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Foreign firms in China: modelling HRM in a toy manufacturing corporation

Fang Lee Cooke, University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST), UK

This article reports the study of a large, wholly foreign-owned toy factory in China. Ite x p l o res whether foreign direct investment (FDI) manufacturing firms in Chinainevitably operate in a Taylorist fashion, in contrast to the much praised HR model of
blue chip multinational corporations (MNCs) in the country, or whether there is a ‘thirdw a y ’ in which good HR practices may be adopted on the ground. The article concludesthat a more nuanced approach is needed in our study of FDI companies in order to gaina fuller understanding of the institutional and cultural factors at play and of the
consequent diversity in the HR and employment practices of FDI firms, instead of beingtrapped in a simplistic and polarising typological framework of analysis. This study isnecessary in light of the growing diversity in the patterns of FDI companies operating in
China in terms of their ownership structure, product market, management style and HRs t r a t e g y, both for managers and for workers.
C o n t a c t: Fang Lee Cooke, Senior Lecturer in Employment Studies, ManchesterSchool of Management, UMIST, PO Box 88, Manchester M60 1QD, UK. Email:f a n g . l . c o o k e @ u m i s t . a c . u k
Th e re is a growing body of literature on HR and work management in fore i g ninvestment enterprises in China, which can be broadly classified into two diversestrands. First are the academic studies on HRM in foreign direct investment (FDI)
enterprises. These focus largely on multinational corporations (MNCs) and joint venture s(JVs) (e g Child, 1994; Goodall and Wa r n e r, 1997, 1998; Lu and Bjorkman, 1997), ande x p l o re the extent to which subsidiary practices resemble those in their foreign pare n t
o rganisations (‘MNC standardisation’) and/or in local firms (‘localisation’) (Beechler andYang, 1994; Rosenzweig and Nohria, 1994; Bjorkman and Lu, 2001: 491). Bjorkman andFan (2002) have observed, for example, that while re s e a rch on some of the early We s t e r n
f o reign investment enterprises established in China showed that Western MNCs hadadapted their HR practices to the Chinese environment (Child, 1991, 1994; Goodall and
Wa r n e r, 1997, 1998), a trend seemed to have emerged during the 1990s toward s
i n t roducing more ‘Western’ HR policies (Lasserre and Ching, 1997; Bjorkman and Lu,
1999, 2001). Similarly, Goodall and Wa r n e r’s survey study (1998: 18) of 20 joint venture s
i d e n t i fied very few practices or pro c e d u res that they could characterise with confid e n c eas ‘local’. They argued that there might be several reasons for this trend, including ahigher level of control on the part of foreign investors over their units in China, and a
lack of a strongly institutionalised Chinese model of HR/personnel management(Goodall and Wa r n e r, 1998). Blue chip MNCs (e g M o t o rola, Nokia, Procter and Gamble)a re generally considered to have a more sophisticated HR system than Chinese domesticfirms. It has been argued that these HR ‘best practices’ are mainly Western practices
t r a n s f e r red and adapted to suit the Chinese environment. They are often hailed by theChinese media as good models to be followed by domestic firms.Foreign firms in China: modelling HRM in a toy manufacturing corporationThe 本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。