Suchergebnisse

Purpose
Although qualitative methods have now gained a stronger foothold in International Business (IB) research, they remain under-researched, especially regarding how researchers can overcome obstacles created when interviewers exhibit 'multiculturality' during international field research projects. This paper analyses how researchers' multicultural backgrounds create challenges and opportunities in data collection during in-depth interviewing, and how such backgrounds further impact on the power imbalance between researchers and interviewees.


Design/methodology/approach
The two multicultural co-authors of this paper draw upon their 141 in-depth interview experiences with expatriates and local staff across five separate field research projects in Mainland China, Hong Kong SAR, South Korea, Finland, and the US. Field research experiences are analysed through a Bourdieusian inspired 'epistemic reflexive' self-interrogation process between the two co-authors.


Findings
This paper suggests five strategies to cope with the power imbalance between the researcher and the respondent in terms of social categorisation and language: activating the 'favoured' ethnicity, putting the 'desired' passport forward, constantly reassuring of belonging to the 'right' social category, bonding in the interviewee's mother tongue and adopting a multilingual approach characterised by frequent code-switching.


Originality/value
This paper emphasises the relevance of exploratory, self-reflexive analysis, and uncovers how social categorisation and language influence the interviewer-interviewee power imbalance. Distinct methodological contributions are proposed accordingly for IB literature: placing 'multiculturality' as an important concept at the forefront of qualitative IB research; and identifying ethnicity and accent as key factors in terms of securing and conducting interviews.

This year, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies has celebrated an important anniversary. Seventy-five years ago, five men from five different Societies — American, British, French, Italian and Japanese — sat together to forge a union of Societies around the world, a global consortium united in its quest to serve humanity. Decades later, with a membership of 162 National Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, a total of 124 million individual members and 250,000 employees, the Federation has marked 75 years of response to the suffering of humankind. Now some changes are in order to help us meet our humanitarian goals. Yet our mission, governed by the fundamental principle of humanity, the cornerstone of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, remains constant.

This article asks how international secretariats can sometimes expand their authority in areas that relate neither to their mandate, nor to their sphere of expert authority. Existing explanations of mission creep assume that IOs act autonomously and expand in those areas that connect with their mandates, sense of organizational mission, and sphere of expert authority. The claim here is that entrepreneurial bureaucrats can succeed—in the absence of policy deadlock among states—in creating creep in unexpected issue domains through the mobilization of external expertise. The article examines this dynamic in the domain of bioethical standards. It shows that UNESCO acted as a first mover in the field, despite having no relevant expertise, and despite bioethics being more closely connected to the mandate of other organizations. Entrepreneurial bureaucrats within UNESCO were able to create creep in bioethics by mobilizing external experts in the field and capturing their skills. Working with external experts endowed their organization with the capacity to act, gave epistemic authority to their actions, and prevented the politicization of debates in a potentially controversial issue domain. In pointing to the strategic uses of expertise, the article challenges the commonly held view that expert knowledge acts as a means of solving problems and rationalizing global governance.

The present article focuses on the connections between the National Council of Women (NCW) and the International Council of Women (ICW) during half a century. The research was made in the Centre of Archives for the History of Women from Brussels and brings to life the official correspondence between the Romanian feminists and the personalities of ICW and other documents preserved in these Archives. This study stresses the importance of Romanian feminism on international level, presents the contributions of Romanian feminists to the activities of the ICW before and during the World War Two and analyzes the essays of Romanian feminists to reconnect the National Council to the International organization during the communism.

This edited volume provides a multidisciplinary perspective on the contribution of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) to law, memory, and justice. It explores some of the accomplishments, challenges and critiques of the ICTY, as well as some of its less visible legacies.