Chinese Cooperatives: Where Does Entrepreneurial Resources Come,and How Are They Acquired?

Chinese cooperatives play important roles in develop rural areas in China. They put the product into market as “rational economic man ”,provide service to cooperation members by responding to production as“welfare person”.Thus, research on how the cooperatives start up may enlighten us on how the service to cooperation members can sustain. Entrepreneurial resource acquisition is the start of entrepreneurial process. Theoretically, entrepreneurial resource acquisition is one most important sub-process of resource management. On the base of Chinese scene,cooperatives is naturally the stage of entrepreneurship research. Practically,cooperatives are newly developed in Chinese rural districts. Resources acquisition is critical to venture success. Our research may provide suggestions on how to develop cooperatives both to policy-makers and cooperative leaders.This research mainly includes three parts of contents. The first part systematically reviews the process based on the perspective of entrepreneurial resources. Studies have found that there are still gaps in the research process to the larger study of entrepreneurial resources for the content of the study. Most of the entrepreneurship-process research combines resources acquisition,resources integration and resources utilization,but few in-depth business resource acquisition. The second part is about the farmers’ cooperatives literature survey and interview survey. Through extensive literature research, we find that the Chinese cooperatives initial resource constraints encountered in three aspects of financial resources,governmental resources and management resources. New cooperatives overcome "resource bottleneck" by two ways: first is “operate on their own”,the second is “rely on government”. However,governmental resources are more inclined to strong cooperatives rather the newly-built cooperatives. The government attitude throw light on the cooperatives that newly-built cooperatives "self-reliance" has a positive meaning to get more government resources. The third part of we build the Organizational Legitimacy-Organizational Legitimacy strategies framework to analysis legitimacy of cooperative organization acquisition strategy. We use descriptive case study method legitimacy of cooperative organization acquisition strategy, and found that the legitimacy of the organization has a positive effect on the start-up process of farmer cooperatives resource access.Theoretically, the research reveals the relationship between one basic proposition of entrepreneurship and legitimacy of the organization and business. In addition,the research inspire the cooperatives more ways to acquire the resources to achieve success. Moreover,we suggest that the government should tend to "support" rather than a "wait and see" to encourage more cooperative activities.