Abstract: China’s remarkable economic development requires a deep understanding of the management practice of Chinese enterprises. However, both the questionnaire-based quantitative approach and the qualitative approach, adopted by Oriental management school, fail to reveal how Chinese enterprises function in a specific and local knowledge perspective. It requires an anthropological, interpretive and sociological approach, based on detailed observation, description and comparison of the social life of the different production units, to find out the common traits behind their original experience.