Edinburgh Napier University

  Market orientation for many organisations seen as conceptual premise to instigate their
changing points, this applies with particular force to organisations in transition
economies. Especially those that have to cope with the challenges imposed by the
cultural rite of passage from political-based market governance to competitive market
systems. The marketing mantra, market orientation, is routinely offered as the basis for
business success. While the sincerity of this principle is of little doubt in most developed
western economies, implementations in many transition-economy contexts are revealing
a range of paradoxes. This paper using China as a contextual premise, offers starting
observations in measuring how local companies are adopting a market orientation.
Although some of the early results are consistent with those obtained in the West, but
there is an underlying lacuna that needs to be addressed so that useful culture-specific
interpretations are offered vis-à-vis locale-specific knowledge. To plug this gap, the
paper argues for an approach that accommodates the institutional perquisites, focusing
the temporal, spatial and wider socio-cultural and