Abstract
In recent years, China has become a prominent topic of interest in the International Journal of Business Communication. A growing wave of the journal’s articles have examined both China’s unique business communication landscape and its tightly-linked relationship to business communication practices across the world (Cheng et al., 2025; Dong et al., 2024; Du-Babcock & Chan, 2025; Chen et al., 2025; Huang et al., 2023; Kim, 2022; Spijkman & de Jong, 2023; Yao & Du-Babcock, 2023; Zhang & Dong, 2025). The surge in scholarly literature on Chinese business communication should come as no great surprise, as China’s rise to dominance in the global economy has proven to be one of the defining developments of the 21st century. Indeed, the country is now the world’s leading manufacturer and exporter of goods, with a gross domestic product (GDP) ranking second in the world, behind only that of the United States. As an industrial powerhouse and key player in world trade, China certainly deserves to be a priority area of study on the research agendas of all business communication scholars, especially ones adopting an international perspective in their work.
Those seeking new resources for studying Chinese business communication will find much to appreciate in Eileen M. Otis’ new book Walmart: Made in China. Throughout, Otis examines the American retail chain Walmart’s expansion across China—the very nation that has long supplied many of the cheaply priced products sold in the company’s U.S.-based stores. Although situated in the discipline of sociology, the book is a relevant reference for business communication scholars because it closely analyzes the communication-intensive practices that shape the unique organizational culture of China’s Walmart stores, while also highlighting the challenges of scaling operations into foreign markets. Otis offers a lively ethnography based on more than 200 hours of participant observation conducted in Walmart stores in six Chinese cities over a 15-year period (2007–2022). The author focuses on what she calls the “internal supply chain,” or the last step in a multi-stage process in which the value of goods for sale transforms into customer satisfaction and profit for the seller (p. 2). The phrase encapsulates the various communicative activities performed by employees and overseen by managers that aim to enhance the consumer experience and thereby maximize revenues.
Otis begins by introducing readers to three people who work in Walmart stores in China: (1) Ling, a sales representative for Kleenex who tries to encourage customers to try samples of the product, (2) Lihua, a cashier who scans items for customers awaiting their turn in the checkout line, and (3) Zheng, a produce stocker who moves items from the refrigerated storage and arranges them in a way that is visually pleasing. Each of these employees are central to the daily operations of the internal supply chain. Otis conceptualizes the work they do as “realization labor,” defined as “the activities that help commodities reach consumers, including stocking, displaying, explaining, selling, scanning, and settling payment” (p. 2, emphasis in original).
Although it is tempting to fixate on the manufacturing process and/or the complex logistical protocols that facilitate the delivery of goods to store shelves, realization labor is an equally essential component of merchant capitalism, an economic system wherein retailers exert outsized influence on the flows of global commerce. As Otis argues, when workers engage in realization labor, they “are tasked with making goods legible, desirable, and transactable. . .The realization worker must manage affect, movement, posture, rhythm, and presentation in relation to objects being sold” (p. 11). Realization labor is thus a crucial form of business communication that is too often ignored by scholars across disciplines, likely because it occurs not in the executive boardroom but on the ground floors of ordinary retail environments.
In the second chapter, Otis traces the legal, economic, and social conditions of possibility that enabled Walmart to consolidate a historically unmatched level of market control and expand into foreign territories like China. She starts in the U.S. in the 1980s, a period defined by new economic policies spearheaded by the administration of President Ronald Reagan. Walmart, originally founded in 1962 in Arkansas by Sam Walton, benefited enormously from so-called Reaganomics. As industries deregulated and antitrust enforcement weakened, the company opened thousands of stores across the nation. Consequently, many American small businesses closed because they could not compete with the steep discounts on goods Walmart imported for low prices from Asian countries, including but not limited to China.
Otis then turns to Walmart’s emergence in China. By the time Walmart opened its first store in the country in the mid-1990s, China’s small business sector had been decimated by decades of Maoist industrial policy, and the country was undergoing a market transition intended to restore trust in the Communist Party of China (CCP). One of the ways the CCP appealed to Chinese citizens was through the modernization of the country’s retail industry, and Walmart seized the opportunity to expand into the growing Chinese market by offering affordable goods and a shopping experience that attracted large numbers of consumers. By 2012, Walmart earned the highest revenues of all China’s retailers. Central to Walmart’s success in China, Otis contends, has been its cultivation of an internal supply chain in which the optimization of realization labor ensures maximum efficiency and profit earnings.
During its first decade of operations in China, Walmart provided its employees with a living wage, skills training, a path of upward mobility within the company, and a generally dignified workplace culture. However, as Otis shows in the book’s third chapter, Walmart ultimately undermined its reputation as a “high-road employer” after it began offering employees lower pay and irregular working schedules, on top of fostering an environment of fear and bullying (p. 51). Otis consults veteran employees of China’s Walmart stores to show how, as the retailer expanded across the country, it failed to keep wages at the level needed for workers to afford the cost of living in high-cost urban areas. Meanwhile, the company introduced new policies, such as decreasing the number of employees per shift and a flexible scheduling system, that led to the diminishment of overall working conditions and resentment shared among employees. According to Otis, managers misled workers to agree to many of the changes, which resulted in Walmart gaining notoriety in China as a “low-road” employer that devalues the labor of realization workers who sustain its business model (p. 76).
