From Resource Constraints to Strategic Flexibility: Drivers of Gig Worker Adoption among Accounting Firms Serving Agricultural Enterprises in China
Copyright © 2026 Zhu Cheng, Shahifol Arbi, Mohd Hadzrami. Published by Nan Yang Academy of Sciences Pte. Ltd.
This is an open access article under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) License.
Abstract
China's Rural Revitalization Strategy has seen rapid growth in new agricultural business entities. However, the rural-urban divide in professional services remains an impediment to their development. The emergence of the gig economy presents an opportunity to address the rural-urban divide in professional services. The study aims to investigate factors that affect Chinese accounting firms' intention to hire gig workers to serve agricultural enterprises. The study combines Transaction Cost Economics, Resource-Based View, and Theory of Planned Behavior. The study investigates five antecedents: cost reduction, access to skills, flexibility demand, focus on key competencies, and regulatory compliance. Firm size is tested as a moderator. The pilot study provided 98 valid responses from accounting firm partners and managers across ten cities in China. The results from the PLS-SEM (Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling) model indicate that cost reduction, skills access, flexibility demand, and core capabilities focus positively influence hiring intention, while regulatory compliance challenges negatively influence hiring intention. Firm size moderates these relationships by showing that smaller practices are sensitive to cost and capability drivers, and larger firms are less sensitive to regulatory compliance challenges. The research contributes to the field of research on the agricultural socialized service system by showing the role that platform-mediated professional services play in increasing service accessibility for new agricultural business entities and thus contributing to the credit and operation efficiency that is necessary for the modernization of the agricultural economy.
Keywords: Rural Revitalization, Gig Economy, Professional Service Accessibility, New Agricultural Business Entities, PLS-SEM
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