Kina - Doing Business in China - a Study of Norwegian SME's in China

The short term objective (2006) is to plan and conduct an empirical study of the experiences of Norwegian SME's which are trying to do business in China. In 2005, preliminary contacts were established between Sogn og Fjordane Unversity College and Beiji ng Normal University. Professor Songbai Liu from BNU visited Sogndal in August. Currently, we are working on an co-operation agreement between our institutions and developing the project idea mentioned above. "Doing Business in China" is intended as an i nitial study done in order to develop the co-operation between the two partner institutions and prepare for what we hope to be a more comprehensive study of cross cultural management using China and Norway as cases. Our intention is to include in the in itial study both businesses with export to the Chinese market and businesses establishing production branches or using Chinese sub-contractors. Researchers and students at BNU will do much of the data collection in China, but planning of the project, anal ysis and reporting will be done by a small research group from both institutions. In order to finish the project draft and plan the interviews, the project group need to gather for a preparation workshop in the winter 2006. We also need to arrange a join t workshop in the autumn 2006 to analyse the data and plan writing of the report from the initial project. The long term objective (beyond 2006) is to develop and carry out a comparative study of management practices in Chinese and Norwegian SME's.