Global Themes and Local Variations in Organization and Management: Perspectives on Glocalization by

Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781136493973
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2013-07-24T04:00:00+00:00

of institutions) would make it unlikely for these managers to become seeds of institutional change. An exclusive local identification represents ethnocentrism when managers experience their own native culture as the only good one, as in the following quote:

Brazilians take it with ‘jeitinho’, more relaxed, without losing commitment. Americans sometimes do not know the person who sits beside them. In Brazil, we go for the barbecues all together. (Local manager of foreign firm; Arduini 2007: 102)

However, when exclusively local identification is paired with openness and active involvement with other cultures, this can give rise to dynamic identities as open locals. This can particularly happen when a sensitive person in middle to lower manager position is exposed to a new foreign work culture without having previously had the opportunity to enter the jet set of global business culture, and when the new culture is not the global business culture itself but a third local culture. This situation happens often to middle managers with high technical expertise who are asked to transfer valuable technical knowledge to a third country. In this case, we are not dealing with the typical milieu of expatriate top managers, but of down-to-earth, cross-cultural encounters, as the following quotation illustrates:

I worked for 10 years in the German subsidiary of a Japanese corporation. This experience made me more open to the world and, to use an exaggerated word, more cosmopolitan— thanks to travels to the Far East (Japan, Taiwan, China) and to the interaction with foreign cultures … I am more open to people and I have discarded stereotypes I may have had. (German middle manager working for foreign firm; Degasperi 2005: 82)

The identity of the glocal cosmopolitan mostly resembles Shokef and Erez's (2006) glocal identity concept; it refers to the integration of a strong attraction to the global community paired with the preservation of the native culture and a high cultural sensitivity for additional local cultures. The following quote illustrates this nicely:

The possibility to work internationally is the most exciting thing in the world; you do not have to give up your cultural roots. This becomes even clearer when you have small children: a good mix of internationality and Bodenstàndigkeit [German: being down-to-earth, solid, rooted] is a good approach … For the kids, it becomes taken for granted that one can work everywhere in the world and that many conversations can take place in a language different from the mother tongue. (German middle manager working for foreign firm; Degasperi 2005: 84)

The last three identities to be presented—the global cosmopolitans, the globalocentrics, and the glocalocentrics—are the most interesting because they represent innovations to existing theory. Global cosmopolitans and globalocentrics represent a growing group of people in actual world society (Brookfield Global Relocation Services 2011, cit. by Shaffer, Kraimer, Chen, and Bolino 2012). More and more bi-cultural or multicultural children missing local roots, at least in the usual sense of national or regional roots, are born from mixed couples (Piaskowska and Trojanowski 2012). These children are multilingual, attend English-speaking schools together

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