Increasing production costs and high pressure from the consumers are leading Swedish companies towards an expansion to China. Since more and more companies are moving their production, we found it interesting to study the problems they might encounter while employing personnel.

The purpose of this dissertation is to analyse what staffing policies companies choose and variables that influence the decision at Swedish production plants in China. Ethnocentric, polycentric and geocentric policies were the three analysed staffing policies.

To be able to achieve our goal and to see if our hypotheses were right, a case study was most appropriate for our research. By analysing a few Swedish companies, the necessary data were gathered. This information showed that our hypotheses were accurate since the companies used the polycentric staffing policy and considered the variables: language, laws and regulations and cultural differences to be important.