The duality of expatriation in the Chinese multinational expansion: from a governmentality perspective

Since the “Going out” policy introduced by the Chinese state and in the wake of China’s accession into the WTO in 2001, China witnesses a vibrant development of multinational corporations (MNCs) to expand the global market, and most of them are state-owned enterprises (SOEs), namely SOMNCs. From a governmentality lens, the paper analyzes the dual roles of Chinese SOMNC’s expatriate managers in Ghana as both business practitioner and state agent. Making use of rarely granted access to one of the leading construction SOMNC in China, the analysis makes visible the duality of expatriation in planning and managing the case company’s overseas strategic directions, diversified operations, and the localization of workforce and expatriate management in the process of Chinese multinational expansion at an organizational level. With a critical viewpoint of the roles of expatriate managers in China’s SOMNC, the paper makes a good contribution to the field of organization and management studies (OMS), through mobilizing the governmentality lens at the organizational level in a unique context and providing a political economic perspective for analyzing expatriate practices as well as to understand the nature of the expatriation of China’s SOMNC, which have been neglected in OMS literature.