The solution
We can bring clarity into the murky situation of what your Chinese counterparts think about their business with you by finding out their personal social networks. We can then map those networks on the relationships of their companies with different sectors of the local society.
Eurasia Consult’s founder Dr Peter Peverelli has developed a model about those relationships and a method to translate the networks into a graphic representation that shows the embeddedness of a Chinese company in one glance.
The illustration on this page shows the membership of various social groups of one and the same manager. As you can see, this model does not only look at professional identities, but also at family, groups of friends, etc. It can be used to explain the origin of that manager’s different personal values and ideas about the company and its business. Your business with his company can have a different meaning in different sections of the network.
Let’s look at a couple of examples from Eurasia Consult’s practice.