Change through Briolage: The Development of China's Futures Market

Change through Bricolage: the Development of China’s Futures MarketHua WeiSubmitted for Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), 30th September 2013, the University of ManchesterThis research has chosen the futures market as a starting point for understanding China’s socioeconomic change. China lives a culture and experiences a developmental stage that is quite different from the West. This creates barriers for Western understanding. Nevertheless, better understanding has great practical implications for business and government as China’s economy and global impact are growing rapidly. Through analysis of the futures market, this research has discovered that institutional bricolage is the major characteristic of China’s socioeconomic change. The dynamic relationship between the state and market players has empowered the market players. They can create and change institutions through institutional bricolage, where they make do with existing institutions or leftovers of previous institutional changes to create new ones. The outcome is a mixture of new and old, Western and Chinese, which is roughly adapted to, but often at a remove from, the original plan. Mainstream social science analyses can be informative in measuring ‘how far across the river’ (Qian and Wu, 2003) if taking ‘where they are heading’ as given, whereas those analyses are less successful in answering ‘how they cross’ because ‘where they are heading’ is actually debatable (Chen, 1995). The answers to ‘how and why’ question lie in a comprehensive understanding about China’s institutional framework which cannot be standardised, quantified, or measured. This research, therefore, took an alternative approach to learning how the players made the change. It started with elite interviewing. To allow reflection, there were two rounds of interview and seven months in between. It continued with six months participant observation in an exchange. The researcher took an overt role in the organisation and was involved with strategic actions. The concept of bricolage emerged during the second round of interview and was further explored and verified in the participant observation. Institutional bricolage is a process could occur in any culture, whilst it seems more prominent in fast growing China than in developed countries. Institutional bricoleur is an identity not to be fixed to a group or an individual, but attached to the change agent who carries out bricolage activities.