Doctoral Thesis: China Still Eludes Expatriates

“I wanted to be Chinese, once…I wanted China to be the place where I made a career and lived my life. I won’t be rushing back either. I have fallen out of love, woken from my China Dream.”

 “China has been a familiar destination for multinational corporations over the last few decades, but surprisingly it still remains one of the most challenging destinations for expatriates”, says Ling Eleanor Zhang, who will defend her doctoral thesis on the subject.

Yet, according to Zhang, underneath the seemingly high expatriation failure rate exists an ever more routine reality of contemporary working life. A growing number of sojourners, from expatriates sent by headquarters, to self-initiated expatriates, to expatriate entrepreneurs, are now, for various reasons, becoming caught up in China. They experience a dizzying array of processes collectively labelled cross-cultural adjustment, acculturation or biculturalism.

Based on comprehensive fieldwork, Zhang seeks to uncover the working and living realities of expatriates in China from a language and culture perspective. In her doctoral thesis, Zhang also presents the multifaceted linguistic challenges faced by expatriates from both their own perspective, as well as that of the host country employees. She further provides a contextual account of expatriate host country language proficiency on cross-cultural adjustment, and inductively builds an analytical framework for analysing why and how host country language matters.

“Nordic expatriates, who are currently working and living in China, have different types of cultural identity, i.e. marginal bicultural identity, cosmopolitan identity, transitional identity, and monocultural identity”, says Zhang. “Factors such as organisational context, expatriates’ attitudes towards the host country language, as well as their network orientations, have influenced expatriates’ identification with home, host and a third culture”, she continues.

The findings also reveal a number of strategies expatriates adopt in order to cope with the uncertainty and ambiguity, such as holding on to physical proof of groundedness, believing in individuality, realistically evaluating and accepting the marginality, and allowing for a certain degree of fluidity regarding one’s cultural identity.

MA Ling Eleanor Zhang defends her doctoral thesis in Management and Organisation On Becoming Bicultural: Language Competence, Acculturation and Cross-cultural Adjustment of Expatriates in China on Saturday 22 August 2015.

Time: 22 August 2015, at 12
Place: Room 309, Hanken School of Economics, Helsinki
Opponent: Associate Professor Yih-teen Lee, IESE Business School (Instituto de Estudios Superiores de la Empresa), University of Navarra, Barcelona, Spain
Custos: Professor Jeff Hearn, Hanken School of Economics

A copy of the thesis can be downloaded at: http://hdl.handle.net/10138/156084 Opens in new window

For further information, please contact:
Ling Eleanor Zhang
ling.zhang@hanken.fi Opens in new window
+358 50 5359576