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risks. Otherwise the whole family would starve (he laughed). In a large company, there is wider exposure and one can learn more. Then one can be an owner.
The high premium on individual autonomy among the spinners, it appears to me, has its origin in the cultural world view of the Chinese. Various schools of Chinese philosophy since the Warring States period shared one basic premise: men are 'naturally equal', (Munro 1969: 1-22). This means that men are born with common attributes at birth. Social inequality appears because some persons can realize their potential through their own efforts, especially by means of education. This conception of man was embodied in a peculiar system of social stratification in traditional China. A strictly hierarchical structure coexisted with an ideology exhorting individual social mobility, (See Chü 1957; Ho 1962: 1-91). No status, no matter how high, was regarded as intrinsically beyond the reach of an individual. In order to maximize one's chances of upward mobility, one should not let one's ambition be suppressed. This outlook affects Chinese economic behaviour and creates problems for the Chinese owners. They must try to devise means to cope with the centrifugal tendencies among their executives. This raises the question of the effect of the role set on the performance of the entrepreneurs. Most studies of entrepreneurship simply look at the entrepreneur in isolation and try to define his essence. They tend to neglect that entrepreneurial performance is often collectively determined. To understand entrepreneurship fully, we should take into account the behaviour and orientation of the people on whom the entrepreneur has to depend, in particular his executives and assistants. In his essay on the Protestant ethic, Weber has touched on this aspect. He writes (1930: 177):
'The power of religious asceticism provided him [the entrepreneur] in addition with sober, conscientious, and unusually industrious workmen, who clung to their work as to a life purpose willed by God.'
This passing comment does not seem to have captured the imagination of later sociologists. Therefore the 'organization men' who form the supporting cast in the drama of industrialization do