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Scholarship and Professional Work - Business

Ethnography

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Full-Text Articles in Business

Boundary Work: An Interpretive Ethnographic Perspective On Negotiating And Leveraging Cross-Cultural Identity, Noriko Yagi, Jill Kleinberg Jan 2011

Boundary Work: An Interpretive Ethnographic Perspective On Negotiating And Leveraging Cross-Cultural Identity, Noriko Yagi, Jill Kleinberg

Scholarship and Professional Work - Business

The complexity of global organizations highlights the importance of members’ ability to span diverse boundaries that may be defined by organization structures, national borders, and/or a variety of cultures associated with organization, nation-based societal and work cultures, industries, and/or professions. Based on ethnographic research in a Japan–US binational firm, the paper describes and analyzes the boundary role performance of the firm's Japanese members. It contributes toward theory on boundary spanning by introducing a “cultural identity negotiation” conceptual framework. We show boundary spanning as a process shaped through the interplay of the contextual issues that make a boundary problematic; an individual's …


"When Are The Japanese Japanese?" Negotiating Japanese Cultural Identity In A Japan-Us Binational Organization, Noriko Yagi Jan 2006

"When Are The Japanese Japanese?" Negotiating Japanese Cultural Identity In A Japan-Us Binational Organization, Noriko Yagi

Scholarship and Professional Work - Business

Based on a seven-month ethnographic study in a Japanese subsidiary in the US located in Southern California, this research describes when the organization members categorized as the Japanese are Japanese. One of the purposes of the research is to challenge the widely held assumption in the body of international business research that every organization member from a certain nation is under the influence of the national culture all the time in terms of its impact on their behavior, cognition and emotive expressions. This research brings the assumption that an individual could have multiple cultural identities into the analysis. Under this …


Ethnography As Research Methodology For International Business Studies : Its Complementary Role To The Methodology Based On A Positivistic Paradigm, Noriko Yagi Jan 2005

Ethnography As Research Methodology For International Business Studies : Its Complementary Role To The Methodology Based On A Positivistic Paradigm, Noriko Yagi

Scholarship and Professional Work - Business

A goal of this paper is to introduce ethnography to the Japanese audience as research methodology for international business studies. Ethnography is defined as the study of describing a culture of a group of people. In the United States, ethnography has been established as one of the research methods in organizational studies. This does not apply to Japan, however. Thus, the paper aims to fill the void and inform the Japanese audience about how ethnography can contribute extending our understanding of the complexity of international cross-cultural management. The paper begins with outlining characteristics of ethnography in comparison to research methodology …