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Otherness in contemporary cross-cultural management (CCM) studies often emerges from migration and refugee movements, with ensuing integration challenges. In this context, 'difference' is perceived as being more problematic than enriching, and this makes it difficult to contribute to integration via a Positive Organizational Scholarship. Introducing the sociology of conflict, I propose that the success of a positive cross-cultural management engagement with Otherness should not be measured in terms of the degree to which difference is overcome and integrated, but in terms of the degree to which more parties engage more deeply with relevant conflict and friction. Investigating Otherness by means of a sociology of conflict approach thus radically changes the assumptions, research agendas, practices, presumed goals and potential responsibilities of a contemporary cross-cultural management theory and practice: deeper conflict signifies better integration, and assuming otherwise is both unrealistic and mis-fitting. I exemplify this reverse logic, and how to employ it, with a discussion of the 'refugee crisis' and the dynamics of 'migration background' in Germany. Thus reconfigured, integration in Germany emerges as more successful than is commonly believed.

Cross-cultural management (CCM) studies is the discipline that investigates the interrelations between culture, management and organization, and ensuing implications. Like all disciplines, it is built upon certain presumed 'disciplinary truths', such as paradigmatic delineations, and assumptions of how culture should be studied differently within different paradigms. Such presumed truths easily become 'trends', potentially even disciplinary closures. In this article, I show how the concept of genealogy (Foucault), can help challenge prevalent ideas of how the disciplinary knowledge of CCM studies is ordered, in particular the idea that positivism and interpretivism are opposing CCM paradigms which study culture in distinct ways. It then becomes apparent how positivism and interpretivism, as selectively understood and delineated by CCM studies, are characterized by a shared focus on stable and immaterial selected aspects of culture and, consequently, suffer from the same limitations. Genealogy thus 'un-fixes' disciplinary knowledge and, via widening the scope of the analysis, enables CCM scholars to make choices beyond presently taken-for-granted disciplinary delineations.

Intercultural training is common practice in many organizations. By cross-cultural management scholars, intercultural training is often critiqued as overly simplistic. The argument is that intercultural trainers lack sophisticated cross-cultural management knowledge. Based on 6 years of ethnographic and auto-ethnographic research, I argue that such a categorical rejection of intercultural training practice as inferior functions as a closure mechanism towards higher scholarly relevance: The problem is not that intercultural training practice is overly simplistic but rather that cross-cultural management scholars fail to consider the actual processes of how intercultural training emerges in a certain (simplistic) and not in another (sophisticated) shape. What is required, is thus an investigation of the actual contexts, actors and chains of events, and of the power-relations underlying them, that bring a certain reality into being. To achieve this goal, I propose a practice approach to genealogy (based on Foucault) which I apply to rich auto-ethnographic and ethnographic material. In doing so, I work with ethnographic material in novel ways and move beyond a previously held, more structuralist, archival and textual approach to genealogy. Exemplifying the benefits of genealogy, I show how intercultural training is implicated by other, more intertwined and local, power-effects than those considered by academia, such as intersections of gender (women trainers), job precariousness, dominant male professionalism, organizational pressures and personal agendas. In walking the reader through the construction of a sample genealogy, I provide academics with a concrete approach of how to challenge taken-for-granted scholarly assumptions and make more impactful contributions to practice.

By introducing anthropological ritual theory, particularly the concept of liminality, this article contributes to a process-oriented view on intercultural negotiations and highlights the importance of bicultural or marginal individuals for their success. These individuals are understood as experts of the intercultural transition (ICT), which needs to be made for a successful negotiation process. Focusing on a specific Sino-German context, this study provides an example for how high bicultural identity integration (BII) facilitates the success of intercultural negotiations. The contribution of this study lies in contextualizing large theoretical concepts such as biculturality, cultural otherness, and marginality and in applying ritual theory to intercultural negotiations and the cultural 'in-between'. It highlights the role and importance of liminal actors with a high BII for their success. These findings suggest that cross-cultural management research and practice should pay particular attention to marginal or bicultural individuals. Culture should be studied at its margins and as a process that evolves in specific intercultural micro-contexts.

Cross-cultural management (CCM) needs to move beyond the paradigmatic schism between positivist and interpretative research. What both paradigms share is the need to understand a specific configuration of culture in context. This article suggests multi-paradigm research through interplay on cultural performances as a means of acknowledging both paradigms. Data is based on action research in a Taiwanese–German management team. The contribution of this study lies in moving single-method interplay in CCM research to the level of cultural performances and in suggesting intercultural simulations as a viable method. Furthermore, this study shows that intercultural simulations can help uncover tacit culture that is performed but not verbalized. When used in action research, intercultural simulations facilitate integrated intercultural learning and increase the interpretative scope of qualitative research through a renegotiation of researcher–field relations.

