China was able to attain the status of the“factory of the world”and the world’s sec-ond largest economy within a few decades were due in small measure to her abilityto transform herself under the overarching“open-up and reform”policy launched in1978 (Tisdell, 2009). This nation-wide transformation over the past 40 years is wellillustrated in the city of Quanzhou, which is a typical industry powerhouse withlarge-scale manufacturing of clothing and footwear products for both domestic andinternational market (Zhang, 1997) and they are in the private sector.To begin with, Quanzhou has witnessed several stages of its industrial evolution.In the 1980s, the values that were emphasized were to behave well, to be honest inbusiness, and to be an astute businessman, as cheating would cause market chaos.Most enterprises would take risks in any endeavor, as there was money to be made inevery business field. In the 1990s and the 2000s, most enterprises directed their focustowards real estate, e-commerce, finance business, and the Internet. More than 10years ago, due to the excess supply in the property market, the burden of rising debt,and the fall in both revenue and profit for clothing and footwear, business transforma-tion has become a popular discourse in Quanzhou. Managers have been preoccupyingthemselves with idea of innovation or transformation. The quest for transformationwas given added momentum since Premier Li Keqiang proposed mass entrepreneur-ship and innovation at the 2014 Summer Davos in Tianjin. In the meantime, China’seconomic growth rate slowed to a 25-year low of 6.9% in 2015, as the world’ssecond-largest economy continues to shift away from its manufacturing roots (CNBC, 2016).Though they, especially the new generation of entrepreneurs, want to transform thetraditional factories of China–Chinese manufacturing–into something else, theydon’t know what that something is yet.Due to the transitional nature of the Chinese economy and the dynamic patternof managers’cognition, it is all the more necessary to explore how managers’cogni-tion are formed and manifested in the pattern of behaviors in Chinese firms. Thisstudy endeavors to transcend what the researcher perceives to be the fragmentedcurrent approaches to reading managerial thought and behavior. As its workingconstruct it proposes a more integrative approach, the“intellectual framework”,taking the ontological assumption that the essence of an organization is a system ofthoughts.