Intercultural collaboration stories: On narrative inquiry and analysis as tools for research in international business

Abstract

The objective of this article is to show how narrative methods provide useful tools for international business research. We do this by presenting a study of stories told about the collaboration between a Danish expatriate manager and his Chinese CEO in the Shanghai subsidiary of an MNE. First, we explain and exemplify how narrative interviews are designed and conducted. In this connection, we consider the interviewers' interaction with the interviewees, and clarify our reasons for focusing on the two selected interviews. Second, we demonstrate how narrative concepts and models are able to elucidate intercultural collaboration processes by analyzing how each member of a dyad of interacting managers narrates the same chain of events. We show how the narratological concepts of peripeteia and anagnorisis are well suited to identifying focal points in their stories: situations where change follows their recognizing new dimensions of their conflicts, eventually furthering their collaboration. We explain how Greimas's actantial model is valuable when mapping differences between and changes in the narrators' projects, alliances and oppositions in the course of their interaction. Thus, we make it clear how they overcome most of their differences and establish common ground through mutual learning.

Intercultural influences on managing African employees of Chinese firms in Africa: Chinese managers’ HRM practices

“…We rely on a biographical narrative study (Wengraf, 2001), with an emphasis on storytelling method which enables leaders to tell a story (Shamir & Eilam, 2005). Storytelling has been used to study cross-border M&A (Søderberg, 2006;Vaara & Tienari, 2011), post-merger integration (Almor, Tarba, & Benjamini, 2009), and intercultural collaborations (Gertsen & Søderberg, 2011), among others.…”

Cross-Cultural Management Studies: State of the Field in the Four Research Paradigms*

“…Deconstruction (see Foug ere and Moulettes 2007) also offers an incisive method for the investigation of implicit meanings and power structures in texts and can be used, for example, in the study of cultural critical incidents (Romani, Primecz, and Bell 2014). Similarly, narrative inquiry can also reveal key learning moments in expatriate experiences (Gertsen and Søderberg 2011).…”

An Empirical Investigation of the Practices and Challenges Specific to International User Studies

“…It has been suggested that in such data collection situations (characterized by shared language and background) interviewer(s) and interviewee(s) create an 'ad hoc' national community as 'fellow travellers' [4,5] that jointly aim to understand the world around them.…”