Transnational Organizations and Cross-Cultural Workplaces PDF
Preview Transnational Organizations and Cross-Cultural Workplaces
Transnational Organizations and Cross-Cultural Workplaces Yukimi Shimoda Transnational Organizations and Cross-Cultural Workplaces Yukimi Shimoda Transnational Organizations and Cross-Cultural Workplaces Yukimi Shimoda The University of Western Australia Perth, Australia Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) Research Institute Tokyo, Japan ISBN 978-1-137-52211-5 ISBN 978-1-137-52212-2 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-52212-2 Library of Congress Control Number: 2016957329 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. Cover illustration © KTSDESIGN/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Nature America Inc. The registered company address is: 1 New York Plaza, New York, NY 10004, U.S.A. To my parents P reface This book is about cross-cultural interactions and transnational connections of people from different socio-economic and socio-cultural backgrounds. My interests in the two main groups described in this book—expatriate and host national employees—are deeply intersected with and have been fostered by my own experiences. I spent my youth from the 1960s through the 1980s in a tiny city in the southern part of Japan. Before graduating from a high school there, I had only twice encountered foreigners in my home city. One day, my junior high classroom was filled with excitement. One week earlier, a female English teacher had announced that she would bring an American to the next lesson. Following the school bell, the teacher entered the classroom trailed by an unfamiliar figure. At that time, what most of the students had imagined was an Anglo-American with fair hair and white skin. The person the teacher brought, however, was a female African American with black curly hair and dark skin. The students were seemingly surprised for a second. The teacher smilingly introduced the woman, who was also showing a big smile. We had a wonderful English lesson, starting with exchanging greetings to each other. At the end of the lesson, we took a photo together. Some students tried to personally talk (with very limited vocabulary) and get close to the guest, and some (including myself) shyly stood at the end of a row. My second opportunity encountering a foreigner was in a high school. A female American student—this time with fair hair and white skin—came to our school as an exchange student for one month or so. However, as she was a senior student, I saw her only once or twice on the corridor. vii viii PREFACE Overall, I had few personal interactions with foreigners. All my knowledge about foreign countries and their people were obtained through books and the media. In those days, this was, I believe, not unusual among many students in my city. In a junior college located in Tokyo, my English classes were taught by American and British teachers. Unlike some students who actively talked to these teachers, I never exchanged words personally with them. Thus, my interactions with people from different socio-cultural backgrounds had been very limited. After the 1990s, I finally came to have meaningful relationships with non-Japanese people. I studied in the UK and made friendship with students from all over the world. After coming back to Japan, I worked for a few Japanese organizations. In these organizations, I worked as a contract- based administrative staff member and project assistant; my organizational positions were mostly subordinate to Japanese male superiors, and I dealt with mainly non-substantial issues. In the workplace, whether we could get along with each other or not, we had to work together in order to pursue organizational goals. These work experiences became a good training for me to adapt myself to my superiors’ different characteristics and work styles. My first extended work experiences with non-Japanese were in Indonesia where I was dispatched as an expatriate to support development activities in cooperation with the government of Indonesia. This experience became vital for this book in many senses. Indonesian people were my colleagues and counterparts, and I had to take on new responsibilities for supervising Indonesian team members. Though I was competent in my understanding of Japanese language and culture, I totally lacked knowledge about both management and Indonesia. I also did not have sufficient knowledge related to issues over which I was in charge. This lack of knowledge and experience forced me to rely on Indonesian colleagues, who had longer careers in the office where I worked. My Indonesian colleagues, as well as the Japanese colleagues, were a great source of work and non-work support. Subtle friction, of course, sometimes occurred between us. As I previously had worked as a subordinate, administrative employee in different organizations, I could share, or at least guess at, some of the feelings my Indonesian colleagues might have been having. I also understood what and how my Japanese colleagues experienced their unfamiliar circumstances in Indonesia. These experiences in Indonesia led my interest in cross-cultural relationships between expatriate and host national employees in the workplace. PREFACE ix Expatriate and host national employees who are the main focus of this book are often differentiated from each other and described as having superior-subordinate relationships without much interaction. Expatriates tend to be depicted as living in an encapsulated space, or a “bubble.” These are true and undeniable facts in some respects. However, the members of the two groups work together side-by-side every day. As a result of employees “moving” geographically and spatially, transnational offices become spaces of both the home and host countries and provide rich opportunities for their cross-cultural encounters. Employees in these offices share experiences and emotions, such as delight, frustration, anger, sorrow, and pleasure, through working in the familiar/unfamiliar working environments of their home/host offices. Such shared experiences and emotions definitely have an impact on both groups of people. These influences accumulated over time are occasionally brought “back” by the employees to their home/host societies and might affect their families, friends, and acquaintances who have been left behind, as was the case with my overseas experiences. My families and close friends still call and/or send messages to inform me about some news related to the countries where I used to live. Expatriate and host national employees make links between their countries. Their relationships are temporary, but, as this book presents, they sometimes extend beyond national boundaries and