Society, individual ability, and motive: A socio-psychological study on entrepreneurial activities in Chinese rural enterprises

The rapid growth of Chinese rural enterprises since the late 1970s was a great opportunity for scholarly investigations on societal development and human behavior since a great variety of changes occurred in a short period and at a huge scale. Through analyzing how the actions of Chinese rural entrepreneurs in business operation were affected by environmental and personal conditions and how their actions affected changes in Chinese society, this study intends to shed lights on the causes and processes of societal change, economic development, and human behavior. It adopts a balanced and integrated perspective of investigation in which the impacts of environmental and personal conditions on societal changes and human behavior were equally emphasized. Chinese rural entrepreneurs become the focus of this study because they are the key links of all other critical conditions of development.; This study is based on data collected through my one year field work from July 1994 to June 1995 in China, primarily from three main research sites: Jinjiang City, Wujiang City, and Tongliang-Dazu. These three sites differed substantially in term of natural conditions, level of economic development, local government policies toward rural enterprises, and other conditions. Through interview, survey, and documentary research, qualitative and quantitative data were collected on the personal characteristics of rural entrepreneurs, conditions of Chinese society and research sites, relevant historical events, and business performance of individual companies.; There are three major findings. (1) Supporting the central theorem that a societal phenomenon is the result of people's actions and human behavior is jointly determined by environmental and personal condition, the data show that individual characteristics and the conditions of business environment determined the behavior of rural entrepreneurs and the performance of their companies. Collectively, their actions contributed greatly to the success of Chinese rural enterprise. (2) The development of Chinese rural enterprises follows an evolutionary and progressive process in which the development of one stage was always built on the previously prepared conditions and its outcomes became the conditions for the next stage. (3) Personal and environmental conditions affected the actions of rural entrepreneurs in interactive and interdependent manners. While the actions of rural entrepreneurs were affected by various factors, the outcome of their actions changed the conditions of those factors and created new business environments in which they were required to modify their actions for further development.; This study also produced supportive evidence for several theoretic propositions regarding economic development and human behavior, such as the positive impact of n Ach on entrepreneurial activities (McClelland, 1961) and the joint impact of personal and environmental conditions on human behavior (Lewin, 1935). A new approach of assessing personal characteristics in predicting individual behavior and performance, the affective measure of Need for Achievement, was tested in this study and the findings supported its criterion-related validity.