Desilencing Complexities: Addressing Categorization in Cross-Cultural Management with Intersectionality and Relationality

Abstract

A central focus of cross-cultural management research is how individuals and organizations differ across national cultures and how that fundamentally shapes their thoughts and actions and serves as a unit of identification. In this article, we critically reconsider the essential categorical nature of culture, problematizing categorization and questioning national culture as the primary basis of differentiation. We draw on intersectionality, an approach that helps understand how multiple categories are experienced by the individual, and on relationality, an approach that conceptualizes people, organizations, and their actions within dynamic patterns of relations and cultural meanings. Both approaches challenge the primacy, unity, and separateness of any given category, the a priori determination of categories (and associated boundaries) in research, and the nature and stability of boundaries. Based on this we advance notions of boundary work and boundary shifting that help explore how today's sociocultural groups and categories, and the boundaries that separate them, emerge and change. We conclude that, while the extant crosscultural literature has come far in identifying differences, relationality and intersectionality can enable cross-cultural scholars to engage in research practice that better reflects the complexities of sociocultural life. We contribute to theory by suggesting why and how these two approaches can be used to explore complex cross-cultural management phenomena.

Interpersonal leadership across cultures: a historical exposé and a research agenda

“…By adopting an intersectionality perspective in future research, we can move away from a simplistic one-dimensional view of human beings, and close erstwhile debates of the kind "what categorization matters the most?" (Bond and Smith 2018;L€ ucke, Engstrand, and Zander 2018;. Engaging instead in a multi-facetted view of individuals would endow us with a more comprehensive understanding of both leaders and subordinates, and thus enable a more thorough delineation of the needs and workings of interpersonal leadership.…”

‘Thinking About How We Think’: Using Bourdieu’s Epistemic Reflexivity to Reduce Bias in International Business Research

“…As a heuristic device, intersectionality relates to how individuals are experiencing multiple social categories or divisions, as well as their interplay in terms of building an understanding of sociocultural life when not having to rely on only one category (e.g., nationality) for sense-making. Furthermore, intersectionality explains the interconnections and interdependencies within and between different categories, which means as IB researchers, we connect and disconnect certain elements of the IB phenomena we investigate (Lücke et al, 2018). Furthermore, the meanings of the categories we use, due to the previously mentioned rationality, are relative to the other categories employed in the study (Shields, 2008).…”

Intersectional reflexivity: Fieldwork experiences of ethnic minority women researchers

“…The reality, however, proved much more complex because as Lücke et al. (2018, p. 304) suggest, “which intersections are relevant is largely an empirical matter, with no overall theoretical ordering (e.g., hierarchical or nested) or selection of master categories.” The numerous instances where we felt undermined as a result of being young women researchers presented one of the most difficult challenges to reflect upon not just because it was uncomfortable to discuss openly but also because we felt embarrassed recognizing that we used strategies that aimed at repositioning ourselves. It is in such intersectional reflexive moments where we were able to come face to face with the ethics of our reflexive praxis—not just thinking about power but reflecting on powerlessness and the efforts to regain power.…”