Gamble, Jos (2006) Multinational retailers in China: proliferating 'McJobs' or developing skills?. Journal of Management Studies, 43 (7).
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Much has been written on the nature of skills and the extent to which there is increased skills development or a deskilling of workers in modern workplaces. This paper broadens the debate and explores these issues in the novel context of UK- and Japanese-invested retailers' operations in China. Data derived from over two hundred interviews at twelve retail stores in six Chinese cities and questionnaires completed by almost eight hundred employees elicited contextualized accounts of interactive service workers' own perceptions of their training and skills development. It was found that these firms made a substantial contribution to skills development, fostered and enhanced both directly by company training and also through experiential workplace-based learning. It might be, however, that this constitutes an essential but 'one-off' increase in skills in transitional economies such as that of China.
This is a Submitted version This version's date is: 11/2006 This item is not peer reviewed
https://repository.royalholloway.ac.uk/items/f6b1baaa-c0ff-616a-f6cb-c07d70f48789/4/
Deposited by Research Information System (atira) on 27-Jan-2013 in Royal Holloway Research Online.Last modified on 27-Jan-2013
Copyright 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. The eprint is the author's final draft; the definitive version is available at www.blackwell-synergy.com/