Emphasis on descent and kinship in analysis of traditional Chinese corporations, a legacy of structural-functional theory, mistakes the analyst's theoretical categories for native culture. In this paper, the author attempts to sort out some of the resulting conceptual muddles, and he proposes a more rigorous analytical framework for discussing the range of organizational variation in traditional Chinese corporations. Analysis of ten representative cases from Ta-ch'i, Taiwan, reveals greater flexibility of corporate form and function than structural-functional theories would predict. Close attention to the cases also reveals the absence of any compelling reason to treat the “Chinese lineage” as analytically or culturally distinct from the entire range of Chinese formal associations (hui). To understand what is uniquely Chinese in Chinese corporations, past emphasis on differences in formal group-membership requirements must be complemented by attention to the cultural values and norms of operation that transcend such differences.
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