Transnational Business Cultures

Life and Work in a Multinational Corporation

Fiona Moore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754642657
• eBook ISBN: 9781317007029
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This volume explores how the idea of 'culture' is used and exploited by transnational managers to further their own ambitions and their companies' strategies for expansion. It thus provides a more complex picture of culture than has previously been presented in business studies, in that it deals with the strategic value of culture within organizations rather than viewing it as a neutral concept and, through using qualitative methodologies, gives us a full picture of the lived experience of culture in a multinational corporation. It also considers the impact of global corporate activity on both national and organizational cultures, as well as looking specifically at the ways in which communications technology is used as a site of conflict and negotiation in business. This book will be an invaluable resource for both researchers and professionals, yielding important new insights into the roles of local and global cultures in the operation of transnational corporations.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Introduction

Although culture and transnational business is currently a subject of great interest in all disciplines of the social sciences, researchers in business studies have tended to treat businesspeople as a single unit, without the complex explorations of culture necessary to understand human behaviour under globalisation. Anthropologists, by contrast, have focused for the most part on non-elite groups, ignoring the possibility that the employees of multinational corporations might have equally complex social engagements. Through an examination of German transnational businesspeople in London and Frankfurt, I argue that “culture” is in fact a complex, shifting concept which is used and reinterpreted according to the strategies of individual managers and groups, and that this fact is leading to the development of a new “transnational capitalist society” incorporating both local and global cultures in a complex, ever-changing system of interconnected relationships.

In this introductory chapter, I will discuss the study’s background as well as briefly describing the issues which affected my research. This will include a critical overview of the way in which “culture” has been treated in the literature on business, particularly that regarding MNCs, and of how my work relates to these earlier studies. I will consider the literature on the role of national and organizational culture, and the recent studies on the development of “third cultures,” incorporating national and organizational elements, in the branches of MNCs. I will then summarise the approach of this book, derived from Erving Goffman’s theories on strategic self-presentation. I will then outline the methodology used in conducting the study and describe the structure of the book: an overview of earlier research done in this area and the formulation of a hypothesis based on this work, followed by an ethnographic case study, and concluding by reconsidering the earlier research in light of my new findings. I conclude with a brief restatement of my hypothesis: that the nature of global finance means that one cannot simply isolate “global” from “national” culture, but must think in terms of “culture” as a concept which is under constant negotiation in a loose social structure focused on transnational business activity.

Two Ships Passing: Anthropology and Business Studies

In order to combine the most useful aspects of anthropology and business studies in this context, I will consider the ways in which the concept of culture, both “national” and “global,” is used by the employees of the London Branch of a German financial MNC. Initially, however, we must consider the theoretical context of this study in terms of the way in which anthropology and business studies have dealt with the concept of culture in such situations.

German businesspeople in Britain are a particularly interesting group in terms of culture and business. For one thing, they have a long history as a labour diaspora which maintains active connections with its home country, and yet is not “visible” in the same way that, for instance, the Italian labour diaspora is (compare Panayi 1995 and Grass 1990 with Banks 1996: 72). Furthermore, the simultaneous admiration and jealousy expressed by the British media for the economic success of German firms in Britain suggests a problematic relationship between a “global” elite and “local” workers (Roth 1979: 115-119; The Economist 1998c). German transnational businesspeople in the UK are thus a group with an interesting relationship to both organisational and national cultures, and which can be isolated for study purposes on the basis of its members' shared nationality.

