, firm performance

(quoted in Shepherd et al., 2019, p. 160). While the f ield of entrepreneurship lacks a

single DV, it does have core research questions, one of which is explaining why levels

and forms of entrepreneurship dif fer through time and between different geographical

localities (R icketts, 2008). Research on the puzzle of what causes variat ions in entrepre-

neurial behaviour is clearly important in light of the evidence that such differences can

help to explain variations in the economic performance of nations and localities (Dodd

et al., 2013; Islam, 2014).

However, while entrepreneurship researchers agree that understanding the causal

mechanisms behind temporal and geographical variation in entrepreneurship is essen-

tial, they have very different approaches to this issue. The field of entrepreneurship is

thus marked by a tension between those who regard formal institutions as the set of vari-

ables that best explain temporal and spatial variations in entrepreneurial behaviour (e.g.,

Bjørnskov and Foss, 2016; Bosma et al., 2018; Bradley and Klein, 2016; Li and Zahra,

2012) and those who believe that the study of religion, attitudes, and other ‘cultural-

cognitive’ variables provide the best explanation (e.g., Henley, 2017; Parboteeah et al.,

2015). Scholars in the first camp (e.g., North, 1990) typically use the rational-actor model