Linking the taniwha and dragon: Māori primary exports into China and culturally aligned value chains

Culture

The concept of culture is broad and complex, with numerous definitions that represent both different ways of viewing the whole and different strata or manifestations of the whole (Mitchell, 1999). Most commonly, culture is viewed as something a national, ethnic, or religious group has, encapsulated in a range of beliefs, values, norms, rules, traditions, and behaviours, or cultural attributes.

Māori cultural attributes emerge from the central concept of whakapapa—the belief that all of creation is related. Whakapapa is a universal taxonomic schema, functioning as the central organising principle through which Māori view, understand, and interact with the world (Rout et al., 2021). The concept of whakapapa delineates the primacy of relationships, reciprocity, and respect across all of reality. Utu, the ethic of reciprocity and balance, demands that all interactions between humans and with nature are balanced. Utu is the fundamental guiding framework that guides the unfolding processes of engagement and interplay. Mana (force of power, prestige, and dignity), mauri (force of vitality), and tapu (force of sacredness) are three key cosmic forces, which ultimately come from the atua (gods), that help shape, guide, and keep track of these interactions, each playing a positive and activating role in the way humans relate to each other, and respect, care for, and use flora, fauna, and ecosystems (Rout et al., 2021). The values of whanaungatanga (ethic of nurturing kinship) and manaakitanga (ethic of extending love, kindness, and hospitality) extol that both kin and strangers should be cared for and respected, providing a more tangible, everyday guide for how the cosmic forces of mana, mauri, and tapu, and the underpinning concept of whakapapa and framework of utu, can be manifested and maintained. These cultural attributes provide a robust and holistic way of understanding and being in the world.

Chinese cultural attributes are grounded in various philosophical and religious schools, such as Confucianism, Buddhism, or Taoism. These schools of thought largely overlap and over the centuries have formed what can be considered Chinese cultural attributes. For instance, the concept of tao—a set of principles such as simplicity or reciprocity—might be considered as universal schema to Chinese in a similar way as whakapapa is to Māori. Remarkably, tao also embraces similar principles to whakapapa. For instance, utu can be observed in a concept such as chi, which “is also known as vital energy,” and similarly emphasises the importance of balance and reciprocity (Chen & Weng, 1998, p. 118). Likewise, the underlying message of manaakitanga is broadly related to the concept of de (virtue). De is in fact the central principle of tao as it is evidenced in ancient texts, such as Tao Te Ching. Whanaungatanga is also central to tao. For example, tao promotes a sense of family connections that are created and maintained through shared experiences. Similar to Māori culture, central to the Chinese culture are notions of virtue, balance, reciprocity, kindness, and kinship. Although there is probably no definitive way of linking each of these concepts directly, there is an overall alignment across these concepts. In modern China, the keyword for describing Chinese culture is guanxi. Guanxi is the essence of daily living practices in China. The core of guanxi is trust, and thus cultivating guanxi is based on accumulation of virtue embodying righteous behaviour, wisdom, and genuine hospitality. The overview and alignment of the key cultural concepts is summarised in Supplementary Table 1.

Cultural expressions

To operationalise culture for analysis, it is useful to explore how it influences key aspects of life, such as schooling, sport, and politics, which could be viewed as manifestations of culture, or cultural expressions. Here we examine three such cultural expressions relevant to this article.

Business culture is the influence a society’s general culture has on business practices, structures, rules, norms, traditions, and so on. As Hofstede (1991) has shown, there are numerous culturally influenced differences in work values, beliefs, and orientations of organisations across different cultures. These are not just shallow surface differences either, as Mitchell (1999) explains:

[W]inning acceptance from foreign colleagues and turning cultural differences into a competitive advantage means more than making sure you know how to properly accept the business card of a Japanese colleague or avoid serving cocktails to a Moslem banker. People from different cultures process information in different ways, value different traits and measure the concepts of time and space in dramatically different fashions. (p. 1)

Audit and authentication cultures are expressions of how a culture influences beliefs in trust or knowledge of an item’s provenance. Audit cultures place a high value on checking and verifying in lieu of direct trust through the quantification and centralisation of information (Power, 1997). While audit cultures are well recognised in academia, “authentication culture” has been coined here to refer to the importance placed on understanding the origins and history of items. An example highlighting the difference between the two is that there are certain cheeses, such as traditional brie, that do not meet food safety audit standards, for example, because they are unpasteurised, yet at the same time are in significant demand because of their craft authenticity, such as traditional brie which comes from a particular artisan food culture from a specific location that is highly valued by some consumers.

