The rise of China as an economic power has been accompanied by Chinese companies’ active engagement in international business. This study looks into two Chinese service suppliers, which are involved in international contracting with Japanese companies, and operate in both China and Japan. It examines how these service providers develop and implement their management systems in order to meet their international clients’ requirements, and how these management systems are experienced by the employees at workplaces. Taking a Critical Realist ontology (Bhaskar, 1975), and drawing on intensive observation and interviews in both China and Japan, this study develops a multi-level approach to understanding the management, organisation and employment practices in Chinese supply firms. This approach is based on the global value chain discussion (Gereffi, Humphrey, & Sturgeon, 2005) and the System-Society-Dominance-Corporate (SSDC) framework (Delbridge, Hauptmeier, & Sengupta, 2011; Smith & Meiksins, 1995). It locates the construction and development of management policies, practices and work relations in the global supply chains, while considering their institutional contexts at the international, national, local and corporate levels. It thus provides a holistic understanding of how SSDC effects are brought together in different supply chains and how they are manifested within the workplaces, as corporate actors respond to, struggle over and manage these supply chain relationships and the structural forces. This thesis contributes to existing studies on global suppliers in three key ways. First, it compares the supply firms in two different patterns of global supply chains (i.e. the market-based supply chain and the captive supply chain). In doing so, it is shown that the influence of clients is exerted in different ways under different governance structures and this leads to divergent consequences in terms of the management practices and employment relations in supply firms. Second, it extends the global value chain analysis of global supply firms by considering the social-institutional embeddedness of the supply firms. Third, it advances our understanding on the workplace dynamics in global supply firms, by focusing on the indeterminacy of labour power and the contested construction of workplace relations.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:646302 |
| Date | January 2014 |
| Creators | Zhu, Jingqi |
| Publisher | Cardiff University |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://orca.cf.ac.uk/73034/ |
Page generated in 0.0023 seconds