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In June 2025, the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, the academic home of SSIR, hosted its Junior Scholars Forum in partnership with the Doctoral Seminar in Social Entrepreneurship and Philanthropy (SEPHI) at ESSEC Business School in Paris. The articles in this issue’s Research section report on papers by scholars who participated in the forum.
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When a new type of organization enters a country, it can evolve into novel forms. This idea of institutional translation is the subject of a new paper that examines how the concept of social enterprise changed as China adopted and edited it through government involvement.
The paper, by Cheng Lu, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School, and Paulo Savaget, an associate professor of engineering science at Oxford with a joint appointment at Saïd, investigates what happened when the social enterprise form, which addresses social problems through market-based activities, entered a socialist and collectivist country accustomed to using government to address such problems.
Lu and Savaget drew on the academic literature of institutional custodianship as they sought to understand the evolution that social enterprises underwent in China. “We want to explore how custodians in the Chinese government engage in the translations of foreign ideas,” Lu says.
Before studying for his doctoral degree, Lu researched China’s social enterprises at Peking University’s Center for Civil Society Studies. The idea for this paper came from his background in political science, coupled with his current business-school research. At the University of Edinburgh, where Lu received his PhD, Savaget and Lu first worked together on systems change and social entrepreneurship. When the pair reunited at Oxford, they decided to collaborate on this paper, an expansion and revision of a chapter from Lu’s dissertation, which built on his fieldwork in China.
The most surprising finding, Lu says, was that the Chinese government took a pragmatic approach to institutional translation, even though social enterprises were a Western import that represented a completely new way of tackling society’s problems in a country where potential threats or disruptions to society are often not tolerated. Because the central government does not have laws aimed at governing social enterprises specifically, Lu says, local governments are the main actors in this process of institutional translation.
Local officials first studied the concept of social enterprises, then considered the risks and opportunities, as well as how these groups would be likely to affect the broader social system, Lu says. This caution arose from the Chinese government’s role as the guardian of social stability and from local and regional governments’ interest in preserving existing institutions that they control.
After a period of wary exploration, governments stepped in to work with the social enterprises that were setting up in their areas to make sure that officials preserved their ability to exert some measure of control, Lu says. Their involvement nudged the social enterprises to change their approach so that it was more aligned with each region’s goals.
“People may think the government is authoritative, powerful, but we observed a much lighter touch and consultative approach,” Lu says.
As a result, social enterprises occupied different spheres in each region, in line with the priorities of the local governments. In Beijing, Lu says, the groups became a vehicle to support social cohesion. In Chengdu, officials pushed them to improve community building. In Shenzhen, the government used social enterprises to leverage impact investment with both overseas and Chinese funds, with a goal of becoming a center for social finance.
Previous studies in the field painted social enterprise as an organizational form that sprang from grassroots foundations. That might be true in the West, but it’s not the case in China. There, social enterprises came not from domestic civil society, but from overseas, says Chenjian Zhang, an associate professor of management strategy and organization at the University of Bath.
“The paper demonstrates that social enterprises are actually institutionally embedded phenomena whose very nature depends on the custodial work of powerful actors—particularly governments that actively shape their development from introduction through implementation,” Zhang says. “This represents a shift from studying social enterprises as independent entities to understanding them as malleable organizational forms that are continuously shaped by institutional custodians.”
Research paper: “Institutional Custodianship Meets Institutional Translation: How the Chinese Government Engaged with the Integration of Social Enterprises in China," by Cheng Lu and Paulo Savaget.
Read more stories by Chana R. Schoenberger.