Research On The Problem Of Market Orientation Of Enterprises Under Transitional Economy

Since 1990's, foreign scholars discuss the concepts, measurement and antecedents of market orientation and its relationship with business performancen from different perspectives, and establish a basic framwork for research. But it hasn't come to a conclude refer to the problem of relationship between market orientation and business performance. In addition, scholars pay little attention on the problem of the implementation of market-oriented, which greatly limited the effort of putting the market orientation theory into practice.With the process of China's reform and opening up, Western modern marketing ideas spread in China, the concepts of 'Customer is the God', and 'Market is the orientation' have become fashion philosophy of the business pursuiting. However, does theory of market orientation which originated and and formed in the bacground of mature markets in Western countries is applicable to China which is in transitional ecnomy? Can the concept of market orientation improve the performance of Chinese enterprises? This is not only an academic issue, but also the course of business practice issues that requiring urgent solution, and the start point of marketing strategy and technology. Bust for various reasons, it has just attracted the attention of schlors for market orientation research in the beginning of this century in China. The existing research focuses on the introduction of foreign researcht or using foreign scholar's research framework for repetive empirical research. The lack of theoretical research into the factors for the implementaion of market orientation and the mechanisms of performance based on the special historical of China, which directly affects the implementation of market orientation in enterprises of China. Therefore, taking the Chinese enterprises as the research object to study the effect of market orientation philosophy on corporate performance, and dicuss suitable mechanisms for Chinese enterprises to implement market orientation, has important theoretical value and in particular the urgency of the reality of guiding significance.Based on the transitional economy background of China, this paper discussed three questions which related to the implementation of market orientaion.Firstly, to examine the market orientation construct in the transition economies of applicability. From the literature, the domestic market-oriented scholars used foreign scolors' market orientation scale meseaure the level of Chinese enterprises dirrectly after the reliability tests, and usually neglecting the validity test. In this paper, we obtained data of 582 corporate samples by use of interviews and questionnaires, based on these, series of comprehensive, systematic reliability and validity tess were conducted in order to test the applicability of the definition of Narver and Slater (1990) proposed its measurement tool MKTOR scale in the context of transition economies such as China.Secondly, to examine the effect of market orientaiton on business performance of enterprises under transitional economy. It mainly answer two questions, that is whether market orientaiton affect the performance of business in transitional economy and whether the impact is different for different types of enterprises ? Existing research on this issue come to inconsistent conclusions, based on the resource-based view, this paper argues that the firm-specific attributes may be the important factors that affect the relationship between market orientation and business performance in transitional economies. The results show that market orientation has a positive direct effect on business performance in transitional economies, and the effect is stronger in the three-funded enterprises, service enterprises and small and medium enterprises.Thirdly, to explore the factors that affect the implementation of market orientation in ecterprises under transitional economy. From the point of view of social capital theory and system theory, this paper proposed that the market and institutional environment are important factors that affect the implementation of market orientation in transitional economy. Using the data of 228 Chinese enterprises, this paper examined the effect of the characteristics of the market environment and institutional environment, and seven organizational factors which put forward by Jaworski and Kohil (1990) on the implimentation of market orientation. The results showed that in addition to some internaorganizational factors, competition intensity and degree of perfection of the institutional environment affected the level of implementation of market orientation in China's enterprises that uner the economy of transition.