



Victor Nee, the Frank and Rosa Rhodes Professor of Sociology and director of the Center for the Study of Economy and Society, has received a $1,190,448 grant from the John Templeton Foundation.

An earlier research grant (2005-09) from the Templeton Foundation provided $1,985,000 to launch an intensive study of the rise of the economic institutions of modern capitalism in China. The new grant will fund a continuation of this study through 2018, resulting in the single longest social science study of China’s transition to a market economy.

China’s economy is commonly viewed as a state-orchestrated system that leaves little room for private initiative. This picture ignores deep socio-economic changes occurring under the façade of state capitalism.

“Private enterprise is the most dynamic economic sector today, and a rapidly growing population of private entrepreneurs, many of them newly wealthy, is changing the system from below,” Nee says. “As they strive for legitimacy, social status and political influence, they are reshaping the social and political landscape. Understanding China’s future and the pathways of institutional change therefore requires deep knowledge of the underlying norms and institutions that guide entrepreneurial behavior.”

The earlier phases of the study surveyed 700 entrepreneurs in seven cities in the Yangtze River Delta region. Novel quantitative survey methods and “lab-in-the-field” behavioral experiments were used to measure cultural beliefs and norms, making these otherwise hard-to-capture “soft facts” accessible to formal analysis.

Are China’s entrepreneurs perhaps rediscovering norms associated with the long-lasting liberal tradition of neo-Confucianism – notably, norms of public-spiritedness – and adapting such prosocial norms to the needs of an emergent market capitalist economy? Such ethics would resemble the ethics – and spirit – that was key to the emergence of modern capitalism in the West, according to Nee. The next phase of the study will specifically address such questions.

“Through scholarly articles and a planned book, as well as academic courses, the proposed research aims to contribute to the broader debate on whether prosocial norms of fairness, cooperation and public-spiritedness are necessary for the sustainability of modern capitalism,” he says.

Linda B. Glaser is a writer for the College of Arts and Sciences.