"Gong De" Taiwan in Mexico: Cultural Encounter in an Asian Operated Maquiladora

Abstract

Seeking cheap and submissive labor is a trend for transnational enterprises in the globalization era. As a robust economic body, Taiwan-based multinational enterprises follow the pattern and rearrange its business globally. When the transnational enterprises relocate in another country, only a few managerial personnel will transfer to the new locale. For employees in the host country, these foreigners’ decisions and organizational strategies decide their working condition and well-being. It is hard to deny that foreigners in these locales hold strategic positions in the host country. However, scholarly discussions of global factory tend to focus on the interaction between the global capital and the local culture. The studies mainly focus on how global capital shapes or manipulates the local culture to satisfy their purposes. Only a few briefly discuss the effects of managers’ background. This dissertation tries to fulfill the hole in the literature and discuss how work ethic and cultural values that are carried by foreign managerial personnel affect the daily operation of a maquiladora on the US-Mexico border city—Tijuana. The maquiladora I studied is owned and operated by a Taiwanese manager with several Chinese engineers. I examine their interaction with other Mexican employees and explore the reasons behind their behaviors and decision-making processes. Taiwanese manager follows the work ethic that he developed from previous working experience in Asia and directs the operation in Mexico accordingly. However, even in a power-unevenly-distributed environment such as a maquiladora, the Taiwanese manager still needs to negotiate with local employees. By delineating how the cultural that brought by the representatives of the multinational enterprise affect the operation and work arrangement, I try to emphasize that the importance of cultural values carried by these representatives should be treated more seriously in the studies of global production.