Bureaucracy and Institutions: Empirical Evidence from Chinese History

Abstract

There is broad scholarly agreement that history and founding conditions matter in the design of institutions and organizations (Marquis, 2003). Yet study of institutional and organizational development rarely includes more than ceremonial references to specific country or regional settings, policy embeddedness, and cultural contingency (e.g., individual versus collectivist cultures). The analytical focus is typically on modern organizations and institutional development trajectories, which leaves us with the question of how history matters. To what extent do modern organizations and institutions reflect historic development trajectories, and how? That we know so little about the ways today’s institutions and organizations are affected by the past is not reflecting lack of interest, but instead being constrained by data availability. Yet with increasing progress of digitalization of archival records, “new” historical data becomes available at an astonishing speed. What remains are concerns about data quality and validity. What can we actually learn from historic data about organizations and institutions, then and now? With this symposium, we show there is much to learn. With a regional focus on China and a wide variety of empirical evidence documenting local development over several thousands of years, this symposium brings together a set of four studies, which gather and apply historical data creatively, and contribute to a better understanding of institutional origins, organizational and institutional change, and their impact on contemporary development. The focus on China is not only interesting for its obvious importance in today’s global economy and politics. The analysis of historic organizations and institutions (mainly bureaucracy) and their association with modern-day development also help identify causal processes of how and when institutions matter throughout time. China offers an ideal context. China displays vast within-country variation in its socioeconomic conditions, whereas provinces can serve as broad proxies of regional units. Furthermore, China is ethnically highly homogenous, with more than 90% of Chinese belonging to the Han group and has experienced only limited and well- documented internal migration flows over the last two millennia, which limits the influence of exogenous shocks introduced by broad- sweeping cultural shifts. Finally, the country has been characterized by a high degree of political and territorial unity for more than 2,000 years and has escaped substantial colonial influence, leaving historic development pathways less affected. The four empirical studies address two broader questions: 1) What are the antecedents and mechanisms that explain the emergence of institutions and organizations developed in and inherited from the past? and 2) how does history shape the opportunity structures for modern trajectories of institutional change? In other words, does institutional change today hinge on experience accumulated in the past — either in a positive or negative way? The Great Political Divergence: Leadership Turnover in Historical China and Europe Presenter: Yasheng Huang; MIT Sloan School of Management Presenter: Clair Yang; U. of Washington, Seattle Local Beliefs and Firms: From the Holocene to Organizational Change in Modern China Presenter: Sonja Opper; Lund U. Presenter: Fredrik Andersson; Lund U. Meritocracy as An Inhabited Institution: The Chinese Civil Service Examinations, 1400-1580 Presenter: Enying Zheng; Peking U. Presenter: Yasheng Huang; MIT Sloan School of Management Presenter: Wei Hong; Tsinghua U. Presenter: Rongzhu Ke; Hong Kong Baptist U. Career Advancement in the Chinese Bureaucracy: An Organizational Perspective Presenter: Ling Zhu; The Chinese U. of Hong Kong Presenter: Xueguang Zhou; Stanford U.