After reading Social Entrepreneurship: The Case For Definition, I was thrilled about the concept of social entrepreneurship, partly because that I hardly heard of this term in China before. And even if I did, I must suppose it to be pure charity. It is a novel terminology for me indeed, and I wondered how it is in China. Highly interested, I read an report on Social Entrepreneurship in China.

To my amazement, the report shows that in the studied group all of the entrepreneurs have university degree, and half among them have advanced degrees. 42% of the participants are women; yet despite the approximate equal gender participation, in some cases gender-specific challenge are holding women back. And talking about age, 31% of them are between 31 to 40; and the second largest group are between 40 to 50, making up about 20%. One notable phenomenon is that about 2/3 of the enterprises are in Beijing(50%) or Shanghai(17%), and another 17% are located in large cities including Tianjing, Shenzhen and Suzhou. It suggests that social enterprises can be hardly seen in small cities, like Taiyuan where I came from. Besides, about 66% of the enterprises are registered as companies, 20% are registered as NGO and 14% were not registered at all. And 71% of the enterprises  receive less than 500,000RMB annually. Overall, the stats suggests that Social Enterprises are prosperous right now but the industry is getting thriving, because 54% of the enterprises were started in the past 3 year

Social enterprise is developing, or to say, starting in China. They are facing a lot of problem and some are in even in crisis, but opportunities always come hand in hand with crisis.

Reference:

http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/social_entrepreneurship_the_case_for_definition/

https://www.bsr.org/reports/FYSE_China_Social_Enterprise_Report_2012.PDF

The Good Jobs Strategy is a book recommended in our course, and I was fortunate to have a quick look on it. Lesson 19 was named “People, Culture&Team” which is also what I think the most important thing for a business after I had the quick look. I have been obsessed with economics and I enjoyed playing with those numbers, because solving economic problem alone makes me feel really accomplished. But it is time to stress the point that business is not about working alone.

Numbers are important because they indicate important facts. But numbers cannot breathe, and if numbers cannot serve people, they are just something dead. Eventually and ultimately, all the numbers are to  serve the purpose of decision making, and it is human who make the decisions. In a business, the most important resource is always human being. And human need great spirits to do great work.

This spirit is exactly what we call “culture” in this class, and it is this spirit, rather than number, driving people to accomplish. It is just a reminder for me, a person currently  obsessed with economics and making assumptions, that human are emotive, and numbers cannot reflect this directly.

As we all know, the United Nations aims to protect peace and human rights. And yes, UN tries to help the developing countries. But while the resources are always limited, UN is naturally not capable to do everything for this world while there are enough emergencies everyday. Thus the responsibility of making it a better world falls on everyone’s shoulder. And what Arc and social enterprises are doing is to using their own edge to help the people in need to find a way out. There is a Chinese proverb going like “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” To help the people combat poverty, it is better to help them learn how to create wealth in this era. And thus the Arc and the Social Enterprise is helping create wealth for the society, while creating wealth is not UN’s goal.

In a crowded market, entrepreneur finds a sweet way to stand out. As much as the title says, this is exactly why we need social enterprises: This society is to be rewarded even when the market is crowded, and social enterprises and Arc reward it by helping its young entrepreneur going through. And we can expect that when the entrepreneurs become successful they would do the same to reward this society, because that is how decent human beings pass hope.

Reference

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/small-business/sb-growth/going-global/in-a-crowded-market-ethiopian-entrepreneur-finds-a-sweet-way-to-stand-out/article17912688/

Recently an article, The Slippery Slope of Getting Away With Little Stuff, attracted me, which is on unethical work behaviour. The article introduced three points that interest me: First, people tend to excuse their minor ethical transgressions; Second, starting from tiny transgression, people keep finding excuse to move to tremendous ones; last but not least, when the risk for transgression becomes more obvious, notably less people would transgress. I agree with these ideas, because there align with my observation elsewhere, other than business arena, in my life – I find the same theory apply well to bureaucratic corruption in China.

Even though the government rules with laws, it does not actually appreciate them. Often when the corrupted bureaucrats are caught, they argue that the structure had become a shackle and they are forced to break the rules. This excuse actually stands itself. Because in nowadays Chinese society, bribes happen so often that everyone regard it as a unusual thing. Usually it is not the bribes putting the corrupted into prisons, but the unusual scale of the bribe or so revealed by their opponents putting them into the prisons. It means that small transgression are usually tolerated until it eventually develops into a huge one. And that is exactly where the problem lies: the bureaucrats can see no obvious risk for small transgression because the society is used to tolerate it. Only when bureaucrats start fearing the risk when they make the slightest transgression, they would actually behave themselves. Therefore, Chinese government needs to use more rigid method to combat small transgressions and the society should not tolerate the slightest transgression no more.

Reference:

http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20140806-the-slippery-slope

While both the release of iphone 6 and Alibaba’s IPO have been fighting to be on the front pages, I would prefer to read more about Alibaba. Because its story reminds me of Milton Friedman’s allegation that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits. Even though China does not have a free market, Alibaba’s profiting benefits the whole.

The middle class in China is rising, its size increasing, Alibaba is having more to sell. And Alibaba has 600 billion people in China using Internet – its potential customers doubles the population of the US. In this case, Alibaba’s business is big enough to affects many aspects in China, and even the world.

Alibaba is making all parties happy, even though it is facing the problem of couterfeits. Alibaba is teaming up with more and more foreign companies to sell the authentic luxury, which benefits the foreign companies because it brings them more customers who would like to pay for the authentic. On the other side, while the safety of food has been a great concern of the public in China, the middle class can have more confidence about the food they are eating; because Alibaba is totally capable of deliver foreign food within an almost incredibly short period of time.  Benefiting from the taxation, the Chinese government must be willing to see Alibaba’s business is promoting the national policy of transforming China “from an export-driven country to a consumption based economy”, as John W. Spelich wrote. And supposing that Alibaba itself is happy to profit, all stakeholders are happy about Alibaba’s business, because they are all benefited from its gain.

Moreover, Alibaba’s e-commerce is reshaping some other industries. Post offices have been dying away because of the birth of Internet. Fewer and fewer people tend to take their time to write a letter or even a check, because the substitutes like email and e-transfer have joined the competition. But now, Alibaba’s e-commerce is bringing the post offices to a revival. The e-commerce is not eliminating post office but acting as an incentive to increase the efficiency and capacity of the nowadays post offices. Accordingly, the e-commerce is also reshaping the retailer’s world. It is never too much to say that Alibaba is Changing China.

If benefiting a society is the best way an individual can fulfill his social responsibility, then Alibaba’s very way of profiting demonstrates that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.

Reference:

http://qz.com/203912/ali-babas-e-commerce-head-has-a-plan-to-save-post-offices-around-the-world/

http://site.ebrary.com/lib/ubc/reader.action?docID=10187339&page=171

Source of the picture:

https://www.google.ca/search?q=alibaba&biw=1440&bih=625&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=s2oRVJqlIuPHiwLogIGoAw&ved=0CAYQ_AUoAQ#facrc=_&imgdii=_&imgrc=QIurXLBBYBw6iM%253A%3B_I0T8MsTxibjSM%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Ftheetailblog.com%252Fwp-content%252Fuploads%252Fsites%252F7%252FAlibaba-Logo.jpg%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Ftheetailblog.com%252F2014%252F06%252F27%252Fchina-e-commerce-giant-alibaba-to-list-with-nyse%252F%3B800%3B227