檢視最近政治學者利用DouglassNorth的「新制度論」對鄉鎮企業變遷的解釋，可以知道他們在理解地方官員控制鄉企的型態的改變上，及釐清不同的產權形式及後來集體產權的私有化因果方面，表現卓越。但是，他們卻也共享了不討論企業主在鄉企中所扮演角色的缺陷。企業主的角色，尤其是他們如何與地方官員互動、形成什麼樣的人際網絡、導致什麼樣的經濟表現，這些問題的解答，似乎可以依賴社會學者闡發North「新制度論」的精微處來進行。即以儒家差序格局的「同」和個人行動的「報」作為關係網絡的運作法則，配合「新制度論」所強調，制度變遷的關鍵在「路徑依賴」的鎖進效果和回饋過程，我們主張，可以比較細膩的處理鄉企經營中官民互動及其經濟表現的問題。

Two advancements have been made in the recent literature of political science on the changing nature of Chinese rural enterprises. One is the changing control style of local cadres in dealing with their collective firms. The other is the specification of the causal relationship between forms of the property rights and the privatization of the collective assets. However, political scientists typically ignore the role of the entrepreneurs, or private business owners in changing the contour of the rural establishment. To make up the deficiency, Taiwanese and Chinese sociologists' theory of guanxi (relation), particularly the Confucianism-inspired notions of tong (sameness) and bao (reciprocity) can come to help. We therefore propose a refined combination of guanxi with the hallmark of new institutionalism-the effects of lock-in and feedback, to facilitate the analysis of the networks between local cadres and entrepreneurs in changing Chinese rural economy.