The International Business Environment and National Identity

Tatiana Gladkikh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317212607
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Globalisation influences every aspect of post-modern social reality. However, little empirical research has considered how globalisation affects people's perception of their national attachments. This book explores the nature of national identity in our increasingly globalised society. "Who Are You?" is the question that it addressed in conversations with international business travellers whose exposure to different cultures, languages and values through their business travel and interactions with their foreign colleagues brings a new slant on their vision of the world. How does it influence their understanding of themselves?

The International Business Environment and National Identity is based on interviews with Russian and British business travellers whose views on their national identity and the role of global business in shaping it offer a new insight on our understanding of the impact of global forces on contemporary society. The book discusses the respondents' practical experiences of their international encounters, their impact on shaping their personal identification and highlights differences and similarities in people's articulation of their national belonging. The issues of understanding the self and the effects of globalisation on business people's professional and personal lives are at the core of the book's investigation.

The International Business Environment and National Identity will appeal to students and researchers of international management and cross cultural management as well as those studying intercultural communication and globalisation.

1 Introduction

Flying from an international airport, be it in Britain, Russia or anywhere else in the world, can be a fascinating experience. On weekdays, holiday-makers and leisure travellers are heavily dominated by businesspeople, easily identifiable by their charcoal-grey business dress, determined and focused behaviour and a must-have set of business accessories: mobile phones and laptops. These people do not fuss. They know their way around. They are not there to enjoy the experience. They are on business. They are working. Airports can be seen as the hub for a worldwide business network that accommodates nationals of numerous countries performing the role of the global business traveller who constantly keeps connected via email or telephone with his or her colleagues across the globe and is totally mobile. He (more rarely, she) feels comfortable communicating with foreign partners and operates with ease in any country.

This book addresses the complexity of identity construction of the contemporary international business traveller: the intermix of the openness to the global business environment and inclusivity of national belonging. The book does not intend to examine in depth contemporary features of nationalism; rather, the focus is on the influences of global exposure on international business travellers’ constructions of their national self. The aim is to understand whether these people’s national attachments are becoming reinforced or, on the contrary, less pronounced and therefore substituted by a newly emerging cosmopolitan vision of self. Is the erosion of national identity taking place in the global business arena?

This book is fuelled by the concern that there has been a lack of inquiry into the effects of international travel beyond understanding its “functionality and role in getting the job done” (Beaverstock et al., 2009). Thus, this read is a response to this challenge. It takes place within the global business arena, a broad platform for further development of contemporary business practices and for shaping the social interactions of those involved in them. The book holds that globalisation affects people’s understanding of their national self in two opposing directions. On the one hand, people are becoming more international, while on the other, they are reaffirming their national belonging. The book particularly concentrates on British and Russian businesspeople who are actively involved in international business operations through interactions with their colleagues from different countries, frequently travelling abroad for business and spending significant amount of time away from their countries of origin.

This book consists of five chapters, each of them beginning with a brief introductory section that sets out the direction of its discussion. Chapter 2 (“Identity in the Global World”) outlines the academic environment in which the book takes place by addressing four major themes that are important to consider in this context: different approaches to understanding the concept of national identity that can be found in the academic literature; the importance of understanding and theorising globalisation; an overview of the literature on transnationalism, the transnational business community and cosmopolitanism; and a discussion of the psychological dimension in studying national identities and the role that psychology can play in understanding issues of national belonging. Chapter 2 highlights that the emphasis of this book is on the national identity of British and Russian international business travellers.

Chapter 3 (“The International Business Traveller”) opens with the methodology employed for collecting empirical evidence to inform the book. The analysis of the empirical evidence that follows is split into four consecutive parts, spanning the following sections: Part One focuses on the international business traveller and introduces some definitions of the global business traveller that can be found in the contemporary literature. It then proceeds to establish a generalised image of the international business traveller based on the discourses of the 60 international business travellers whose interviews informed the book.

The analysis addresses such characteristics as age, gender, education, foreign language skills and professional ambition to travel abroad. It also explores the business travellers’ discourse on their willingness and ability to be immersed into foreign cultures; formation of social networks and, in particular, friendships with foreign nationals; feeling of comfort or discomfort while on business trips abroad; feeling a foreigner in non-home countries; ways and efficiency of communication with their foreign counterparts; and feelings and degrees of satisfaction or dissatisfaction with their busy lifestyles. The section acknowledges the pitfalls of generalisations in qualitative research and admits that the image of the global business traveller that transpires from this study is by no means inclusive of all international business travellers.

