Crossing Boundaries

Abstract

Business socializing may be a critical hindrance to career advancement for many women. Chinese societies place particular emphasis on the development of personal relationships ( guanxi), and the workplace is no exception. Work relationships are often built through after-hours socializing ( ying chou). For a woman to succeed in business socializing, she must cross out of the office and into a context in which workplace expectations for professional conduct may not apply. She must also cross traditional gender role boundaries that conflict with the requirements of business socializing. Like her male counterparts, she achieves the long-term benefits of socializing by crossing interpersonal boundaries to turn professional contacts into personal ones. This exploratory study investigated women’s business socializing through in-depth interviews with 36 professional women in a Chinese society. Thematic analysis of the interviews revealed the challenges of socializing and the tactics women used to overcome them, highlighting how women leverage gender stereotypes and social norms to build relationships for work. I make cross-cultural comparisons of the challenges encountered by Chinese and Western women engaged in work-related relationship development and discuss cross-cultural differences that may be important in conceptualizing future investigations of gender and workplace relationships. The findings have implications for managers and corporate policies in and outside Taiwan and for foreign business people conducting business in Chinese societies.