http://repub.eur.nl/res/concept/jel-P51/ Recent publications classified by JEL Code P51 en http://repub.eur.nl/static-eur/img/logo.png http://repub.eur.nl http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/7293/ 2005-06-03T00:00:00Z Jan Rotmans (1961) is one of the founders of Integrated Assessment (IA), and has outstanding experience in IA modeling, scenario-building, uncertainty management and transition management. During the past twenty years he has led a diversity of innovative projects in the field of climate change, global change, sustainable development and transitions and system innovations. He is founder and director of the International Centre for Integrative Studies (ICIS) (1998) at Maastricht University. Since 2004 he is a full professor in Transitions and Transition Management at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands, where he founded the DRIFT-institute: Dutch Research Institute For Transitions. He is vice-president of The Integrated Assessment Society (TIAS), and founder and director of the Dutch Knowledge Network on System Innovations and Transitions (KSI). Jan Rotmans is founder of two scientific journals, Environmental Modeling and Assessment and Integrated Assessment, and has published ten books and more than 150 peer-reviewed scientific articles in journals and books in the fields of environment, sustainability, governance, transitions and system innovations. Rotmans, J. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/160/ 2002-01-29T00:00:00Z The literature on transaction costs concentrates on established firms in established markets, while the literature on industrial ecology concentrates on new firms in given markets. It is contested in the following that the picture looks differently if the analysis concentrates on establishing new firms in new markets, such as e-commerce or the new private sector in the formerly socialist economies. A new market is defined by high uncertainty. First, the general knowledge of expertise in a society is low, so that young entrepreneurs find it hard, and costly, to acquire the necessary know-how. Second, institutions, might these be the law, business practices, or intermediaries, are poor and underdeveloped. It will be argued that in China therefore entrepreneurship depends crucially on the ability to establish firms, i.e. to find organisational forms for business ventures that facilitate long-term business relations within and around a firm, that is to say, individual entrepreneurship depends on mechanisms for co-ordinating individual or organisational behaviour of firms. These mechanisms were lacking under socialist planning. The legacy of the planned economy was an environment of weak economic institutions in which state-socialist institutions uneasily coexisted with market institutions, and newness of private exchange added to uncertainty. In this environment, economic actors depended on collective action to create their own institutions, driven by the need to agree on rules of conduct in business relations and on sanctions against violation of these rules. The study will concentrate on two essential components of (private) entrepreneurship. One is the search for organisational forms conforming to the situational constraints; the other is the formation of business practices that enable individual entrepreneurship to become a viable and sustainable course of action. In other words, we will attempt to show how the transaction cost advantage of organisational forms and co-ordination mechanisms can compensate entrepreneurs for the disadvantage they face with respect to the lack of clearly defined property rights. Based on extensive fieldwork in two provinces where 100 firms were interviewed the study can show that 1. as predicted by approaches in industrial ecology both experimentation and selection were crucial in shaping the new private business sector; 2. on the individual level the performance-orientation of Chinese culture allowed entrepreneurs to combine rational decision making with tradition. Both factors can explain why for example the family in China but not in Chinese overseas communities is no longer the natural base for private firms, why networks are assessed by their expected performance, or why Chinese firm do not care about building up a core business. 1 Krug, B. Hendrischke, H. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/142/ 2001-01-09T00:00:00Z The development of entrepreneurship and a private business sector in China pose various challenges to analysis. On the one hand, neo-classically based New Institutional Economics aims to find evidence that long-term investment and long-term commitment in and around firms can not be expected without deeply entrenched and state guaranteed private property rights. On the other hand, empirical studies within the China field concentrate on the political processes, in particular the interaction between the central state and local governments, at the danger of neglecting market forces, economic interests, and economic problems at stake. The empirical study on which the following is based took a different path by using a set of framing assumptions. Krug, B. Hendrischke, H. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/43/ 2000-09-04T00:00:00Z Chinese entrepreneurs innovatively manage organisations in the absence of strong economic institutions, under conditions of high environmental and technological uncertainty. This paper presents the findings of an empirical study designed to investigate how Chinese entrepreneurs can be successful in such an environment. We found that Chinese entrepreneurial activity relies on social institutions rather than on economic institutions. We offer a sociological theory which explains why the reliance on social institutions leads to such an unprecedented success. We conclude that the strong rule-enforcement mechanisms generate reliable behavioral patterns, and that these in turn efficiently reduce uncertainty to tolerable levels. Krug, B. Polos, L.