Multinational Retailers in China: Proliferating ‘McJobs’ or Developing Skills?*
基于对六城市十二家零售店的两百多次访谈和近八百份问卷，研究发现英日资零售商在中国通过培训和在职学习显著提升了员工技能，但这种提升可能是一次性的。
abstract 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.