are partly maintained for a longer period of time. This book mainly focuses on Japanese expatriate and Indonesian host national employees in transnational organizations and corporations in Jakarta, Indonesia, where I conducted one year of fieldwork. These employees were diverse. The Japanese expatriate employees different from each other in terms of, for instance, their career trajectories, educational backgrounds, and willingness to work outside Japan, particularly in developing countries, which influenced their ways of thinking and attitudes to non-Japanese people. Many of them had experienced studying and/or working abroad. The Indonesian employees also varied in their ethnicities, religions, educational backgrounds, work trajectories, roles and careers in their workplaces, genders, marriage statuses, parental statuses, hobbies, and personal characteristics. Some of them had previously worked with non-Indonesian people, for instance, American, Filipino, Singaporean, Japanese, and Korean. Some took training outside Indonesia. Some studied (and/or worked) outside Indonesia, taking opportunities to accompany their parents or husbands, or to obtain scholarships. Their language proficiency differed: most of the white-collar employees were x PREFACE fluent in English. There were also those who had a good knowledge of the Japanese language due to their educational backgrounds. Non-white-collar employees used mainly Indonesian, but they sometimes mixed Indonesian with English and Japanese words. Consequently, these employees bring their experiences back to home societies and the people there who still lack such direct cross-cultural interactions, as I have done with my family, who had had little direct contacts with non-Japanese people living in their tiny, local city. Focusing on the employees, this book aims to understand the influences and meanings of people’s cross-cultural face-to-face encounters brought about by their geo-spatial movement in our globalizing society. Doing so, this book will tackle several challenges in multiple layers. First, this book challenges the contradictory characteristics of relationships between expatriate and host national employees: on one hand there is a compelling sense of closure derived from the closed image of expatriate employees’ lives, which is described as “living in a bubble,” as well as the employees’ segregation in both work and non-work contexts. On the other hand, there is an equally prevalent notion of openness created from the expatriate employees’ mobility and the associated attributes of cosmopolitans. Through fine-grained, micro-level observation, this book will provide ethnographic evidence of the existence of porous spaces on the surface of the bubble that is said to contextualize expatriate lives. Second, this book explores the interpersonal relationships between expatriate and host national employees, by bringing the latter firmly into the center of attention. This addresses a missing element in business studies in general by providing a balanced focus on both groups. In doing so, this book will highlight the formation of cross-cultural transnational connections within and beyond host societies. The third challenge is to re-evaluate network theory in ethnographic research. For this book, network theory, particularly Granovetter’s (1973) theory of “the strength of weak ties” together with small-world networks, will provide a useful framework to understand open and closed structures of social networks in our society, by including diverse individuals and groups connected in various forms. Simultaneously, the notions of social capital and cosmopolitanism, which also contain both discourses of openness and closure, will be interrogated. The micro-level analysis of expatriate and host national employees’ everyday lives will identify the impact of cross- cultural interactions on both the employees and their home societies. With these challenges in mind, this book is presented in three parts. The first part provides the framework within which the voices of the two PREFACE xi focus groups of the book—expatriate employees (and their families) and host nationals—are situated. Chapter 1 introduces the contexts of this study and the rationale for studying interpersonal interactions among those from different socio-economic and socio-cultural backgrounds in valuable in-between, or “porous,” spaces, particularly in the workplace for international and local professionals of transnational organizations and corporations. It emphasizes the necessity of looking at their interactions—in other words, the open dimension of their relationships— and of understanding transnational connections beyond the common trend of separating the two groups. This chapter also explains three key theories—networks, social capital, and cosmopolitanism—which contain the concepts of openness and closure in interpersonal interactions. In Chap. 2, I introduce the field site of this research and describe its particular circumstances, including a brief history of Japanese nationals and the demographic characteristics of expatriates (mainly Japanese) in Indonesia. This chapter also explains the socio-cultural environments of my field sites, particularly two offices of a Japanese organization (JO), and briefly places myself within this specific context by introducing methodological and ethical issues related to the study. The second part of the book presents the ethnographic findings from my fieldwork. It depicts the everyday lives of Japanese expatriate employees and in particular the way in which they work and live with Indonesian employees in Indonesia. Chapter 3 describes the way in which Japanese expatriates and families carve out their spaces as individuals and groups in new environments in Indonesia, outlining their everyday lives in non- work contexts. This chapter reveals where, with whom, and how they connect beyond their ostensibly encapsulated lives by shedding light on the lesser-known realities of their lives. Chapter 4 focuses on the everyday interactions in a transnational office space and how the transformation of values and knowledge between expatriate and host national employees takes place, and highlights their capacities for managing multiple differences. Struggling and negotiating with unfamiliar customs and values and simultaneously practicing the same work ethic within the office, the Japanese expatriate and Indonesian staff members gradually develop new outlooks, allowing them to see things from both their own and the Other’s viewpoints consciously and unconsciously. This helps them to flexibly cope with new circumstances and customs, creating porous spaces where openness and closure co-existed.
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