PhD thesis final - Royal Holloway, University of London

Chapter7- Conclusionthe interactions between my respondents and PRC Chinese who are important membersof the household (e.g. domestic worker, spouse). This revealed the household powerrelationships and how different identities are practised so shaping Taiwaneseexpatriates‘ experiences of home and feeling of being at home. This chapter revealedthat household interactions are also important aspects to consider in understandingtransnational migrants‘ practices of belonging in the domestic space.Chapter five addresses Taiwanese expatriates‘ workplace practices to examine the waysin which workplace belonging is forged in relation to the workplace‘s material settingsand the institutional structure of Taiwanese transnational IT corporations as well as totheir workplace interactions. The research reveals that Taiwanese expatriates‘ workplace(i.e. the factory compound) is often a reproduction of that in Taiwan and in accordancewith headquarters‘ criteria. Also, the centralised management strategy applied byTaiwanese IT multinational corporations also envisages the intensive transnational(business) links between Taiwan and China. As such, Taiwanese IT firms operating inboth countries can also be understood to be an institutional form of transnationalpractices (Vertovec 1999) and a transnational social space (Pries 2001). While theunderstanding of the constitution of a transnational social space within MNCs stillfocuses on the role its soft structure, particularly employees‘ transnational businesspractices, plays in this process (for examples of this, see Flecker and Simsa 2001;Kotthoff 2001; Pries 2001), this research has argued that the materiality of MNCs (i.e.the built forms of the factory compound and the deployment of objects within thecompound) are also significant, especially in facilitating transnational similarities of theworkplace. My research findings have also shown that as it is the Taiwanese work(place)culture that is injected in the China base and imposed on the PRC Chinese employees,the workplace is also an ethnocentric social space that allows Taiwanese expatriates to250