The first chapter explores an area of entrepreneurship in which China in many ways leads the world. As well as considering e-commerce in general the chapter highlights some particularly Chinese innovations. The relevance of social embeddedness to online communication and interaction is widely acknowledged. In addition, there are now many studies which explore how online networks are affected by offline networks. Sociological research on e-commerce nevertheless remains underdeveloped. Little is known about how individuals participating in e-commerce markets take initiatives in creating, expanding, and maintaining online social networks behind the screen. Chapter 1 identifies forms of social embeddedness that while obscure are important to online markets. The chapter develops a concept, ‘personalized anchoring reputation’, in highlighting this phenomenon. Additionally, analysis is presented of an e-sales approach, called by its practitioners ‘fission’, which integrates characteristics of face-to-face transaction with online exchanges.

Theoretical suppositions of business crisis in the literature are largely drawn from studies conducted in North America and Western Europe. Chapter 6, on the other hand, examines a Chinese approach to crisis. Based on the notion of paradoxical integration, this approach informs not only crisis management in China and East Asia, but potentially has general application. In this conceptualization, crisis is not necessarily treated as a consequence of discord or disruption, but rather is understood as an aspect or phase of an unfolding process, even in the most difficult circumstances. This approach, then, offers a course toward future business success even in the face of significant loss, without suffering desperation or self-destruction. Three strategies which entrepreneurs adopt to crisis are examined in the chapter, namely, the combination of the old with the new, or path dependence; second, seeking facilitating relationships with other members of a business community, or guanxi accommodation; and finally, reordering priorities and available resources, including familial and personal, or self-reflexivity.

The Introduction outlines the historical, social, and cultural background of business in China since the economic reforms commencing in the late-1970s. The empirical material regarding entrepreneurs and business in present-day China deployed in this book is described, and an account of the research methods employed in acquiring it is outlined and discussed. In addition, the Introduction provides a detailed summary of the six chapters that constitute this book, including a preliminary discussion of the issues treated throughout. By presenting select examples of fieldwork findings, discussed in the context of a broader background indicated in official and related sources of data, as well as findings and theories presented in the published literature, the Introduction details the range of substantive issues that are treated in and which are the focus of each of the six chapters to follow.

The role of social networks in business, and entrepreneurship, in particular, is widely acknowledged. Chapter 2 explores the ways in which business persons relate to networks and how networks impact the circumstances of entrepreneurs. The enabling and constraining properties of networks, their effects on participants, and their subsequent social consequences have all been extensively explored in a large and growing literature. A feature of social network analysis lies in its tendency to deploy structural perspectives in explaining social outcomes. Chapter 2 highlights the ways in which social networks operate as a context in which individual initiative and engagement lead to the making and remaking of network attributes. An empirical examination of business networks in Chinese cities reveals the way in which the formation and maintenance of networks require the conscious contributions of their members, how network norms are produced by the expressed preferences of individual members, and finally how network membership involves management of network participants.

Chapter 5 explores key aspects of the gendered dichotomy assumed to underlie entrepreneurial endeavour and achievement. Entrepreneurial success is predominantly understood in gendered terms as a consequence of qualities associated with masculinity while women are assumed to play supportive roles in business and enterprise. Even though successful female entrepreneurs are increasingly acknowledged, their ability to perform as business leaders is typically associated with masculine ideals of success, through an accomplishment of female imitations of masculinity. Chapter 4 challenges such persistent dichotomic approaches to gender in entrepreneurship. It is shown on the basis of data drawn from China’s new generation of entrepreneurs that women and men strategically display gender in the company and in the marketplace, in a manner that will maximize growth and profit for their firms. These women and men are not constrained by stereotyped gender ideals but rather utilize existing imagery and norms, and, when necessary, create new ones in doing business. In addition, the involvement of grandparents in supporting their daughters and daughters-in-law who are in business, wholly overlooked in consideration of female entrepreneurs, constitutes a hidden factor in the interplay of constructions of gender, family, and business experienced by female entrepreneurs in China.

Central issues of family business are treated in Chapter 4. It is widely assumed that in establishing a new business family members are preferred employees as they are trusted. As it expands a business increasingly employs non-family members. In these circumstances kinship forms of address, irrespective of kin status, create familiarity and closeness. A significant literature reports that by these means pseudo-kinship or quasi-familial relations are formed in order to cultivate trust with non-kin individuals. Chapter 4 challenges these assumptions. It is shown, firstly, that among family members, rather than trust a number of other factors, including compliance with role obligations as well as monitored forms of reliability, xinyong and face considerations, govern relationships and authority structures. Secondly, as non-kin employees are recruited to a family business neither pseudo-kinship nor quasi-familial relationships are assumed nor market exchange relations engaged; rather, non-kin members of family firms are subject to an intentionally cultivated emotionalized guanxi relationship with the company. This arrangement means that intra-firm relations operate in conjunction with market relations in order to elicit obligatory feelings and maintain them, generating firm-specific social bonds between management and employees as well as between employees.

Of particular concern in the literature on business is the importance of trust and the disabling consequences of broken trust on business partnerships. Chapter 3 draws on extensive interviews in exploring the issue of trust, and reports novel findings which lead to new theoretical formulations. It has been central in sociological understanding that embeddedness in social and business exchanges generates and maintains interpersonal trust. Should opportunistic behaviour or violation of trust occur it is routinely assumed that such breaches would be exposed or punished, including reputation loss and exclusion from future exchange opportunities. What is less explored is that breaches of trust in many instances may not lead to disclosure of such a behaviour or termination of exchange relationships. Chapter 3 expands our understanding of broken trust. It identifies and explores mechanisms which operate in avoidance of confrontation, exposure and retaliation in instances of breaches of trust and also strategies employed by entrepreneurs in continuation of exchange relationships with violators of trust. The chapter examines underexplored aspects of the complexity and dynamics of business exchange relations and points to a rethinking of trust and social exchange.