Anthropology and business studies have historically worked very much at cross-purposes when it comes to the study of transnational business. Anthropologists, for instance, despite occasional calls to “study-up” (Nader 1974) tend to eschew studies of elite groups (in particular white, male and European ones) in favour of small-scale and third-world societies. Although ethnographies of large corporations do exist (see Baba 1998, Schwartzman 1994, Nash 1979, Kasimir 2001, Graham 1995), they still tend to focus on the lowest level of the workforce and ignore the transnational aspects. Consequently, although it is not true to say that anthropologists do not study transnational business, their research tends to focus very much on small businesses and migrant labour, with transnational businesspeople featuring mainly as two-dimensional oppressors. Portes, for instance, in his study of Dominican peasants in New York City, dismisses their involvement with state bureaucracy and global capital, portraying them instead as resisting First World domination through transnational practices, when it could be argued that by acting as cheap labour to First World organisations, they are in fact supporting it (1998). Also, as Guarnizo and Smith cuttingly point out with reference to such studies, that simply because a group is “oppressed,” it does not mean that they do not share exactly the same hegemonic outlook as their oppressors (1998: 24). Nancy Lindisfarne’s otherwise-excellent overview of globalisation and imperialism nonetheless writes off transnational capitalists in a single line as the main cause of imperialist practices, tarring expatriate managers and two-person Internet startups with the same brush as Rupert Murdoch (2002). This volume thus endeavours to redress this balance and place a human face upon the elite: to make a reasoned examination of their place as part of the transnational economic system and, perhaps, to shed some light on how they truly relate to other groups within it.

Business studies, by contrast, has no lack of monographs on transnational businesses, with the bulk dating from the 1970s onwards (e.g. Bergsten et al. 1978). However, there are very few which actually deal with the lived experience of culture: while the work of Carroll and Fennema and Carroll and Carson (2002, 2003) on the formation of global elite networks and Harzing (2001a, b) on expatriate businesspeople are valuable and interesting, their quantitative focus leaves little room for considering the lived experience of culture in a transnational organisation. Studies of organisational culture in general tend to consider it very much in the abstract, rather than as something which is experienced daily by ordinary people (e.g. Garth Morgan 1997, Trompenaars 1993). Consequently, I intend to build on the qualitative approach taken by such researchers as Czarniawska (1997) to look at the people within the corporation under study as individuals, acting within the organisation according to their personal strategies for success rather than as simply individuals following prescribed roles.

This study thus aims to contribute to both anthropology and business studies by combining the ethnographic, qualitative approach of the former with the traditional area of study of the latter, to cast some light on how individuals behave in transnational economic organisations.

Background to This Volume: “Culture” in Studies of Corporations

While much has been written on transnational businesspeople in business studies, these works tend to dismiss the significance of culture in their daily lives. By contrast, although anthropologists have recently developed some thought-provoking insights into the nature of transnational cultures, they have contributed little to the study of business. An ethnographic study of a particular group of transnational businesspeople thus might allow us to combine the best of both approaches, and to explore the lived experience of culture in transnational organisations.

“Culture” in Business Studies

In applying anthropological methods to a setting normally the domain of business studies, the chief difficulty which must be addressed is the fact that anthropologists and business studies researchers have quite different definitions of “culture.” The main points of the debate have been effectively summarised by Wright (1994); however, I shall briefly outline the situation here. While both disciplines seem more or less to agree on what a company or nation’s “culture” consists of—its values, myths and rituals, collective symbols and so forth (Mead 1994: 155-156; Turner 1971: 21)—they disagree on how it is formed. Business studies views culture as a solidary, unified property belonging to a group—a property which is manufactured, and changed at will, by the group collectively or by powerful individuals within it. Hofstede, for instance, refers to culture as “the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one human group from another” (1980: 21), thus likening it to a computer programme which can be installed and edited at will. Although this approach is useful for developing theoretical models, it tends to afford too much agency to powerful people within the group, ignoring the fact that secretaries, for instance, may have as much influence in the definition of a corporation’s culture as its general managers (Anthony 1994: 2). Furthermore, this approach tends to gloss over the complexity of culture. In studies of German businesses, for instance, most tend to treat them as a unified whole, speaking, like Randlesome, of “German” traits which have an existence in and of themselves, rather than considering these as symbols which can be redefined according to the context (1993: 1; this approach is criticised in Millar 1979: 43). Furthermore, such studies often avoid explorations of the role of national culture in transnational business in favour of simply setting up German companies as the antitheses of Anglo-American ones, in a manner disturbingly reminiscent of the way in which Japanese companies were treated by the “learn from Japan” movement (compare, for instance, Sorge and Warner [1996] with Chapter 6 of Vogel [1979]). The view of culture in business studies is thus as a unitary property of groups, whether corporate or ethnic, which is more or less the same throughout the group and is bounded off from other groups.

