Language and Social Knowledge in Foreign-Knowledge Transfer to China

This paper establishes that transfer of knowledge across national borders within multinational enterprises depends both on a common language necessary for communication and on the shared social knowledge necessary to understand and predict the behavior of those engaged in the knowledge-transfer process. In a set of four case studies, it was found that knowledge transfer is more effective when technical and social knowledge are transferred together. Besides, ownership structure affects the understanding and transfer of social knowledge, while rich person-to-person contact in multinational teams provides an effective means of transferring social knowledge.