| Observed from the present social representations, Chinese society can be described as a network constituted by human relationship, natural affection, fellow relationship and friendship. As immoral familism, this network is sure to demonstrate special effects and regulations in its interaction process with economic system, which endows the study of embedded performance mechanism with certain value. Meanwhile, the relationship between social and economic systems has been being the core problem in the studies of humanities and social sciences while the proposal of embeddedness provides us with the key of linking the two major systems. Moreover, organizational performance is the original issue on which both economics and management have been focusing while the theory of embeddedness makes the explanation of industrial and organizational theories more precise and the theory of embedded performance is the study of path and mechanism in which the social system influences the economic system performance through embeddedness.Foreign researches of the relationship between embeddedness and enterprise management performance mainly begin with relational and structural embeddedness and expand to further researches in systematic embeddedness, spatial embeddedness and virtual embeddedness. Domestic studies are mainly presented as one trunk and three branches: one trunk refers to the studies of embeddedness ontology, namely, the studies of mechanism through which network embeddedness influences the performance; three branches refer to the studies in three perspectives (range of embeddedness, innovation points and learning points). The differences between foreign and domestic studies are manifested in the following three aspects. First, the acceptances of“embeddedness”are different.“Embeddedness”has always been working in Chinese culture. Therefore, domestic studies begin with the application of embeddedness theories in Chinese society. Second, the judgments of social situations in which embeddedness works are different. The theory of embeddedness which originated from western countries must be situationalized in China in order to explain Chinese network. Domestic scholars have made great efforts in realizing this goal. Third, the judgments of organizational integrity and coordination on which embeddedness relies on are different. Chinese state system and regime have its uniqueness which results in the fact that enterprises’organizational integrity which is decided by national and social coordination mechanism and ownership is different from that in Western countries. As a result, domestic studies must be different from foreign ones. The major work of this paper is to construct a model framework of embedded performance theory and then to verify and depict it from the observation of general enterprises and small and medium-sized listed companies. The research logic adopted in this paper is theory'empirical'theory; the research method adopted is a combination of normative research and empirical research. The empirical research methods include: entropy method to obtain every index weight of financial performance evaluation system in small and medium-sized listed companies; binary semantic model of fuzzy decision to obtain index weight of non-financial performance evaluation system in small and medium-sized listed companies; questionnaire to obtain quantitative data of subjective embeddedness and non-financial performance indexes, structural equation modeling and regression analysis in order to verify and analyze the theoretical hypothesis. The main conclusions of this study include: (1) model framework of embedded performance theory. The paper argues that embedded factors exert their influences on enterprise management performance with organizational learning ability as intermediary and environmental organizational system as regulation; (2) embedded factors are made up of relational embeddedness, structural embeddedness and virtual embeddedness. Relational embeddedness can be analyzed in two dimensions: relational stability and relational intensity which can be measured by the sustainability degree, intimacy degree, credit degree and reciprocity degree; Structural embeddedness is constituted by network density, centrality and intermediary; Virtual embeddedness refers to the non-face-to-face contact between a enterprise and its six partners (supplier, clients, regulatory agencies, research institution, financial institutions and peers). Among the three kinds of embeddedness, the relational one exerts the greatest influence on management performance and is followed by structural and virtual ones; (3) The organizational learning ability which acts as intermediary composes of the ability to discover, invent, select, extend and reflect, execute and manage knowledge; (4) The factors which acts as regulation includes environmental factors (environmental dynamics, competitive intensity, industry characteristics), organizational factors (strategic direction and life cycle), institutional factors (type of ownership and political correlation); (5) enterprise management performance can be analyzed in three dimensions: historical dimensions, dimensions in which virtual economy perforates real economy, present and future dimensions. Specific indexes include subjective performance, financial performance, Tobin’s Q, market value, etc. A number of operational tools are also obtained in the course of study: (1) questionnaire of embedded performance theory; (2) evaluation system of small and medium-sized listed companies’comprehensive performance.According to research findings, this paper proposes five recommendations: (1) relationship embeddedness: Enterprises should be concerned with both subjects within the supply chain (supplier and clients) and subjects without the supply chain (peers, regulatory agencies, research institution and financial institutions). The management should be mainly conducted in the aspects of relational stability and relational intensity which means the degree of sustainability, intimacy, credit and reciprocity should be focused on; (2) structural embeddedness: enterprises should strengthen the network density, centrality and intermediary to realize the structural management, which refers to the management of number and network positions of six major subjects. To be specific, the management includes the use of correlation in getting product development, production and access to market information (cent2, the centrality 2), establishment of as many external relations (cent 1, the centrality 1), obtain of more market information through market (cent 3, the centrality 3), acting as the third party to realize the sharing of information and resources (inte, the intermediary ), the fostering of correlation with regulatory agencies, research institutions, financial agencies and peers (dens2\dens3, the network density); (3) virtual embeddedness: enterprises should strengthen their non-face-to-face contact with six major subjects via e-mail, phone calls and messages in order to promote their performance; (4) organizational learning ability: enterprises should cultivate six components of organizational learning ability, namely, the ability to discover, invent, select, extend and reflect, execute and manage knowledge. Better learning ability will intensify the influence of embeddedness, which will in turn greatly promote enterprise management performance; (5) organizational, systematic and environmental factors: enterprises should be concerned with the management of the three kinds of factors, which includes making clear strategic direction, clarifying the life cycle, establishing proper political correlation, paying attention to competition environmental change. These factors will influence the final effect in the promotion of performance, especially the external competition, speed of environmental change and strategic directions play the role of guidance and desert more attention.The possible innovations in this paper are: (1) embeddedness---one influential factor on social network---has been always simplified by economic management and is brought into the management black-box to be studied with the hope of modifying the theory of enterprise performance on the basis of research finding of new institutional economics and new economic sociology; (2) measurement methods and data mining methods are tried from different angles: social network analysis and questionnaire are adopted to measure embeddedness; entropy method and binary semantic model of fuzzy decision model are adopted at the same time to measure the comprehensive management performance; historical dimension, market dimension and dimensions in which virtual economy perforates real economy are adopted to define management performance; factor analysis, structural equation modeling and regression analysis are adopted to obtain data. |
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