This approach also leads researchers in business studies to differentiate more or less firmly between “national” and “organisational” cultures. This results in, for instance, Hofstede’s Culture’s Consequences (1980) focusing solely on the difference which the host country culture made to each branch of IBM included in the study, and Garth Morgan’s Images of Organisation describing the development of the cultures of individual corporations without reference to the countries hosting them (1997), with neither researcher considering (as an anthropologist might) the branches as organic and dynamic syntheses of the corporation’s history and practices and those of the host country. More recent studies have begun to critique this approach, considering the cultures of branches not simply in tei ins of corporate culture or home versus host country effect, but as “third cultures” made up of a synthesis of elements from both inside and outside the organisation (e.g. Ghoshal and Nohria 1989; Andersson et al. 2000; Mueller 1994). In business studies, therefore, we are beginning to see a recognition that culture may be subject to more in the way of negotiation and change than was formerly believed.

The “third-culture” literature does go some way towards acknowledging the complexity of culture in organisations. Ghoshal and Nohria, for instance, come up with a complex typology of ways in which home, host and organizational cultures can interact to form a variety of different patterns (1989). Kristensen and Zeitlin’s ongoing studies of dairy-product multinationals go even further than that, considering that a variety of factors other than home, host and organizational culture—including history, mode of acquisition and market sector—go into forming the culture of the branch (2004). During a 1998 conference at the Goethe Institut, Stephen Hagen observed that much of the emphasis on MNCs developing a distinctive, global “corporate culture” comes from American MNCs who, rather than hiring local managers for their branches, hire American-educated people originating from that area; in such a situation, one might well question whether these individuals are part of “local,” American or corporate culture, if indeed any of the three are separable from the others. Kogat suggests that MNCs are conduits of national culture, not simply from the home to the host country, but also from the host to the home, through their employees' social networks (1993). Ohmae questions whether IBM, which has a Japanese workforce but American origins and management, can be said to be Japanese, American, both or neither (Ohmae 1990: 10). It is thus not so much that MNCs are “nationalityless,” as Ohmae argues, as that they are, by virtue of their involvement with the processes of globalisation, engaged in complex “trialectics,” to coin a phrase, between two local cultures and at least one transnationally operating global culture (1990: 195; see Vertovec 1999: 449). However, these accounts generally do not take into account the influence of global cultures, or the possibility that these cultures change over time in response to different social pressures. In order to analyse its effects on MNCs, then, business studies thus need to consider culture not in terms of particular unitary entities, but as changing concepts subject to diverse pressures; more than this, however, the dynamic character of culture in organisations must be acknowledged.

“Culture” in Anthropology

Anthropologists, in contrast to business researchers, tend to consider culture as a common repertoire of ideas which is reworked in ways which are systematic, but not predictable (Wright 1994: 4). Culture is seen, not as a bounded, unified entity, containing distinct national and organisational forms, but as subject to continuous negotiation as different groups overlap, come together and move apart. Wallman’s study of two London neighbourhoods, for instance, considered how, while the groups might appear to have solid, defmite boundaries, these “boundaries” were in fact composed of a variety of different ways of considering different groups (ethnic affiliation, class, occupation, etc.) which intersected in some ways, and acted in opposition in others (1986). The key aspect of the anthropological view of culture is thus its shared, dynamic and negotiable quality, constantly changing in response to inside and outside pressures; however, this view is generally applied to small-scale and, especially, third-world groups, without considering the applications for business.

With the advent of globalisation studies, with its interdisciplinary approach, the tendency is to regard culture as even more complex and multifaceted. Globalisation studies focuses, more or less directly, on the complex relationship between global and local cultures, activities and groups. Tomlinson, for instance, in his seminal book Globalization and Culture, argues that the relationship between global and local reflects a “complex connectivity” (1999a: 2, 71). He argues that while people engage in activities which take place in “global spaces”; flying on airplanes, using the Internet, and other practices which cannot be said to take place in one locality or another; they are at the same time embodied and physically located (149, 141-3). As he puts it, this process of deterritorialisation does not mean “the end of locality, but its transformation into a more complex cultural space” (149). Globalisation studies thus builds upon the anthropological view to create a picture of culture which, due to the complex nature of the relationship between the global and the local, is necessarily fluid, with diverse groups blending into each other. It thus seems that the nature of global finance means that one cannot simply isolate “global” culture from “national” culture, or indeed either from “organisational” culture, but that we must think in terms of “culture” as a concept which is under constant negotiation in a loose social structure focused on transnational business activity.

