Knowledge As Action: Research On Forming And Mode For Social Responsibility Of Traditional Culture Embedded Corporation

During the important period of economic and social transformation, many Chinese corporations, especially private corporations, have been confronted with unprecedented difficulties. Introduction of western management system without localization is hardly likely to successfully adapt to the reality of modern Chinese management. In this background, a number of traditional culture embedded corporations emerged with different characteristics compared to common corporations. Those corporations, this research focuses on, try to comprehensively embed Chinese traditional culture into the development of corporate social responsibility forming a unique mode of corporate social responsibility. This research, three traditional culture embedded corporations as research subject, introduces organizational learning theory, conducts standard multiple case studies combing with grounded theory gathering complete store line with 33 conceptions and 9 categories, explores the forming and the mode of corporate social responsibility, and finally obtains the following results:(1) Entrepreneur’s sense of mission and culture awareness are the key factors motivating corporations to introduce traditional culture and promoting organization to learn traditional culture. And it changes the culture awareness and values of members within organization, integrates the values and behavior between entrepreneur and employees. This change and integration ultimately reflect on the organization system and form a unique corporate social responsibility.(2) The impact from entrepreneur’s sense of mission and culture awareness to corporate social responsibility has two parts, direct and indirect impact. The indirect impact is through the organizational learning process as intermediate impact, and then form the corporate social responsibility through the three phases of obtain, absorption and transformation.(3) Corporations with embedded traditional culture positively take the responsibility of cultural dissemination. They not only focus on how implementation of corporate social responsibility influences corporate performance, but also educate employees with traditional culture and guide them with right values, put employees` family into the corporate social responsibility system and pay attention to social profitable sustainable development.Based on the conclusion above, this research proposes a social responsibility mode for traditional culture embedded corporations and theoretically explains corporate social responsibility in this kind of corporations. The forming and implementation of social responsibility in traditional culture embedded corporations are the behavior reflection to the entrepreneur’s sense of mission and culture awareness as well as the result of corporate learning process for traditional culture. This implies the “knowledge as action” in corporate social responsibility and traditional culture, which is the unification of knowledge and action.In the case extension part, this research also discovers that corporations attain excellent economic and non-economic performs after embedding traditional culture, which implies the effectiveness of traditional culture to those corporations.