PhD thesis final - Royal Holloway, University of London

Chapter 5 – Workplace belongingsafety derived from working in the Taiwanese transnationally-operated IT companies,and its predictable physical environment, coherence and shared values. This findingcontributes to the understanding of the formation of a transnational social space withinthe MNCs relating to the reproduction and transfer of the physical structure andenvironment of a company. Furthermore, such spatial experiences provide Taiwaneseexpatriates with a reference to confirm their self and corporate identification. Themechanisms specified in this section as being useful in facilitating the formation of atransnational social space within the Taiwanese IT firms are also important forintra-organisational integration and coordination. They also, however, reflect thehegemonic roles and centralised management of the Taiwanese headquarters, as it is theTaiwanese working culture, workplace practices and managerial styles that are imposedon the PRC Chinese employees and in China plants, which in turn have limited thedevelopment of the local Chinese work cultural orientation. In this sense, thetransnational social space formed in Taiwanese IT firms and dominated by theTaiwanese-style work culture and workplace practices is also an ethnocentrictransnational social space (see also Kotthoff 2001). This point will be elaborated inmore detail in the next section through examining Taiwanese expatriates‘ everydayworkplace and work-related practices.5.3. Constituting belonging through workplace practicesIn this section, I examine the ways in which the soft structure, or the corporate andwork(place) culture of the China-based Taiwanese IT firms may contribute to make theworkplace a transnational social space and mediate Taiwanese expatriates‘ emotionalexperiences of belonging. In particular, I describe the spatial norms of Taiwanese ITfirms and their organisational practices, of which expatriate workers‘ transnational179