Recoupling Corporate Culture with New Political Discourse in China’s Platform Economy: The Case of Alibaba
通过阿里巴巴的民族志研究，揭示管理层如何利用创始人故事、平台带来的经济和社会变化构建企业文化，并分析市场优绩主义与技术进步主义话语如何同时推动企业文化与政治话语的脱耦与再耦合。
Previous research on the corporate culture construction in China primarily highlights how Chinese firms draw on its traditional culture and socialist heritages as two crucial intellectual resources. The highly marketised high-tech sector with declining employment security and changing political environment renders a new context and dual process for the ‘engineering’ of corporate culture in China’s platform economy. An ethnographic study of Alibaba unveils the resources the management draws on to construct its culture, including not only the founder’s entrepreneurial stories but also the economic and social changes allegedly brought by Alibaba’s platforms and technologies. This article theorises a new tripartite state–employer–employee relationship manifested through corporate culture by showcasing how the discourses of market meritocracy in China’s reform era and national renaissance based on technological progressivism have both fuelled the corporate culture construction, delineating its simultaneous yet paradoxical decoupling from and recoupling with the national political discourse in China’s high-tech industries.