Coevolution of Culture and Technology: The Business Success of Lee Kum Kee

Abstract

This article attempts to examine the roles of technology and culture playing the business success of a Chinese family enterprise in Hong Kong. It argues that culture influences the adoption of new technology. Likewise, new technology changes the way people think as well as organizational culture. In the market process, business strategies are formulated according to the entrepreneurs’ stocks of knowledge which in turn are based on their everyday life experiences. Since everyday life experience is culturally embedded, culture can impede or facilitate the adoption of new technology. The ability to learn and adopt new technologies is a key factor for latecomer firm to catch up in the global market. On the other hand, new technology changes the mindset of people in general and organizational culture in particular. New technology and novel events bring about a conflict of knowledge in entrepreneurs’ minds. As a result, the entrepreneur either resists the new technology by condemning it as vice or deviance, or adapt to it by modifying his or her way of thinking. Those entrepreneurs who resist new things do not catch up with the changing world and are doomed to fail. Given new technology, most entrepreneurs learn to adopt new methods by trial and error, and experimentation. Successful strategies will be adopted and routinized as a rule of thumb, resulting in institutional change. In this article, we shall examine how changes in culture and technology influence the business strategies, and hence, the transformation of Lee Kum Kee, a well-known oyster sauce manufacturer in Hong Kong.