International Comparisons Of The Evolution Of Clan Firms And Studies On The Management Specializations Of Chinese Clan Firms

Family Enterprise is a very important mode of enterprise organizations both in China and in the west world. But different from that in west countries, Chinese family enterprise takes a special character: the special trust model on the basis of the kinship and the pan-kinship is the intrinsic and vital part of the Chinese economic society.Up to now, the studies of Mainland's scholars in the fields of specializations of management and mechanism of human resources in family enterprises are still weak. The findings have not came into a system, and lacked the support of systematic theories, even some of them have gone too much into the dispute of the advantages and disadvantages of family enterprises and the direction of transformation . As some scholars have indicated, the prevailing opinion in theory is that the family enterprises should be transformed and only through transformation can they walk out of the closed state and limitation. Many scholars in this field through the studies of structure of standardized modern company believe that in order to promote the development of Chinese family enterprises, we must depend on the establishment of institution of a modern company, separating the management from the ownership. They also severely criticized the prevalence of family-styled management in Chinese private companies.Not only histories of China, but also developed countries'economic developments have shown that family enterprises play a very important role in the early industrialization. In developed economies, professional skills increasingly determine the salaries, and the criteria for employment lies in the abilities than the special social network. As a result, along with the modernization and the internationalization of distribution and cooperation in work, family enterprises break the closed family circles and break kinship into non-personalized system deal, and also from the non-regulated management to modern management, which is very important to modern economic development. In this sense, Douglas North pointed out that the shift from the exchange on the basis of personal trust to non personal is the key point. We don't think it necessary to change family enterprises to non family ones; in fact, numerous family enterprises are indispensable to economic structure. In modern economic developments, however, family enterprises must integrate social resources to take part in the internationalization.As a kind of human beings subjective prediction, trust has a deep relationship with the society, history, culture and tradition. Different trust mechanisms can be produced by different conditions. From the essence and character, trust can be distinct in emotional private trust, institution-based trust and purpose-based trust. Family trust and pan family trust produced in the kinship of Chinese social traditions are the typical mode of emotional private trust. Purpose-based trust is established on the basis of rational choice and is produced after the comparison of losses and gains in the exchange.According to the history of the development of western society, institution has provided a basic support for the scale expansion of trust, which makes it possible for enterprises to further undertake the risk and trust. This king of support can bring about the better team and working performances in the organization; on the layer of society, law institutions can be used more widely and more efficiently to protect personal property and the business right of both sides. Institution-based trust includes the formal trust of legal contracts and informal trust, such as the reputation mechanism and psychological contract concerning the justice in the market–oriented economy. These two sides supplement each other and promote each other.Family trust is a special personal trust system. The management of trust here is based on the character of personality. The core is the family kinship, but it is not enough to solve all problems that surpass the family business, when it is necessary to absorb the outsiders of long term contracts to be inside the family circle. They are given the similar behavior principle on ethic, emotion and payment to family members. In the process of this special trust management, Confucianism plays a dominant role and is influenced and strengthened by the shortage of the society trust institution. It is not hard to see that compared with the general trust principle; family special trust institution can not expand beyond the reach as the enterprise grows, because it is restricted by the cost and value in establishing the long term contract. Therefore, family trust actually restricts the internationalization of family enterprises.To promote the family enterprises'institution-based management so as to solve the bottleneck problem of the trust mechanism ,it requires the'regulation control'in place of'human control'in the management of family enterprises .Choices between'regulation control'and'human control'is very important for the modernization of family enterprises. Many family enterprises in the western countries tend to choose the'regulate control'management to set up rational organizations. They depend on the formal regulations to manage enterprises and then expand the scale up to a giant in accordance with the requirements of the modern production and distribution. In order to keep the growth continuity of family enterprises in the future, to have some large-scaled private enterprises with global competitiveness be predominant, at least some family enterprises will carry out the professional management. But where? And how? According to scholars'analysis, professional management in family enterprises is dependent on the improvement of outer environments, especially the accumulation of social trust capital and the transformation of the government administration. At present, the biggest obstacle is neither Chinese traditional culture itself, nor executive manager market, but special trust and trust model based on kinship. Therefore, it is urgent to set up a general trust mechanism.