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Abstract
This dissertation investigates diversity and organizational performance through an indepth study of intrateam relationship and teamwork within a Chinese professional basketball club. I question why the club consistently failed to achieve coordinated and effective teamwork before and after the COVID-19 pandemic—but not during the pandemic, despite having highly skilled players from around the world, a collectivist organizational structure, and access to world-class resources. Drawing on 36 months of ethnographic research, over 190 interviews, and more than 600 hours of training and game footage, I demonstrate how distinct early training experiences shape players’ approaches to training, collaboration, competition, and rule interpretation. By comparing players from foreign private basketball academies with those trained in local Chinese programs, I show that interactions with coaches, teammates, competitors, and referees are shaped by and transmit the cultural contexts of players’ early training institutions. Compared to their locally trained counterparts, foreign and privileged Chinese players tended to approach opportunities and resources in training, collaboration, competition, and rule enforcement more proactively. These asymmetries in access and influence fostered persistent conflicts that ultimately undermined the club’s efforts to cultivate effective teamwork. While the culture-based explanation explained the struggle with teamwork before and after the pandemic, it does not answer why and how the team produced improved performance during the games in pandemic seasons. I find that a provisional organizational structure that I call “rotational scrimmage” enabled players from distinct class background overcome entrenched conflict during the process of training, collaboration, and competition. By introducing structured competition, rotational scrimmage promoted cross-class contact between previously antagonistic members and introduced competitions between players from the same class background. The scrimmages effectively weakened entrenched class-based xi conflicts, facilitating cross-class collaborations and fostering team synergy. In contrast, before and after the pandemic, an ordinary structure promoting a highly collectivist training regimen without rotational competition within teams led to failure when players from the same class background pursued their own goals at the expense of the goals of the players from different class contexts. Through four independent chapters with each addressing dynamics of training, collaboration, competition, and rule interpretation, this dissertation examines the dialectical relationship between transnational cultural economy and local production processes. Within each chapter, I show how the transnational flow of basketball talent to China transmits American cultural practices into local club operations, and clubs and players in rising powers like China simultaneously negotiate with and contest American cultural dominance in professional basketball. By tracing these interactions, the dissertation reveals how global cultural forces are both embedded within and transformed by local organizational practices.