Food is an intrinsically cultural expression. Culture influences the production, preparation, and consumption of food in a wide variety of ways, from the patterns of productive land use to the animals considered eatable, from the ceremonies and rituals that shape the ways it is eaten through to the varying values of foodstuffs (Montanari, 2006). This last point is critical, culture plays a strongly mediating role in the prices of different types of foodstuffs as is clear in willingness-to-pay research (Prescott et al., 2002).

Value chains

Conceptually, value chains are a way of analysing or transforming a supply chain. The supply chain is the system of organisations, people, activities, information, and resources required to supply a product or service to a consumer. Conversely, the value chain concept seeks to examine or improve these various links and processes in the chain with the aim of adding and capturing value (Hellin & Meijer, 2006). Both streams of literature consider cultural attributes to differing degrees. Supply chain management literature largely focuses on optimisation of resources. With supply chains spanning the globe, they are interested in alignment through a set of universal principles, tending to overlook cultural differences. For example, organisational practices are codified in various reference points, such as codes of conduct or international standards (Castka, 2018, 2020). These codes of conduct and standards are then adopted across supply chains and its adherence is enforced and monitored through audits and inspections—orchestrated by the most dominant actors in supply chains (Prajogo et al., 2021). Although culture is considered as important in building relationships, for example, in long-term partnerships (Zhao & Castka, 2021), the formation and operation of individual firms and their networks are often driven by universal principles. The value chain literature has been more considerate of the role of culture. For example, early work by Pratt (2008) fostered research into cultural commodity chains, cultural clusters and production chains. Importantly, in the Indigenous domain, extant studies have explored the role of culture in reshaping the classical neoliberal viewpoint of value chains. For example, Barr et al. (2018) demonstrate how a joint consideration of cultural and economic perspectives contributes to rejuvenation of Indigenous enterprises.

There are a number of common themes in terms of optimal value chain characteristics and components: the importance of relationships, networks, incentives, collaboration, and governance between links and organisations across the chain; the role of information to evaluate opportunities, identify methods for competing, coordinate the chain’s activities, and communicate along the chain; the centrality of the customer as the final arbiter of value and consequent need for value chain market orientation (Dalziel et al., 2018; McIntyre et al., 2019; Walters & Lancaster, 2000). In sum, the first is focused on the quality of controls, connections, and alignments across the chain—value chain composition, while the second is interested in the types of information and how it moves along the chain—value chain integration, and the third emphasises the determiner and directional flow of value along the chain—value chain orientation.

Primary sector value chains are generally conceived of in a simplified way as a set of links between producers, processors, distributors, wholesalers, retailers, and consumers (MacClay & Feeny, 2018; McIntyre et al., 2019). Often, there are more complex links or networks in the value chain, particularly around the inputs that go into production, the logistics that are involved in distribution, the different retailers involved in sales, and the range of end consumers. Also, in many cases, some of these links are part of the same business, while in other cases, there are numerous businesses involved at each link with various horizontal and vertical ties (Bode & Wagner, 2015; McCarter & Northcraft, 2007) as well as various ownership structures (Galaskiewicz, 2011).

In any potential Māori value chain exporting into China, the producers are Māori, while the consumers are Chinese. Somewhere along the chain there has to be a cross-cultural engagement. In a commodity-focused supply chain, this interaction may be minimal but for a value chain it has to be relatively substantial. In what would be a powerful Māori-dominated value chain, Māori would control all elements of the value chain, albeit probably contracting out processing and/or distribution, selling direct to consumers. It is more likely, however, that the Māori exporters would engage with a Chinese distributer, wholesaler, or retailer, who serve as intermediary between Māori products and Chinese consumers. Regardless of the exact nature of the value chain, there would be one or more areas of cultural engagement between Māori and Chinese within the value chain.

Figure 1 provides a simplified depiction of a value chain and links the three value chain domains and the cultural elements into a generic framework, also indicating the potential areas of cultural engagement. The framework provides a platform for further analysis of culturally aligned value chains presented in the next section, where each domain of a value chain is analysed through the lens of Māori and Chinese cultural expressions.

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Figure 1.

Cultural alignment processes in value chains.

Value chain composition: business culture

Much has been made of the cultural affinity between Māori and Chinese business people. Most of this commentary focuses on the emphasis both cultures place on relationship building in business (Rout et al., 2021; Zhao & Castka, 2021). This is epitomised by the tourism and trade body New Zealand Story (Wixon, 2016), which explains, “when Māori do business the first order of business is not business, it is building relationships through actively finding and forging connections. . . . Chinese do the same” (para. 3) This shared emphasis on relationships as a fundamental, even prior, component of business is understood as a critical for Māori in creating a culturally aligned value chain into China.

