The 3rd Think Tank Lecture of Shanghai Academy was held in the Lecture Hall of the Academy on May 6. Research fellow Peng Heping, former assistant to the President of Renmin University of China (RUC) and Secretary-General of RUC Alumni Association and RUC Education Foundation, was invited to deliver a speech themed on “Difficulties in and Approaches to Institutional Innovation”.
Executive Vice President of Shanghai Academy Wen Xueguo presided over the lecture. Wen firstly expressed his appreciation to Peng for agreeing to speak at Shanghai Academy and gave the audience a brief introduction of him. Peng is a well-known expert in institutional science and institutional theory, and his work Principles of Institutional Science is a pioneering academic monograph on institutional research.
In his speech, Peng elaborated on some institutional theories, including understanding and analysis of institutions, institutional rules and implementation, the institutional roles and institutional people, institutional field and field type management, institutional effectiveness, cultural factors & institutional outlook, institutional construction, operation & innovation. Moreover, he also made a detailed analysis of the difficulties in and approaches to institutional innovation.
Regarding the importance of institutions, Peng believes that people change with the objective environment, and institutions are an important factor of the objective environment. Now we are in an era when institutional reform is well under way.
What is the major role of institutions? As Peng pointed out, it is, first of all, regulation and constraint. Secondly, institution arises from regulation and realizes its value via implementation. It is a product or result of regulation and implementation. This is an interactive process, with regulators and implementers as the subject of the institution, while others the object. The two sides interact with each other. Therefore, no one is an abstract person in the process of institutionalization. No doubt each of us is an institutional person. Every one represents relations in various forms in the process of socialization, and all these relations are an institutional process that will form an institutional relation and a role relation. How to deal with this relation? This is a basic condition for personal development. Institutional studies must stress on the resultant force of an integral whole. That is to say, how to integrate all people into a whole? This is the effective wholeness we see in institutional studies.
When it comes to the relations between organizations and institutions, Peng believes that an organization is an aggregation of people who come together for some purpose. When regulation and implementation is in place, it will form an acting force that is effective within a certain space and time. The scope refers to the institutional field. The ultimate goal of institutional science is to form a resultant force or produce a result that is measured by performance indicators.
On the difficulties in and approaches to institutional innovation, Peng pointed out that subject and object interact with each other in the institutional field, and the people-and-people relations, people-and-event relations and people-and-thing relations are regulated through regulation and implementation. This is the most difficult part. He argued that on the one hand, institutional innovation refers to innovation of the institution itself, making the institution advanced, vigorous and lasting. On the other hand, it refers to promoting technological innovation by using the power of institution and seizing commanding heights with core competitiveness in various fields. When an organization has specified its strategic goal for future development, it must design and create a corresponding institutional form to help it accomplish the goal. Besides, it must adjust and improve institutions in the process of practice, in line with the actual conditions, and push forward theoretical and institutional innovation progressively, according to preset goals and plans, so as to achieve a high degree of unity between purposes, means, and institutions.
With regard to the differences between institutions and relations, Peng believes institutional science is not a discipline about relations. Through institutional studies, we must enhance institutional awareness, straighten out relations, and integrate actions in an effort to form positive energy for the institutional field, achieve good institutional effectiveness, and better contribute to organizational and national development goals.
In the Q & A session, Peng gave a detailed explanation of "issues including past institutional design and current corporate development", and interacted openly with audiences, winning bursts of applause.
This lecture attracted an audience of nearly 100 from all walks of life, including white-collar workers, students and institutional research experts, and won welcome social response.
（By Lu Wenting and Shi Leilei)