The next three chapters give readers a closer look at the everyday lives of realization workers in China’s Walmart stores. In the first of the series (the fourth chapter of the book), Otis follows Zheng. Zheng’s primary responsibility is overseeing fruits and vegetables as they make their way from the warehouse to the store floor, where they are cleaned, organized, and displayed. Because produce stockers like Zheng are not confined to one area of the store, they can easily seek refuge in locations such as the storage room. In the storage room, they are less likely to be monitored by a surveillance camera while taking a break or consuming a needed meal. Otis calls this dynamic “panoptic escape,” a term illustrative of how realization workers strategically express their autonomy while resisting Walmart’s strategies of control (p. 96). Whereas Otis associates panoptic escape with a masculine tendency toward dissent, she describes the work of sales representatives for products sold in stores as “distinctly feminine performances,” necessitating repetitive behaviors, including “smiling, cajoling, demonstrating cosmetics on their own skin, or embodying ideals of domesticity in aprons and uniforms” (p. 101). Otis further probes these gender dynamics in the fifth chapter by analyzing the realization labor of a worker named Ling, as well as other mostly young women migrants from rural areas who work as sales representatives. Otis finds that these realization workers use their loosely supervised positions to pursue better professional opportunities and resources.
In the sixth chapter, readers complete their tour through the internal supply chain, concluding with a stop at the checkout lanes, where cashiers—closely surveilled by cameras overhead and computers that keep track of their speed and accuracy—scan items and accept payments from customers. There, Otis detects signs of a “techno-normative regime” regulating the efficiency of realization labor, as demonstrated by the work of Lihua, a cashier who finds joy in beating her last daily scan rate (p. 138). This chapter, paired with the two before it, convincingly attest to how realization labor propels the everyday operations of the internal supply chain in China’s Walmart stores, providing readers a window into mundane but nevertheless significant patterns of business communication that secure consumer loyalty and drive revenues upward.
Finally, in the seventh and closing chapter, Otis returns to the book’s primary themes and considers how COVID-19 transformed the internal supply chain of China’s Walmart stores. Before the pandemic, Walmart had opened 420 stores across China, but by 2025, the number had decreased by almost 100, indicating that the crisis decelerated the company’s international expansion. Amid China’s relatively strict protocols to quell the pandemic’s spread, gone was the expectation that realization workers would directly interact with customers for extended periods of time within stores. Instead, the nature of realization labor shifted Workers were now mostly responsible for retrieving and packing items ordered online. Sales within China’s Walmart stores never quite recovered to pre-pandemic levels, but the company found new success with Sam’s Club, its membership-only wholesale chain, which has grown significantly throughout China over the last half decade. Like in the U.S., Walmart’s currently faces challenges in China, specifically in adapting to an environment dominated by e-commerce and the rise of multinational competitors, namely Amazon, that have spearheaded innovations that have fundamentally revolutionized the retail industry. Yet still, Otis reminds readers, “Walmart stands as a leading architect of a new phase of capitalism, one that brought merchant capital into dominance through the global reorganization of circulation,” (p. 146). For this reason, while the future of Walmart in China and the rest of the world remains uncertain, it is reasonable to predict that the company will find ways to evolve alongside changes occurring in the prevailing economic system that it helped to create.
Upon completing Otis’ book, some readers may be left with critical questions about aspects of the internal supply chain that were only mentioned by the author in passing or ignored entirely. For instance, Otis does not compare the internal supply chain of Walmart stores in China with those in other regions, including the U.S., the rest of North America, Latin America, and Africa. While it is understandable that Otis narrowed the scope of the study to focus on the specific organizational dynamics of China’s Walmart stores, incorporating some comparative analysis could have clarified the extent to which the Chinese internal supply chain is unique or reflects a replicable model of realization labor identifiable in Walmart stores across geographical settings.
Moreover, Otis dedicates scant attention to the day-to-day roles of store managers in supervising the realization labor of low-wage workers within the internal supply chain. To her credit, she does discuss how management supplies often punitive consequences for labor workers’ failure to fully meet expectations, but it is difficult to empirically ascertain from the book the forms of pressure managers themselves face by their superiors, customers, and other stakeholders in China’s Walmart stores. Likewise, Otis does not sufficiently address the behaviors of customers and how they shape the internal supply chain or the realization labor enacted therein. Of course, no single book-length study can comprehensively cover every aspect of an organizational culture, so these gaps could be filled by future studies, which will no doubt be indebted to Otis’ scholarship.
In conclusion, Walmart: Made in China is a valuable contribution to the fields of sociology and political economics, and its core findings are also highly relevant to readers of this journal or anyone who considers themselves part of the international community of business communication scholars. By shedding light on the often ignored professional activities low-level workers in a Chinese retail environment, Otis makes possible future analyses of similar workplace settings, both in and outside China. She does so by inventing a rich conceptual vocabulary for investigating the internal supply chain, where the values of commodities are made tangible as profit due to the habitualized enactment of realization labor on store floors. The theoretical language Otis develops should prove useful in naming and explaining the complexities of communicative practices that suffuse the organizational dynamics of the contemporary retail industry. As the academic field of business communication continues to diversify its objects of study and internationalize its scope, it would do well to incorporate findings from Otis’ work and to draw inspiration from its willingness to explore under-studied dimensions of work life and consumerism in an age of corporate globalization.