For Māori, business partnerships are more than just a commercial arrangement, they are underpinned and motivated by a range of core cultural imperatives. Māori aim to build mutual trust and integrity when they partner with others. This drive to create and sustain relationships in business is inherently cultural. As Ruwhiu et al. (2021) found in their study of Māori entrepreneurs, “networking and the networking skills . . . were essential business attributes and an extension of their cultural life” (p. 45). Describing a meeting between Māori and Chinese business people, Spiller and Stockdale (2013) explains,

[i]t was discovered, again, through the process of full introduction that both cultures shared a deep appreciation of the role of ancestors and elders; service for a greater good; and a preference for face-to-face meetings. The two cultures recognise the significance of whakapapa . . . and family ties, and story-telling as a medium for keeping history alive. (p. 13)

Similarly, Glenn Wilcox, deputy chairman of Auckland City Council’s Independent Māori Statutory Board, notes,

For Māori, much like Asian communities, relationships are much more important than anything else . . . . Without relationships you don’t make business, without relationships and deep faith in each other you can’t go forward. The real purpose for us as Māori is that we develop the relationships . . . . The business and that other part that goes with business, financial, that create commerce, that comes later. For us as Māori, it’s about explaining who we are and how we can make those relationships with people on a one-on-one basis. (“Roundup: Maori businesses taking strategic view with china partnerships”, 2016, paras 4–6)

Manaakitanga sees Māori businesses going out of their way to welcome and host business partners, ensuring that the relationship is maintained. In their study of Māori business networks, Amoamo et al. (2007) found that the “ability to network and to create successful businesses is not only about business success but also about the growing esteem and mana” (p. 3). Underpinning the growing business relationship is both mana and utu, the first serving to encourage honourable and respectful actions and the latter in ensuring the interactions are balanced and reciprocal, which, in turn, sees mana grow (Rout et al., 2021). The mana-utu dynamic means business relationships are regulated by the understanding that any transaction obliges the receiver to provide an item or service of equal or greater value back to the giver at a future date (Rout et al., 2021).

The centrality of relationship building in Chinese business is encapsulated in guanxi, which refers to a “relationship that bonds the exchange partners through reciprocal exchange of favors and mutual obligations” (D. J. Lee et al., 2001, p. 52). Guanxi functions as an informal governance mechanism, helping to create social and economic value for organisations through networking (Luo et al., 2012). Business people usually use guanxi, consisting of business ties and government ties, to facilitate negotiations with governmental officials and business partners to access to knowledge, information, and preferential opportunities, facilitate business operations, open dialogues, acquire intelligence, build trust, and enhance reputation (Luo et al., 2012). As D. J. Lee et al. (2001) explain, under guanxi

if an exchange partner receives a favor based on humanized obligation (renqing), the other partner is obliged to pay back the favor in the future. Violating this norm will damage one’s reputation and will lead to the loss of face (mianzi). (p. 54).

The parallels with the roles of mana and utu are clear in the above, as are the relationship dynamics and rules of engagement which are almost exactly the same across Māori and Chinese cultures. This suggests that not only is the centrality of relationship in business culture shared, but the underlying ways in which this operates are similar, giving Māori an advantage in developing and sustaining critical business relationships need to create a culturally aligned value chain.

Value chain integration: audit and authentication cultures

Just as with business culture, the alignment between Māori and Chinese audit and authentication cultures has been noted. Wilcox explains that it is

very important to us [Māori], to understand where your food, where your meat comes from and I think Chinese are the same. It’s important to understand the relationship we have with animals with that whole ecosystem that we deal with. (“Roundup: Maori businesses taking strategic view with china partnerships”, 2016, para. 12)

However, in terms of chain integration there is some variance between the two cultures: Māori have a strong authentication culture, while China has an equally strong audit culture, which is being matched, and in some ways blended, with a rejuvenating authentication culture.