In this book, I propose to develop this view of culture to argue that transnational businesses and the people associated with them do not in fact form solidary cultures, but a kind of global “Transnational Capitalist Society,” in which various groups of different degrees of global integration coexist, interact and develop their cultures in response to each other and to outside pressures. Effectively, this involves viewing transnational businesses not as individual entities, influenced by national and organisational cultures, but as existing in the sort of “complex connectivity” described above, linked to other groups and internally divided, and with their cultures being ongoing, dynamic processes in constant development through interaction with other groups and through internal debate. As this theory will be outlined in greater detail in the final chapters of the book, I will simply state here that the transnational capitalist society hypothesis argues for a more dynamic, less bounded view of culture and social interaction in the global business world.

This volume thus takes as its starting-point the idea of culture as a fluid, dynamic property of particular groups, subject to constant negotiation, which does not define single cultures, but contributes to the development of a globe-spanning social construct incorporating many different groups. As such, we shall consider how one group which operates in transnational business circles makes use of culture and its fluid properties, and in turn influences the way in which different local and global cultures connect with each other, through the way in which its members present themselves.

Theoretical Approach of This Volume: Strategic Self-presentation in Transnational Business

The main theoretical position in this work stems from Erving Goffman’s theory that the driving force behind this dynamic system of culture, or transnational capitalist society, has to do with the self-presentation of individuals and groups. Goffman’s argument, that the way in which people and organisations act to present themselves in the most positive light possible according to their own strategies for success, goes some way towards explaining the dynamic nature of culture in transnational business settings.

Understanding Strategic Self-Presentation

Many of Goffman’s works focus on exploring the ways in which people define themselves and their allegiances, most famously in his monograph The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956), but also in many of his other articles and books (e.g. 1961, 1963, 1970, 1979). Goffman describes individual and corporate actors strategically combining and selecting between expressions of allegiance in order to maximise their benefits in particular situations (1961: 101; 1963: 243). Actors, he says, may define themselves predominantly according to a connection with one group (as “a Jew,” for instance, or “medical doctors” or “employees of IBM”), but within that there is a constant interplay of allegiances to many groups and institutions, with different ones prioritised in different situations according to which the actor feels best suits their aims (1961: 143). While Goffman has been rightly accused of verging too much on rational action theory, people do use symbolic self-presentation strategically at least to some extent; one might also argue that to act strategically is not necessarily to act rationally, or even, as Bourdieu’s theory of social practice suggests, to act entirely consciously (Burns 1992: 119; R. Jenkins 1996: 70-71; 1992: 78-79). Robertson sums it up with the phrase “identity [sic] is power”; self-presentation therefore can be a key part of the strategies of social actors in their interactions with one another (1992: 166; Burns 1992: 232).

Goffman’s theory is, of course, not without its problems. One must also note, for instance, as Goffman does not, that it is not just that we present ourselves strategically, but that at the same time our self-presentation is being interpreted by, and incorporated into the strategies of, others (R. Jenkins 1996: 58). Oberg describes a tendency towards linking individuals' quirks with their ethnic groups, as witness Marsh’s anecdote about Prime Minister Thatcher’s 1989 visit to Germany, in which Chancellor Kohl made a strong effort to impress her with his Europeanness, but, despite this, she was heard to exclaim to an aide, “isn't he so Gelman!” (Oberg 1960: 181; Marsh 1994: 45). The complexity of the relationship between multiple discourses of grou...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Transnational Culture’s Consequences: Theorising the Global and the Local
• 3 Community, Interrupted: The German Businesspeople of Londo
• 4 A Financial Utopia: The “Global City” of London
• 5 Branch Mentality: Change and Self-Presentation in a German MNC
• 6 “Mobile Phone Wars”: Language and Communication in the MNC
• 7 Global Culture Revisited: The Transnational Capitalist Society
• 8 Conclusion: Defining Transnational Business Cultures
• Bibliography
• Index