This article views culture as collective identities from an interpretative, sense-making perspective. It analyses religion-based cross-cultural conflict through the example of two ethnographic studies of multicultural high-tech organizations undergoing change. Specifically, it looks at professional identity and the practice of religion among a diverse group of highly qualified technical employees. The aim is to show when and how difference in religious practice creates cross-cultural conflict. The examples given will be from various nationalities (German, Indian, Iranian) and from various religious practices (Christian, Hindu, Muslim). Based on these findings, a model of how to assess cross-cultural conflict from an interpretative perspective is developed. This article makes two contributions to cross-cultural conflict management. First, it gives an account of how transnational professional identities, external and organizational culture, religious practice and conflict are linked in two specific high-tech work environments. Second, it proposes a model of how to assess cross-cultural conflict in cultural complexity from an emic perspective.

Basierend auf dem Foucault'schen Machtverständnis und auf postkolonialen Theorien zeigt dieser Artikel auf, wie Wissens und Machtungleichgewichte moderne interkulturelle Felder beeinflussen. Nach Foucault erfordert jeder Prozess des Wissenstransfers eine erneute Aushandlung von Macht. Diese Betrachtungsweise wird auf das indische Bangalore angewandt, eine Stadt, die oft als die IT Hauptstadt Indiens bezeichnet wird. Die Daten basieren auf ethnologischer Feldforschung; das Feld ist der Nebenstandort einer deutschen High-Tech Firma. Hochqualifizierte indische Arbeitskräfte in diesem Feld sind teilweise ermächtigt. Trotzdem halten sie sich in ihrer Arbeit bewusst zurück, um keine Ängste am deutschen Standort freizusetzen, von dem sie abhängig sind.

Hardly any management theory nowadays fails to take culture's influence on today's organizations into account. At the very foundation lies the belief that the intercultural boundary can be determined externally—by etic view. In my paper I show how much emic organizational reality differs from etic view. Hereby, I refer to two years of fieldwork that I conducted in a global high-tech company at sites in Germany, Austria and India. I choose this approach to trace culture as an open process of sense-making in practice. Through interpretative anthropological means, I identified several discourses of collective identity that were constructed narratively—often regardless of the presumed etic border of "Germans" vs. "Indians." In summary, this paper makes the following contributions: Firstly, it shows how emic and etic categorizations of the cultural other can differ in a complex environment. Secondly, it looks in depth into the emic categorizations of "the Other" and how they are constructed narratively. Thirdly, it draws conclusions for the field of intercultural communication.

This e-book seeks to understand identity - namely something that is in a constant flux, that moves beyond and across single locations and that poses new challenges for researchers and practitioners of workplace diversity. Nomadic identities are understood as the sense of self of those moving individuals who inhabit the 'in-between' permanently and might not even conceive themselves in majority-perspective dichotomies such as 'bi-national' or 'bi-cultural'. The term 'nomadic' is used broadly as referring to all who are born, placed or place themselves into a state of expatriation, migration or

This article proposes a creative approach to cultural intelligence, as an individual's capability to function effectively under the condition of cultural diversity. Virtual team collaboration, as stimulated by the COVID-19 pandemic, constitutes a novel, culturally diverse context. We explore how cultural intelligence may shed light onto the requirements of post-COVID virtual and hybrid team collaboration. The contribution of this article to cross-cultural management studies is thus conceptual: by using the concept of cultural intelligence creatively and beyond its classic application, we exemplify a way in which cross-cultural management studies remain relevant, in an increasingly virtual world of work wherein people travel less to other countries, wherein collaboration takes place online and remotely, and wherein national cultural boundaries intersect with other cultural diversity factors.

Technisches Projektmanagement (PM) erfordert die fortlaufende individuelle Interpretation des zu erwartenden Projekterfolgs oder -misserfolgs. Dieser Artikel identifiziert Prozesse des narrativen Sinnmachens als Schlüsselfaktor bei der Interpretation von zukünftigem Projekterfolg oder -misserfolg. Basierend auf einer interpretativen Langzeitstudie eines interkulturellen Projekts in einem technischen Unternehmen, identifizieren wir drei Schritte des narrativen Sinnmachens. Diese sind: (1) Retrospektive Geschichten des Misserfolgs; (2) laufende Erzählprozesse des Misserfolgs; (3) kulturalisierte Geschichten des Misserfolgs/ des strategischen Erfolgs. Wir zeigen auf, dass kulturalisierte Interpretationen des Projekt-Misserfolgs oft im Bezug stehen zur individuellen Notwendigkeit, die Realität zu vereinfachen. Die Gefahr von kulturalisierten Interpretationen liegt darin, dass sie den potenziellen Bezug zu PM-Problemen vernachlässigen und der Entwicklung interkultureller PM zuwider laufen. Um zu vermeiden, dass kulturelle Interpretationen dominant werden, schlagen wir die Analyse von Projekt-Geschichten vor, speziell die der laufenden Erzählprozesse des Misserfolgs. Damit tragen wir zu Theorie und Praxis des Projektmanagements und der interkulturellen Kompetenzentwicklung bei.