Out of the blue, I got an email from a stranger today. He was doing research on KM in China, and asked me a number of questions about how Chinese companies (as opposed to foreign companies in China, was the implicit distinction, I think) are using KM, collective intelligence, organisational structure and cooperation. Very, very interesting questions. Here’s the basis of my gut feeling about this:
Chinese society is traditionally very much based on personal trust relationships, given that society used to be based on Confucian principles. Imperial authority was based on Confucianism, and the principle that ‘virtue’ should come from an internal sense of duty, rather than being imposed by any external authority.
Practically, this meant that society had only criminal law, not civil law – so, in the absence of recourse to the courts (over contract disputes, for example), people dealt only with people they knew and trusted personally, or with whom they had a common connection. Even after the upheavals of the past 100 years, these traits are still strong. There is a definite generation gap now: you’ll hear that people currently in their mid-twenties or younger may have quite different attitudes from those older than mid-twenties. I think this is true, though perhaps only for those people who have grown up in the eastern seaboard. Overall, though, the culture of personal relationships is very strong today.
I suspect that this will make FOAF, social networking tools such as LinkedIn incredibly powerful in China – when they become available in Chinese. Gmail went through a phase of being very, very popular in China,and I believe that this was due to its invitation-only model.
In HR terms, industry in China is dominated by a bubble mentality: there’s so much demand for skilled workers that job-hopping is the norm. Once things start to settle down, though, and people start to take a longer term career view, I think that KM and social networks are going to be more useful and widespread here than in the West.
[...] salary above all else, and that encourages talent to try to maintain its value by not sharing. I looked at this for my HRM course at Tsinghua two years ago, and the tendency hasn’t [...]