Description
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 proliferated by easy-to-use, statistically testable, generalized classifications, scholars and practitioners find themselves stereotype rich and operationally poor where culture meets real-world international business context. “Culture” is much more complex: made up of various multifaceted and interacting spheres of influence – national, regional, institutional, organizational and functional – and enacted by individuals, many who are multicultural themselves. International business settings are therefore rife with multilevel cultural interactions as individuals with differing cultural assumptions work together in real time (often virtually) across distance and differentiated contexts. Ethnography is the most effective approach for gaining insights into such microlevel embedded cultural phenomena. This coursebook provides detailed examples of three types of ethnography especially suited to researching and building theory in today's complex cultural environments.
Table of Contents
Introduction; Part I. Intracultural Ethnography: 1. Introduction to intracultural ethnography; 2. The focal ethnography; 3. The comparative ethnography; 4. Exercises for Part I: some tools and practice opportunities for engaging in intracultural ethnography; Part II. Transcultural Ethnography: 5. Introduction to transcultural ethnography; 6. The focal transcultural ethnography; 7. Building generalizable theory from transcultural ethnographies; 8. Exercises for Part II: some tools and practice opportunities for engaging in transcultural ethnography; Part III. Strategic Ethnography: 9. Introduction to strategic ethnography; 10. Strategic ethnography and learning from the other; 11. Exercises for Part III; Part IV. Epilogue: 11. Ethnography in international business revisited; 12. Frequently asked questions and some answers; Appendices.