The following parts analyse, respectively, national identity construction by international business travellers interviewed in England, Scotland and Russia. The book focuses on how national identities are being understood, interpreted and articulated. By deliberately not placing national identity in any particular context and not conditioning its construction by any limiting factors, this section of the book aims to uncover what elements of people’s lives constitute their national identity and whether the national explanation of self occupies an important role in their day-to-day activities or remains insignificant and distant from factual reality.

Having analysed national identity construction as an abstract concept, the book continues by exploring the nature of national identity in Chapter 4 (“Identity Claims in a Cross-Cultural Perspective”), where the subject of discussion is placed in two different contexts. Part One (“The Significance of National Identity from International Business Travellers’ Perspective”) adopts a cross-cultural approach for identifying the similarities and differences in the international business travellers’ articulations of their national identity and provides further insight into how national identities are created and manifested by people of different national and ethnic origins. The major identity constructs which have been identified in this book are tested against A.D. Smith’s national identity theory (1991) in order to examine potential theoretical developments in the way national identity is lived, understood, performed and theorised.

Part Two (“National Identity and the International Business Environment: The Analysis of Trends and Tendencies Towards Change”) positions the discussion in the context of the international business environment in order to assess whether erosion of national identity is taking place in the global era. Firstly, it provides an overview of the different approaches to understanding globalisation that can be found in the academic literature. It then investigates the nature of globalisation as it is understood by the business travellers in order to consider what their empirical understanding of globalisation can do for globalisation theory today. Secondly, building on the business travellers’ discourse on globalisation, this part examines the dynamics of national identity in the context of the contemporary international business environment. It pays particular attention to the international business travellers’ understanding of themselves in the global arena: Do they preserve their attachment to their national roots, or do they associate themselves with much broader geographical, political and political and economic landscapes? How does globalisation affect their sense of national belonging?

Finally, Chapter 5 (“Erosion of National Identity?—Searching for Answers”) summarises the main discussion points from the previous chapters in order to provide the answer to the book’s main question. This concluding chapter also presents the author’s self-reflection on this work.

References

Beaverstock, J.V., Derudder, B., Faulconbridge, J. and Witlox, F. (2009) International Business Travel: Some Explorations. Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 91 (3), pp. 193–202.

Smith, A.D. (1991) National Identity. London: Penguin Books.

2 Identity in the Global World

This chapter seeks to set out the academic context in which the investigation of the erosion of national identity takes place. Owing to the nature of the enquiry, it is important to address a wide range of areas that directly affect the issue of the book. Thus, it firstly considers the concept of national identity by discussing different approaches to its understanding and establishing the theoretical framework which will guide this discussion. It then emphasises the importance of understanding and theorising globalisation as the environment in which the erosion of national identity is potentially taking place. Thirdly, it presents an overview of the literature on transnationalism, the transnational business community and cosmopolitanism. This appears important if we are to understand the social group who transcend national borders in their business activities and adopt cosmopolitan views on the world as an effect of their international interactions. The book then introduces a discussion of the psychological dimension in studying national identities and highlights the role that psychology can play in understanding issues of national belonging. In conclusion, it emphasises the need for a deeper understanding of local and cosmopolitan orientations of contemporary business travellers that currently has not received the desired level of academic attention. By highlighting that the emphasis of this examination is on the national identity of British and Russian international business travellers, the book raises its main research question that will be guiding its discussion.

Identity and National Identity

This section addresses the issue of national identity as a component of a complex organisation of human social identity (Tajfel, 1982). In this respect, it is useful to distinguish national identity from other types of social identity and to understand how identity changes depending on the context in which it is considered.

The Multifaceted Character of Identity

Identity as a term originated in ancient Greece and since then has had a long history in Western philosophy. However, it acquired the more intensive social-analytical use in the United States in the 1960s. It appeared highly popular and diffused rapidly across academic disciplines and state borders. It was quickly adopted in the journalistic lexicon and the language of social and political practice and analysis. “Identity talk” continues to flourish, with many authors whose main interest lies outside the traditional “identity field” publishing extensively on identity (Brubaker and Cooper, 2000).

