Dettagli
- Autore: Sacchetto Devi
- Duration: 2016-2018
Abstract
This project investigates the ways in which the current reconfiguration of the global economy, and in particular the rise of China, is impacting on work and employment relations in Europe. The project examines these dynamics through the theme of internationalization of China-based firms into European markets, thanks to an in depth cross-national comparison case study. This involves researching the similarities and the differences between one firm’s manufacturing headquarters in Mainland China and its European subsidiaries. The objectives of this project are: 1. Assess home influence in multinational firms operating from Mainland China to see if they can be characterised as peculiarly ‘Chinese’; 2. Assess whether ‘Chinafication’ of work and employment practices is taking place in Europe. A large body of scholarship addresses issues of internationalisation and multinational firms by exploring how markets or institutions shape a firm’s approach to managing its workforce across international borders. Scholars typically conceptualise firms’ strategies in terms of distinctive ‘national business systems’, intended as interlocking structures and institutions that engender distinct national ways of organising economic activity, and investigate home and host country influence on the behaviour of the firm. Both economic and institutionalist strands of scholarship focused until now on the multinational firm’s expansion from mature (i.e. the US, Western Europe and Japan) to emerging economies or alternatively from mature to mature economies as in case of US firms establishing subsidiaries in Western Europe. Very little attention is paid to the expansion of firms from emerging to mature economies, in particular how firms from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) establish and organise their subsidiaries in Europe. The few existing studies are undertaken from an economic perspective, focus on characteristics of Chinese investments in Europe such as location, motivation and modes of entry, and deploy quantitative methods. This project will fill this gap. It will do so by carrying out a multi-sited ethnography, a method typically used to explore transnational processes that extend over multiple locations. Multi-sited ethnography will enable a cross-national in-depth investigation of the firm’s work and employment practices as well as detailed descriptions of workers’ daily lives gathered through participant observations. Multi-sited ethnography will be complemented by semi-structured interviews and secondary research to gather in-depth knowledge about the firm’s management style and strategies, the power relations between the firm and its clients, the labour process, the composition of the workforce and the organisation of social reproduction. Investigating how the interaction of the above factors influences the firm’s expansion overseas as well as its adaptation to a host country context represents a radical departure from traditional approaches to internationalisation on two main fronts. First, most studies of multinational firms focus either on the home country or one specific host country (Almond et al 2005: 286) and second, they limit their analysis to the firm’s strategies and associated organisational structures. In order to allow for all of the above factors to be integrated into the project’s theoretical framework in an equal manner, the project elaborates a novel interdisciplinary analytical model that combines the existing approaches to the multinational firm with those developed in global production network, migration studies and gender studies. Such an analytically and theoretically multi-layered model is considered better suited to capturing the complexity of actors, sites and institutions, as well as the power relations between them that inform the workings of transnational firms in a global context.