Big-Data-Enabled Confucian-Merchant Spirit for High-Quality Enterprise Development: Theoretical Framework and Practical Paths

Against the backdrop of the digital economy, the modern transformation of the Confucian‑merchant spirit, a core carrier of fine Chinese commercial ethics, is confronted with practical dilemmas such as predominant qualitative research, difficulty in effect quantification and insufficient implementation models. This paper introduces big‑data technology into research on how the Confucian‑merchant spirit empowers enterprise development. Rooted in practical scenarios of enterprises in Shandong Province, it integrates organizational behavior science, business ethics and data science, and constructs a mediating‑effect theoretical model of “Confucian‑merchant spirit‑organizational capability‑enterprise performance”. It analyzes the internal mechanism through which the Confucian‑merchant spirit empowers enterprises from the ethical‑technological‑governance three‑dimensional perspective. Adopting research methods including bibliometrics, multi‑source data collection, text sentiment analysis and mediating‑effect testing, this study attempts to quantify the abstract Confucian‑merchant spirit and break the bottleneck of quantification in traditional ethical research. The findings indicate that the Confucian‑merchant spirit does not exert direct influence on enterprise performance; instead, it generates indirect empowering effects by improving organizational capability, and such effects present heterogeneous characteristics across industry types and enterprise development stages. Accordingly, this paper proposes hierarchical and classified digital practical paths and develops a lightweight digital diagnostic tool for the Confucian‑merchant spirit, providing new research paradigms and practical references for traditional culture empowering modern enterprise governance.