Organisational bordering: Chinese professional women as ‘skilled support workers’ in Japan and South Korea

Drawing on biographical narrative interviews with 34 middle-class Chinese women employed in knowledge-intensive corporate settings in Tokyo and Seoul, the paper explores how bordering operates beyond state boundaries in transnational organisational environments. Via conceptualising the ‘skilled support worker’ as a product of internal organisational bordering within corporations, we show how relatively privileged ‘middling’ professionals with transnational lives find themselves in a situation of durable professional subordination. We reveal a dual filtering process whereby state migration regimes and corporate HR, operating through gendered and racialised assumptions, redirect credentials into support functions such as coordination and client liaison, while foreclosing promotion routes and strategic authority. Critically, these women are aware of their positioning, yet their own diagnostic clarity enables rationalisation rather than resistance, transforming structurally imposed constraints into something that feels individually negotiated. Rather than providing the protection that middle-class privilege might be assumed to offer, class resources instead sustain tolerance of this channelling. This happens through three distinct mechanisms: the economic buffer removes urgency, the imagined exit makes subordination feel temporary and chosen and cosmopolitan lifestyle redefinition replaces professional status. These findings advance middling migration scholarship by identifying organisational bordering as the specific mechanism sustaining inequality in professional settings.