IUAES2015 panel session #9
17 July 2015, 11.00 – 12.30 hrs.
Yukimi SHIMODA
Japan International Cooperation Agency Research Institute
contact: ykmshimoda@hotmail.com
Abstract
This paper considers the emergence of diverse cross-cultural issues in workplaces where both expatriate and host national employees of transnational organisations confront both different forms of diversity from their home and host societies, and that from their stereotyped images of each other. Due to globalisation, cross-cultural phenomena – encounters between people from different socio-cultural backgrounds – are occurring everywhere, thus increasing the social complexity of society. Consequently, among other contexts, there is more diversity in the business landscape. This has drawn the attention of cross-cultural management scholars, albeit their investigations of these phenomena remain limited. This paper discusses the necessity of bringing intra- and international contexts into analysis in order to generate more inclusive and effective analyses of cross-cultural relationships in the workplace.
The ethnographic data in this study was collected through participant-observation and interviews during a year of fieldwork conducted in a branch office, in Jakarta, of a Japanese transnational organisation which provides services to the public sector in Indonesia. In the transnational space of the branch office, Japanese expatriate employees experienced the diversity characteristic of Indonesian society. Meanwhile, Indonesian host national employees experienced the unknown diversity of Japanese society. Across a certain period working together, their personal experiences revealed alternative characteristics of Japanese and Indonesians from the stereotypes described and created by media and friends/colleagues, who live(d) and/or work(ed) in Indonesia and Japan. This study explores the experiences and perspectives of Japanese expatriate and Indonesian host national employees, revealing processes through which they add their personal experiences to stereotypes and establish complex, subtle relationships with those with other cultures from their own.