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The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of corporate social capital and local embeddedness on perceived business performance of Chinese enterprises operating overseas, whose recent growth resulted from the Belt and Road Initiative.

This study reports the results of a sample of 83 Shaanxi outward foreign direct investment (FDI) firms operating in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe and North America. In-depth interviews with a few sampled firms are used to develop the survey questionnaire and help interpret the results of statistical analysis.

This study proposes two hypotheses and both are supported by the data. First, corporate social capital is a three-dimensional concept, covering governmental, market and personal sources with each source making an equal, positive effect on perceived overseas performance of the surveyed firms. Second, these firms do better when having developed a higher degree of local embeddedness, a measure on local channels used to obtain information and mobilize resources. While local embeddedness indeed mediates some effect of corporate social capital, both variables have shown direct impact on performance.

Reported findings are from a small sample of 83 firms in an inland Chinese province, and business performance is measured by subjective evaluation rather than economic output.

The practical implication is that a Chinese FDI firm is expected to maintain all three relational channels – governmental, market and interpersonal – because the firm can gain different kinds of information and resources from these sources and each channel is necessary and equally important for the firm’s development. Importantly, it needs a different strategy to maintain and best use each channel. For the Belt and Road Initiative to be effective, China must establish platforms through which enterprises can strengthen and reconfigure their corporate social capital, as well as to cultivate and sustain their local networks in foreign destinations.

In this paper, we model histories of coresidence between two cohorts of urban Chinese couples, married during the Cultural Revolution and early market reform periods. Most research on coresidence pictures families cross‐sectionally, but nuclear households are a natural part of extended coresidence systems that prefer stem family arrangements. We study histories of coresidence to determine what predicts ever having coresided with the husband’s parents, comparing the predictive power of modernization theory to the impact of demographic change, the availability of household members, and the resources and needs of each generation. While married children’s needs for childcare do not propel them into coresidence, they strongly predict the likelihood of staying coresident.

This chapter presents systematic evidence on the persistent power of guanxi, the Chinese phrase for informal social relations and networks, in transitional China. I draw heavily on my previous publications reporting findings from a series of probability sample surveys of the Job-Search Network (thereafter JSNET) project in Chinese cities, and job histories of the survey respondents combined cover a span of 37 years from 1978, the beginning year of China's market-oriented reforms, to 2014, the year of last JSNET survey completed.

We conceptualize corporate social capital within the context of Chinese guanxi culture. We assert that the formation and mobilization of corporate social capital are culturally and institutionally contextualized. Building upon a relational approach to corporate performance, we examine culture-sensitive properties of Chinese guanxi and compare guanxi social capital with non-guanxi social capital. We then explain why guanxi-based corporate social capital is of growing significance to the Chinese transitional economy in an era of increasing market competition and institutional uncertainty. We conclude by proposing a research agenda about the roles that guanxi-based corporate social capital plays for boosting corporate performance.

Information and influence are distinct network resources that are embedded in and mobilized from networks of personal contacts. A five-city survey shows that Chinese job changers obtain both kinds of network resources from social ties of varying strengths. During the first 20 years of China's market reforms, job changes were increasingly network facilitated; despite the growth of labor markets network allocation of labor had reached dominance by 1992. Job changers using information and influence networks to search for new employment were more likely to increase both job search time and job–worker matching; however, those using influence networks, not information networks, were likely to move into jobs of higher earning opportunity. These results are interpreted in a dynamic context of increasing market competition and growing allocative efficiency.

Thirty years of rapid development and economic change have created organizations and work relations in China that would have been unthinkable at the start of transition. In December of 1978, the Chinese Communist Party agreed with Deng Xiaoping to allow agricultural privatization, a stark contrast to the communes of Mao Zedong's era. This change established the financial foundation that would lead to development in eastern, coastal cities and that would ultimately fuel an extraordinary transformation of China's economy and its global position. As a result, organizational structures have changed, and new organizational forms have emerged. There have also been dramatic changes in the way work organizations behave and in the nature and implications of work. This volume provides a glimpse into the state of organizations and work at the 30-year mark. The contributors are top scholars in the field, including many who have observed and studied China's transition for decades, who are drawing on some of the most up-to-date and innovative data sources available. The chapters are samples of the current work of these researchers that, taken together, provide a snapshot of the state of research on China's organizations and work behaviors as transition enters its fourth decade.