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Audit means many things to different doctors and managers. Formal clinical audit, involving the setting of clinical standards and peer review of the performance of clinicians, is what will be required in future. Expertise is the most important resource needed, both to guide doctors and managers, and to provide the back‐up staff needed to carry out data collection. It has not been found that money and/or computers pro‐duce true formal clinical audit. The UK National Health Service will need to look at the production of the medical record, and doctors at how to deal with persistent clinical ‘outliers’, if audit is to produce its ultimate aim — the improvement in patient care.

The purpose of the paper is to question the false dilemma of bread (the social and economic rights) or freedom (the civil and political rights), which amounts to a simplified ambivalent vision either for or against “China in Africa”, in the debate over African workers’ rights in Chinese enterprises. The paper, first underscores the importance of the constraining and enabling institutional conditions by deconstructing this normative approach, and then proposes an alternative institutional approach to address issues pertaining to employment relations.

In the tradition of deconstructive techniques, the paper draws three lines of institutional resistance to move the “China in Africa” controversy in employment relations beyond its normative approach. These lines of demarcation are an African ethnology as opposed to a Western modernist reference, a postcolonial analysis of power in lieu of liberal hegemony and informality as a legitimate source of legality.

The paper suggests the Chinese corporate strategy as implemented by managers notably through human resource management practices, the African institutional contexts where the protagonists’ power resources are deployed and the paramount importance of informality in discussing the impacts of Chinese investments on workers’ rights in sub-Saharan Africa.

The paper shows that the disconnect between “good investment” that should improve social and economic rights and “bad employment” that downplays civil and political rights is not a “foreign” (Western or Chinese) issue per se, but a challenge for innovative employment relations that support investment and mind the workplace institutional context.