This dissertation explores how state-owned enterprises (SOEs) overcome the liability of stateness and survive the process of institutional logic change in China. It also investigates how firms react to irreversible external political events that cause institutional logic change in Korea. The first essay examines how SOEs thrive in China’s state capitalism system. It focuses on how SOEs in China interact with three more market-based organizational forms (Privatized private-owned enterprises (POEs), New POE entrants, and foreign-owned enterprises (FOEs)) when state socialist and market capitalism logic coexist. Drawing on the institutional logics perspective and state capitalism literature, I explored how SOEs incorporate cognitive templates and material elements from more market-...[ Read more ]

This dissertation explores how state-owned enterprises (SOEs) overcome the liability of stateness and survive the process of institutional logic change in China. It also investigates how firms react to irreversible external political events that cause institutional logic change in Korea. The first essay examines how SOEs thrive in China’s state capitalism system. It focuses on how SOEs in China interact with three more market-based organizational forms (Privatized private-owned enterprises (POEs), New POE entrants, and foreign-owned enterprises (FOEs)) when state socialist and market capitalism logic coexist. Drawing on the institutional logics perspective and state capitalism literature, I explored how SOEs incorporate cognitive templates and material elements from more market-based forms. The four mechanisms that help SOEs adopt elements and survive—intermediation, optimization, decentralization, and transformation—were also discussed. A panel dataset of manufacturing firms in China from 1999 to 2005 was used for the analysis.

The second essay explores how firms navigate and shape new institutional environment when institutional logic changes as a result of an irreversible external political event. The essay examined the governmental transition from a conservative to a liberal government after Korea’s presidential election in 1997. This essay highlighted firms’ efforts to connect to diverse emerging sociopolitical elites after an ideological shift occurred across society following a presidential election. Selecting an independent director whose local political ideology is compatible to the new government’s political orientation is proposed as a relational institutional strategy that a firm can deploy. I argue that board members’ U.S. undergraduate and elite domestic school experiences are related to adoption of the strategy. The contingent effects of demographic similarity between directors and emerging political elites and of directors’ local political ideology were also examined. The results of the two essays largely support the hypotheses.