| Infantilisation and ‘tough love’ in the Chinese workplace: towards a new form of paternalism? |
Received:October 13, 2017 Revised:October 13, 2017 |
Key Words: Paternalism; management control; Chinese workplace |
| Author Name | Affiliation | | Jingqi Zhu* | Newcastle University | | Rick Delbridge | Cardiff University |
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Abstract: |
| The evolving nature of management control is often captured in new empirical settings as new management controls are developed in response to changes in the wider socio-economic and political environments. This study, therefore, aims to contributes new insights into how management control regimes are being constructed in a newly emerging sector of the world economy: Chinese outsourcing companies. Through an inductive qualitative case research, we have found that a new form of paternalism is central to the managerial regime in our case firm. This paternalism has been developed specifically to meet the requirements and context of a corporation operating in a rapidly growing urban environment and employing migrant workers from rural areas. This approach to paternalism – with its infantilisation and ‘tough love’ approach to workers – combines the rhetoric of care and mutuality with concrete practices but in a short-term and bounded sense that fit the company’s management control requirements and the specific context of the firm. It thus represents a refinement and development of traditional paternalism which contains more than the empty rhetoric reported in recent case studies but differs from the conventional approach in terms of specific practices and objectives in ways that fit the corporation and its context. |
