Bending Without Breaking: How Chinese Patent Examiners Navigate Value Tensions

Abstract

Professionals increasingly work within commercial and governmental organizations whose mandates often create tensions with their professional values. Prior research, however, shows mixed findings regarding how professionals respond to these value tensions, with some values being protected and others being compromised. We explore this inconsistency by investigating how Chinese patent examiners navigate tensions between their professional values and governmental pressures to promote domestic strategic innovation under the Made in China 2025 policy. Using a mixed-methods approach that combines qualitative interviews with 27 Chinese patent examiners and quantitative analyses of nearly 1 million patents reviewed by 10,304 examiners, we develop a hierarchical framework of professional values. We find that examiners perceive their values hierarchically, distinguishing between core identity-defining values and subordinate operational values. Under external pressures, they attempt to protect their core value of judgmental fairness while absorbing the pressures by compromising their subordinate value of diagnosing diligence. Professional interactions with foreign examiners and experienced patent agents mitigate this compromise by anchoring examiners’ attention to the operational details where diagnosing diligence is embedded. Moreover, our quantitative analyses reveal that compromised diagnosing diligence ultimately undermines judgmental fairness due to interdependence within the value hierarchy. Our study advances the understanding of professional value dynamics under external pressures and provides insights into how experts balance their professional ideals with institutional mandates. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2024.18504 .