Lions grazing on the dragon’s land: South African firms’ business strategies in the Chinese market: navigating institutions

This research project is one of the first studies to focus on South African foreign direct investment (FDI) in Mainland China. Specifically, the research aims to identify and specify the key institutional factors that have contributed to the effectiveness or otherwise of South African firms entering and operating within the Chinese market, as well as to investigate the characteristics and processes that have effectively shaped South African firms’ business strategies to negotiate the current Chinese institutional environment.
The research adopts an institutional perspective, fusing two separate disciplinary study frameworks, international business (IB) and international political economy (IPE), to draw out the key institutional factors that South African firms entering and operating within the Chinese market have encountered. The principal contributions of the thesis are conceptual and empirical: the latter presenting case studies of a cross-section of South African business actors who have sought to penetrate the Chinese market; the former centring of a model which emphasises the importance of both formal and informal business processes and practices in influencing business success and failure in context.