This chapter offers an illustrative case of theory development from transcultural ethnography in a completely different industry, going from a soft industry like Disney and entertainment to a hard industry – ball-bearings. Theory development around knowledge sharing and challenges based on different types of knowledge are discussed.

This section offers a review and frequently asked questions regarding ethnography in international business.

This chapter offers an illustrative example of a large food retailer, Tesco PLC, using insider ethnography from its Asian subsidiary managers to reinvigorate its home operations in the UK. The technique of strategic ethnography and learning from Others along with its challenges and opportunies for growth and renewal are discussed.

The focal ethnography is the starting-off point from which general understandings and the inklings of new constructs are gleaned. It is usually carried out within a single division, plant, or project of a company that is undergoing change. In order to induce theory, several within-methods triangulations are used to check for internal reliability. This chapter offers an illustrative case of a focal intracultural ethnography around negotiating culture in a takeover by Japanese management of a US paper plant. Individual-level outcomes from cross-cultural adjustment and synergistic learning, on the positive side, to work alienation, on the negative side, are explored. Unsuccessful navigation of these outcomes leads to failed integration that can seriously affect successful technology transfer, knowledge sharing, and the general realization of global growth. By means of an iterative between-methods triangulation, the study surfaces cross-cultural work alienation as a phenomenon that can limit the overall success of such ventures, and identifies interventions that help to promote successful post-merger integration.

Preparing oneself to thoughtfully engage in intracultural ethnography within today’s multifaceted and dynamic cultural settings is no small task. To document and theorize the cultural undercurrents at work in today’s multicultural work settings requires an understanding of the complexity of culture as expressed, enacted, and negotiated across interconnected levels of analysis and spheres of influence. The following tools and practice opportunities are designed to consolidate your learning from the previous chapters, using practical aids for sifting through the various layers of culture while allowing for and giving voice to individual variance.

Transcultural ethnography is about understanding the flows of culture and its consequences as organizations expand their global reach across national boundaries. This scope of research focus beyond a company’s nation of origin is precisely what distinguishes international business from other types of business studies that are primarily domestic. Yet, the concept of national borders is fraught with controversy both in real world actuality as well as in ivory tower discussions. An ethnographic perspective that considers both culture and borders as concepts that are often overdetermined in our efforts to put together aggregated understandings of a world increasingly characterized by cultural flows as well as barriers is essential to theory building. Since transcultural ethnography involves research at globally distributed sites, a comprehensive understanding of how changing cultural contexts affect multinational enterprises (MNEs) and in turn the reciprocal effects of the MNEs on the host environments is essential to advancing transnational theory.

Transcultural ethnography seeks to understand how culture affects the transfer of firm competencies abroad as it internationalizes and seeks to integrate its operations on a global scale. Decidedly comparative by nature, this form of ethnography focuses on cultural contradictions or anomalies belying traditional international business (IB) constructs. Here the IB ethnographer seeks to understand how national culture affects an organization and how this in turn affects its internationalization.

Intracultural ethnographic research involves studying the flows of culture(s) in all its different expressions – national, occupational, functional, and so on – as they function, co-evolve, and affect the day-to-day lives of individuals within a single organization. The focus here is on the internal organizational challenges and dynamics that are ubiquitous to such complex cultural contexts as foreign direct investments, cross-national mergers and acquisitions, and international joint ventures. The micro context of these kinds of organizations is in fact the global meeting ground where people experience the everyday challenges of working with diverse Others in today’s culturally complex world. Part I of this book explores the challenges and opportunities facing organizations when there are competing national cultural assumptions around how work is done, language differences, and multiple sources of power and influence.

In today’s globalized world, a deep understanding of how culture affects international business phenomena is critical to scholarship and practice. Yet, armed with only superficial measures of national cultural differences, scholars and practitioners find themselves stereotype rich and operationally poor where culture meets real-world international business context. “Culture” is substantially more complex than this, made up of multiple interacting cultural spheres (national, regional, institutional, organizational, functional) that are differentially enacted by individuals many of whom are multicultural themselves. Settings in international business are therefore rife with multilevel cultural interactions as individuals with diverging cultural assumptions are brought together in real time (often virtually) across distance and differentiated contexts. This coursebook on ethnography in IB is the first of its kind, offering students, academics, and executives a way to study, understand, reduce uncertainty about, and make the most of the effects of culture in today’s global and multicultural business contexts.

Strategic ethnography is an approach to organizational learning where a firm utilizes its internal human resources as insider-ethnographers to reflect upon their own operations and organizational culture. This kind of ethnography is distinct from intracultural and transcultural ethnography where the researcher is an organizational outsider. Here the ethnographic exercise is performed proactively by organizational insiders and designed to feed into the firm’s strategic mission to facilitate global integration, innovation, growth, and renewal.

As the prefix “intra” suggests, intracultural ethnography focuses on the cultural dynamics within a given organization. In the case of international business, the cultural arena under study is that of an international organization in one location and the research questions that arise from this kind of study are generally framed at the organizational level of analysis and are focused around making sense of the diverse beliefs, norms, values, and customs that the prople making up these culturally complex organizations use in their day-to-day work. Although culture is a group-level phenomenon, it is enacted by individuals. As such, the cultural identity of the individuals is introduced in this section as the key construct to understand for doing intracultural ethnographic research.

This study expands theoretical research on negotiated culture by testing basic assumptions in the context of a German–Japanese joint venture. Data collected by semi-structured interviews are analyzed using textual analysis software to uncover key issues that became catalysts for negotiation. Results include a model of cultural negotiation linking organizational events with issue domains as points of departure for negotiations. Results show that aggregate models of cultural difference are useful only to the extent that they serve as latent conceptual anchors guiding individuals’ cultural responses to events. The study shows that structural/contextual influences together with individuals’ culturally determined sensemaking with regard to specific organizational events are more useful determinants of negotiated outcomes. Authors conclude that, while it is unlikely that we can predict organizational culture formation in complex cultural organizations, we can understand the process of cultural negotiation and as a result be better prepared to monitor and manage in culturally diverse settings.