Wodak et al. (1999) assert that identity is a topic of wide variety. Echoing this view, Brubaker and Cooper (2000) claim that as an analytical category it is “heavily burdened and is deeply ambiguous” (p. 8). The term is used and abused in both social sciences and humanities and this “affects not only the language of social analysis but also—inseparably—its substance” (Brubaker and Cooper, 2000: 2). Thus, in order to avoid political and intellectual costs, it requires conceptual clarity.

Identity as a Concept

Identity as a term can be characterised by a broad spectrum of approaches depending on the context in which it is studied, e.g., national identity and advertising (Morris, 2005), questions of Englishness and Britishness (Byrne, 2007), multiculturalism (Parekh, 2000), national identity and geopolitics (Dijkink, 1996). Identity can be accessed from different levels of enquiry, e.g. from lived and felt identities of individuals (identity at a personal level) to identities of nations and organisations (identity at a structural level) and from identities of nations or countries to group identities, such as European identity.

The concept of identity is non-static and changing, positioned in the flow of time and involved in other processes. Therefore, it is wrong to assume “that people belong to a solid, unchanging, intrinsic collective unit because of a specific history which they supposedly have in common, and that as a consequence they feel obliged to act and react as a group when they are threatened” (Wodak et al., 1999: 11). Identity can be perceived as a “relational term” and thus is defined as “the relationship between two or more related entities in a manner that asserts a sameness or equality” (Wodak et al., 1999: 11).

With the analytical complexities attached to the term, it is claimed that “identity” is harder to understand than we suppose. We all seem to have multiple identities and therefore the question arises: What determines which identity is silent at any given time? Mandler (2006) stresses that identity is not fixed and not being formed by any one particular process. In order to understand how identity is shaped, we need to understand the context in which this process is taking place.

Identity as Sameness and Identity as Selfhood

Ricoeur (1992) attempted to untangle the semantic jungle of the sub-components of the term “identity”: identity as sameness and identity as selfhood. “Sameness” is seen as a concept of relation and as a relation of relations (Ricoeur, 1992: 116), whereas the concept of “selfhood” is identified with what can also be referred to as the “ego identity” in other theories. For example, Goffman (1990) defines “ego identity” as “one’s own subjective feeling about one’s own situation and one’s own continuity and uniqueness” (Goffman, 1990: 129).

According to Ricoeur (1992), sameness and selfhood are in a relationship with each other, with “narrative” identity taking an intermediate position between those two identity elements. Narrative identity is an identity of a character (personage).

Narrative identity allows various, different, partly contradictory circumstances and experiences to be integrated into a coherent temporal structure, thus making it possible to sketch a person’s identity against the background of a dynamic constancy model which does justice to the coherence of a human life. Thus the concept of narrative identity can go beyond the one-sided model of an invariant, self-identical thing. It can take into account the ideas that the self can never be grasped without the other, without the change.

(Wodak et al., 1999: 14)

Identity as a Category of Practice and a Category of Analysis

Brubaker and Cooper (2000) assert that it is important to differentiate identity as a category of practice from identity as a category of analysis. As a category of practice it is used by lay actors in everyday settings to understand themselves, their actions and their similarities and differences relative to others. Identity as a category of practice can also be used by politicians in the course of their political activities to make people make sense of themselves, relate and differentiate themselves from others in order to organise and direct collective response of people in a particular way.

Identity, when used as a category of analysis, assists in explaining social processes. However, one should avoid adopting—even unintentionally—the use of categories of practice as well as categories of analysis. This is not to say that the same term cannot qualify as a category of practice and as a category of analysis at the same time. For example, “nation”, “race” and “identity” are used both analytically and in practice, for they do exist and people do have “nationality”, “race” and “identity” (Brubaker and Cooper, 2000).

In seeking to bring some analytical clarity to the term identity, Brubaker and Cooper (2000) distinguished five uses of the term:

• Identity as a ground of social or political action, often opposed to “interest”
• Identity as a collective phenomenon (“identity” in this case presupposing sameness among members of a group or category)
• Identity as a core aspect of “selfhood” emphasising something very deep, basic and foundational
• Identity as a product of political action, highlighting collective self-understanding, solidarity or “groupness”
• Identity as the evanescent product of mult...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Table
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Identity in the Global World
• 3 The International Business Traveller
• 4 Identity Claims in a Cross-Cultural Perspective
• 5 Erosion of National Identity?—Searching for Answers
• Index