IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/adl/wpaper/2026-08.html

Beyond Skills: The Institutional Role of Employee Training in Republican China’s Banking Sector

Author

Listed:
  • Lingyu Kong

    (Adelaide University)

  • Qixia Xu

    (Zhongnan University of Economics and Law)

Abstract

We show that employee training in Republican-era Chinese banks served not just to build skills but to stabilize institutions and align workforce behavior with evolving organizational goals. Despite operating in skill-rich environments with simple job tasks, banks invested heavily in hierarchical training systems to maintain internal labor markets, enforce ethical conduct, and foster merit-based promotion. Training functioned as a mechanism for employee monitoring, governance control, and symbolic commitment to long-term employment. This reframing challenges human capital theory and contributes to a richer historical understanding of training as an organizational control mechanism, emphasizing its symbolic and structural significance in employment relations.

Suggested Citation

  • Lingyu Kong & Qixia Xu, 2026. "Beyond Skills: The Institutional Role of Employee Training in Republican China’s Banking Sector," Adelaide Economics Working Papers 2026-08 Classification-, Adelaide University, School of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:adl:wpaper:2026-08
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://media.adelaide.edu.au/economics/papers/doc/wp2026-08.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:adl:wpaper:2026-08. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chansik Yoon or Ruby Nguyen (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/decadau.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.