Tian-ren-he-yi strategy: An Eastern perspective

There is a debate on whether the business-environment dilemma should be the primary responsibility of firms. One side of the debate argues that since the environmental issue is a public good, protecting the environment should be the primary job of governments (Friedman, 1970). However, the other side of the debate argues that firms should shoulder more responsibilities. This is because “in recent years, business increasingly has been viewed as a major cause of social, environmental, and economic problems, and companies are widely perceived to be prospering at the expense of the broader community. Moreover, business will often be far more effective than governments and nonprofits are at marketing that motivates customers to embrace products and services that create societal benefits” (Porter & Kramer, 2011: 4). While joining this debate is beyond the scope of our study, it is useful to disclose that we—as well as many executives that we interviewed—share the second view in the debate.

Li (2016) suggested that tian-ren-he-yi can be translated as “heaven-nature integration.”

Such a voice represents a minority in Chinese academia. In the Chinese academia at large, there is “a dramatic dominance” of economically-oriented studies relatively to human welfare-oriented studies, as documented by Tsui and Jia (2013: 1) using articles published in three leading Chinese-language journals in management.

In comparison, manufacturing contributes 28 % of South Korea’s GDP (the second highest in the world), 20 % of Japan’s, 19 % of Germany’s, 13 % of Brazil’s and India’s, and 12 % of the United States’ (McKinsey Global Institute, 2012: 24).

Firms in three regions (Guangdong, Shandong, and Shanghai) were involved in both qualitative and quantitative phases. However, within these three regions, we sampled different firms to obtain qualitative and quantitative data.

For example, firm X simultaneously implements economically-oriented strategy and environmentally-oriented strategy. Our measurement of balance indicates that when the respondent of X scored economically-oriented strategy and environmentally-oriented strategy, the basic assumption is that the score of Likert scale reflects the effort employed by X. We assume X has five options (scenarios) to split its efforts (100) into economically-oriented strategy and environmentally-oriented strategy. The more efforts X devotes to implement economically-oriented strategy, the higher score of its Likert scale. The same holds for environmentally-oriented strategy. Please see the following table.

This is a subsample (subgroup) analysis since we could not obtain such data for all sampled firms. Overall, 191 firms reported such data. We ran a t-test to ascertain whether these 191 firms and the rest of the sample had significant differences in terms of age and size. We found that firms that reported the objective environmental index were not statistically different from those not reporting such data (age: F = 2.00, p = .16; size: F = 1.89, p = .17).