Intercultural communication within a Chinese subsidiary of a Western MNC: Expatriate perspectives on language and communication issues

Abstract

This study investigates Polish expatriates’ stories of encounters with local personnel in a Chinese subsidiary of a Western multinational company. A narrative analysis of the stories produced important insights into Polish-Chinese communication in an intra-subsidiary context. Low proficiency in the host language was a serious obstacle to expatriate socialization and a source of expatriates’ exclusion and social isolation in the workplace, which often led to stress, frustration, and negative attitudes toward collaboration with local personnel. Language-related issues prevented the expatriates from acquiring information from Chinese superiors, learning about problems within a team, and participating in decision-making. The findings of this case study relate to communication challenges in the Chinese subsidiary, expatriates’ accounts of how they overcame communication difficulties, and their reflections on what fostered and hampered intercultural communication.

Spirituality in expatriate experience and coping in mission

“…This inductive, interpretive and nonpositivist research approach is still rare in expatriation research. So far, this method has been used to study, among other things, the construction of expatriate experience and career cycles (Myers et al, 2017), expatriate identity formation (Kohonen, 2008), expatriate-local personnel communication in the MNC (Wilczewski et al, 2018) and expatriate adjustment and cultural learning (Gertsen et al, 2012;Wilczewski, 2019;Wilczewski et al, 2019). This approach is well-suited for exploring intercultural experiences because it allows for investigations into how a narrator constructs experience and how the processes he/she participates in are enacted in the storytelling process (Czarniawska, 1998).…”

The multilingual workplace realities of Polish truckers: A case study in the Netherlands

“…There are plenty of other examples of this kind of misunderstandings in the literature on business communication (e.g. Angouri 2013;Peltokorpi 2007;Wilczewski et al 2018).…”

“…Several studies show that this practice is adopted in a range of sectors, the expectation to learn the relevant skills 'on the job' is not exclusive to the logistics sector (e.g. Canagarajah 2013; Piller and Lising 2014; Wilczewski et al 2018). In this case, since there is a significant difference in wages between national and international driving, young truckers are likely to expand their driving beyond the Polish borders.…”

Turning away from epistemic violence by capturing a lived experience of the other

“…Such an analysis reveals how and what knowledge is created in a cultural encounter from the cultural other’s perspective. The high potential of narrative inquiry has been proven by empirical research in the social sciences as an alternative method to investigate the ways people ascribe meanings to events (Denzin, 1997), including our research agenda into intercultural experience (Wilczewski, 2019), intercultural learning (Wilczewski et al, 2019), and intercultural communication processes (Wilczewski et al, 2018) in multinational companies. The narrative approach allows the researcher to link content (meaning, values, beliefs) with context (familial, social, cultural, ecological), which remain key in Indigenous psychology (Kim et al, 2006).…”