1.1 Background
In the 1970s, China opened its door to Western companies. At around the same time, management scholars started to become interested in the phenomenon of expatriation, particularly the expatriation of Western expatriates. It has been noted that over recent decades, the mobility of global professionals, including traditional expatriates, has become much more common for destinations like China. But China itself has also changed rapidly over the past 40 years. This may be seen firstly in terms of economic development; it may also be understood in regard to the attitudes of the local Chinese people towards the consumption of Western products and foreign population, together with their view about Chinaâs position globally. Consequently, the role of expatriation and the challenges that expatriates of all types face in contemporary China have changed substantially. While traditional challenges such as being unable to complete tasks successfully during expatriation may still exist, an increasing number of expatriates in China are realising that they cannot ignore the fact that the Chinese language is becoming ever more important and that their local colleagues may not accept them so easily if they do not show an interest in at least attempting to learn the local language. The purpose of this book, Managing Expatriates in China: A Language and Identity Perspective, is therefore to study challenges associated with language and identity among todayâs various expatriates in China. In this introductory chapter, we outline the language dilemmas that both multinational corporations (MNCs) and their employees face and the attendant challenges of adjustment, acceptance and identity that expatriates of different ethnic origins experience. We also explain why expatriates should be seen as a heterogeneous group; we discuss the role of local employees in MNCs and provide a backdrop of a changing China as the host country. Lastly, we provide a detailed description of the fieldwork for this book and an overview of the book as a whole.
1.2 Multinationals and Language Dilemmas
MNCs are multilingual almost by definition, unless they expand only into countries that share their home country language, something which for most MNCs is not a sustainable strategy. While there are many factors which can be seen to influence the actual choice of language use within an MNC (Janssens and Steyaert 2014; Luo and Shenkar 2006), MNCs have a choice of three main strategies through which to address the multilingual challenge. First, MNCs can impose the headquarter language in all subsidiaries: a choice common in MNCs headquartered in Anglophone (UK, USA, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Ireland) or East Asian (China, Japan, Korea) countries (Harzing and Pudelko 2013). The US American MNC Microsoft has, for example, set English as their corporate language. A second option is to select a common lingua franca as the MNCâs official language, such as English or French, and to impose this language both in headquarters and subsidiaries. The Finnish MNC Outokumpu, which employs more than 12,000 professionals in over 30 countries in the stainless steel industry, is an example of this: the company mainly uses English for its operations abroad (Palo 1997). A third approach is to emphasise the respective host country languages of the MNCâs subsidiaries. This approach is more common in MNCs headquartered in Continental European countries (such as France, Italy and Belgium), although the practice is declining.
The emerging and burgeoning stream of research on language in international business (IB) focuses predominantly on the first two options. Both approaches, those of selecting either the headquarter language or another shared language as the corporate lingua franca , often result in the dominance of one language and subsequently a great deal of information loss, in spite of the facilitating role that a corporate language can play (Fredriksson et al. 2006; Hinds et al. 2013; Janssens et al. 2004). That is, having a shared corporate language does not necessarily ensure efficient communication, and especially when it is not the native language of the majority of the employees from either the headquarters or subsidiaries. Research on language in IB has documented the language barriers present in vertical communication between headquarters and subsidiaries (Goodall and Roberts 2003) and in horizontal communication between subsidiaries (Charles and Marschan-Piekkari 2002) and also the negative influence that such language barriers can have on the interactions between managers from corporate headquarters (HQs) and subsidiaries (Neeley 2012). To overcome such language barriers, one frequently adopted practice in MNCs is to communicate via translation. However, this may impede work processes, as working via a translator usually takes more time (HeikkilÀ and Smale 2011; Maclean 2006). Translation is also unlikely to convey the full cultural connotations of words (Blenkinsopp and Pajouh 2010; Wilhoit and Weaver 1983; Xian 2008). Paradoxically, translation can therefore in itself also contribute to language barriers within MNCs.
The third approach, that of encouraging the use of the host country language in MNC subsidiaries, has received little scholarly attention to date. Studies have rarely examined the possibility of adding one or more of the MNC subsidiariesâ host country languages to the main corporate lingua franca. This appears rather surprising, as the majority of MNC employees in foreign subsidiaries speak the host country language as their mother tongue, and local business operations are largely conducted in this language in destinations such as China (Barner-Rasmussen and Aarnio 2011).
It is this gap in the research that we intend to address in this book. In doing so, we aim to extend our understanding of multilingualism in MNCs, focusing in particular on the necessity, probability and challenges of incorporating the host country language as one of the official languages in the MNC subsidiary. Expatriates working in China are mostly employed by MNCs; within subsidiaries, expatriates are the only group of employees who do not speak the host country language as their native language. Whether they can speak the host country language, that is, Chinese, therefore becomes the key to whether it is feasible for MNC subsidiaries in China to use Chinese in daily business operations.
The need to understand the reasons for potentially including Chinese as one of the formal corporate languages for MNCs with a heavy presence in China is also driven by two empirical and contextual factors. First, as the language spoken by the largest population, and as a result of the economic development of China, Chinese has become an increasingly important language globally. In Europe in 2012, as many as 14% of the Eurobarometer Survey respondents considered Chinese to be useful for the future of their children (Eurobarometer 2012). To put this percentage into context, in the same year, those languages traditionally considered important for Europeans, such as German and French, were rated by 20% of the respondents to be useful for their childrenâs future development. In the same survey conducted in 2005, only 2% of the European respondents considered Chinese to be important. The percentage of European citizens who recognise the importance of Chinese has therefore risen significantly in the last decade.
Second, like inhabitants of any large country with a single dominant language, such as the USA, Chinese people assume that they will be able to speak their mother tongue when working in their own country. With the rapid growth of the economy , Chinese citizens have also become increasingly proud of their country and believe that they can develop the country without the aid of foreigners. Manifestations of local resistance towards foreigners have taken many forms and have proved disquieting. Events such as the pro-China demonstrations in 2008 during the Olympic torch relay have raised concerns about the nature of Chinese nationalism and Chinese attitudes towards foreign employees (Sinkkonen 2013). When such anti-foreign sentiment is reflected in Westernised workplaces such as MNC subsidiaries in China, the resistance can take on subtler forms. Thus, instead of physically protesting against foreign employees, there is an increasing linguistic nationalism (Von Busekist 2006), that is, nationalism based on the host country language, with local employees showing various degrees of resistance to speaking English with foreign expatriates (Zhang and Harzing 2016). Local employees exclude foreign workers by passively resisting the use of English at meetings where expatriates without knowledge of the Chinese language are present. With an increasing number of conversations and client meetings taking place in Chinese, local employees are thus demonstrating implicitly that expatriates are not welcome in China.
1.3 Language, Cross-Cultural Adjustment, Acceptance and Social Identity
Four key concepts are explored in this book: language, cross-cultural adjustment , interpersonal acceptance and ethnic similarity . These concepts emerged from our empirical work in China over the last decade studying different types of expatriates with varying ethnic backgrounds. Language is an essential element which impacts on expatriatesâ cross-cultural adjustment, on acceptance by their local colleagues, and also affects their social identity in the host country. These phenomena are all influenced by interactions that occur through language. Here, language refers to the different languages that MNC employees may use as a means of communication, but speak with varying degrees of fluency. In this book, we focus in particular on expatriatesâ host country language skills , that is, their ability to speak, understand, read and write in the host country language.
Existing research has found that language influences many aspects of the functioning of MNCs; this includes interaction between expatriates and local employees. On the one hand, language proficiency can have a positive influence on expatriatesâ adjustment in interacting with locals (Shaffer et al. 1999). In Engli...