For Māori, food is inextricably linked to the ecosystem where it comes from, the place in which the plant or animal grew and the mauri that it harnessed are a critical component of what that plant or animal is, and therefore, the geographical and ecosystemic provenance of food is of fundamental importance. Food is an expression of the whakapapa of the atua, and creating and keeping track of the chain of whakapapa from the atua through to the habitat, then the producer and food, and finally to the consumer is seen as an inescapable part of food production (Reid & Rout, 2016). Equally important is the mana and mauri of the person who provides the food and the ways in which this food was produced. Communicating the provenance—its geospatial, social, and cultural origins—of food matters. In some ways, whakapapa itself is an authentication process. As Reid and Rout (2016) explain,

Food is the product of a nexus of relationships from a place, and as such will be imbued, from a Māori perspective, with unique mauri that comes from its specific whakapapa. (p. 432)

More simply, Karena and Kasey Bird (as cited in Santamaria, 2021) explain that for Māori, food “is about the people who cook it, the whakapapa of the dishes, the provenance and sustainability of the ingredients used, innovation and creativity using our cultural ingredients, flavours and cooking techniques.” There is a veracity that emerges out of such an outlook on tracing, one that helps overcome the tension between authentication and audit cultures.

China audit culture goes back centuries (Kipnis, 2008). In recent years, driven by food scandals, this culture has become focused on food safety. To satisfy such demands, increasingly strict, comprehensive, and sophisticated quality assurance systems have been implemented by official regulation agencies (Bai et al., 2007). There is a strong and pervasive desire for information on food origins and safety to be communicated along the chain in China. Alongside this, there has been a return to traditional practices facilitated by fast-growing discretionary income in China. One example are so called time-honoured brands, which have been around for centuries, are officially recognised by the Ministry of Commerce, often use traditional recipes and methods that promotes a sense of doing good deeds and spreading positive energy and de and jia (kinship). Yuan and Chen (2018) discuss the time-honoured Changsha soybean brand, noting how there is a new focus on implementing tracing and verification systems to reassure consumers of safety. The brand is building on its traditional authenticity and applying audit veracity to this authenticity. In some ways, then, the audit and authentication cultures can be seen to be merging in China, which has invested heavily into development of standards for cultural products. Even though authentication culture is not as central to Chinese as it is for Māori, it is increasingly evident that efforts are being made to rejuvenate traditional approaches and values that alongside the strong audit culture suggests that this would enable Māori exporters to integrate the chain based on similar cultural expressions.

Value chain orientation: food culture

Māori and Chinese also have a number of alignments across their respective food cultures in terms of production, preparation, and consumption. Then chief executive officer (CEO) of what was Aotearoa Fisheries, rebranded as Moana New Zealand in 2016, Carl Carrington (as cited in Te Puni Kokiri, 2015) explained “[o]ur [Māori] values combined with the pristine access to high quality products and integrity of supply chain will resonate with Chinese consumers.” Carrington (as cited in Te Puni Kokiri, 2015) recognises one of the

challenges to overcome for Māori companies wanting to do business in China . . . will be how we communicate “our story” to the Chinese consumers . . . . We can provide integrity in supply chains and the cultural identity, origins and sustainability of our products.

This is, as identified earlier, the least developed of the cultural alignments, though as Carrington hinted at it does help tie other chain aspects, particularly chain integration, together.

For Māori, food has a fundamental cultural meaning. A key component is mauri, which impacts food in several critical ways. The first is that it encourages all production to be sustainable as mauri needs to be conserved and grown through all interactions with nature. Although food itself does not have mauri, because it is no longer alive and has passed from existence, the way the food has been procured, produced, processed, and prepared, and by who, does matter and this effects the mauri of the person consuming it. Also, there is an emphasis on food purity, as the mauri of the ecosystem—particularly that of water—has an impact on the purity of the food produced. Because NZ already has a reputation in China for being clean and green, Māori can leverage this existing reputation and add to it with their own cultural imperatives. Manaakitanga is also in terms of food consumption, sharing of food is a fundamental component of manaakitanga, there is no manaakitanga without food. As Tau et al. (1991) explain, manaakitanga “demands that the hosts . . . prepare local foods for their guests. By providing the best food available, the tangata whenua [local Māori] are paying respect to their important visitors, and also enhancing their own mana” (pp. 3–14).

The Chinese concept of chi is similar to mauri. Chi is both central in food choices and health practices along with determining human–environment relationships, playing an analogous role to mauri. Chinese culture also has a focus on balance, much like utu, which “traditionally emphasizes living in harmony with nature” (Xu et al., 2012, p. 76). Xu et al. (2012) identifying a growing segment of Chinese consumers willing to pay more for eco-labelled food, connecting this with the traditional belief of balancing yin and yang. Chinese also hold a similar value to manaakitanga with regard to food sharing as well, Ma (2015) explains that in “Chinese society, people usually treat others with meals to make new friends or enhance established relationships . . . service of expensive and rare foods usually shows the respect to the guests” (p. 195). Māori exporters, then, have a range of shared food cultural attributes they can emphasise to orient the chain towards Chinese consumers in a culturally aligned manner.