Abstract
Recent years have seen the increasing importance of vocabularies in organization and strategy studies. Theory develops steadily, yet empirical and case studies remain rare, perhaps due to the difficulty of field access and data collection. In this paper, we examine how the Chinese Shan-Zhai entrepreneurial firms draw on tropological strategies to deal with and overcome the liability of newness and other institutional constraints. Three strategies are particularly developed: (1) pragmatic tropes, (2) moral tropes, and (3) cognitive tropes. Our analysis should enrich our understanding of Chinese Shan-Zhai phenomenon and provide important implications for the analyses of tropology and other vocabulary-centered themes in organization and strategy studies.