Place based and place bound realities: How a Chinese firm embeds in Tanzania

Abstract: The paper aims to contribute to understanding the implications of the Chinese firm within embeddedness concepts of the global production network (GPN) framework. The study demonstrates the need to fill a gap in the knowledge about Chinese investment in Africa by specifically focusing on intra-firm work dynamics and the cultural and relational constructs within the Chinese firms operating in Tanzania. In a growing and dynamic China-Tanzania business partnership, clarity on these aspects lack the on-the-ground empirical analysis that may help shed light on the implications for value capture by local terms, especially for Tanzanian workers. In the last two years, private Chinese companies have entered new niche markets in response to public interests and profit potential, and strategically built its brand and reputation. The Chinese firm attempts to ―localize‖ and engages the local labour force in their operations while holding on to certain cultural and social norms that create challenges and power differentials in the workplace. The findings are based on a case study of a Chinese broadcasting firm (BST Media) operating in Dar es Salaam and how the firm‘s embeddedness into their local context and through its internal manager-employee dynamics may have different implications for the Tanzanian employees.