ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how the racial context shaped their workplace behaviours and employment relationships in the two restaurants. It describes the communication problems among different groups of people and analyses how the language barrier created difficulties in workplace control. The chapter explores the variation of owners’ trust towards members from different groups and the implications to control strategies. It focuses on the inter-group conflicts and discusses how conflicts and tensions caused by the cultural difference were experienced vertically between owners and workers and horizontally between workers and workers. The chapter also discusses the dynamics between multi-cultural workforces in the two restaurants. In the specific context of the ethnic Chinese restaurant sector, it mainly consisted of three groups: Mandarin speaking workers, Cantonese speaking workers and British-born Chinese. Adaptations based on guessing in practice could not always match owners’ perceptions. Existing research in exploring employment relations in ethnic small firms rarely discussed the heterogeneous character within ethnic groups.
