Interkulturelle Routinen in deutschen und amerikanischen Unternehmen in Japan

Abstract

This article investigates how Japanese, German and American managers or experts working in German and American companies in Japan cope with the intercultural challenges by using "intercultural routines," i.e., conceptualizations of perturbations in German-Japanese and American-Japanese collaboration. The different perspectives of the respective actors on the intercultural challenges of daily practice, as well as the different ways of coping with these challenges, are contrasted and reveal the contradictory function of intercultural routines: on the one hand, they serve to uphold individual and organizational performance; and on the other hand they undermine this very performance. It is concluded that intercultural learning, particularly by making explicit the culturally different tacit concepts comprising intercultural routines, can resolve this contradiction and make intercultural collaboration more efficient.

Culture is leaving conversation analysis, but is it really gone? The analysis of culturalist performances in conversation

“…Although verbal expression is by far not the only mode of communicating identities, linguists tend to claim that the analysis of spoken language will provide major insights into the role of culture in interaction. From today's perspective (Moosmüller, 2007: 17, Haas, 2009, Condon and Yousef (1975) have paved the way of intercultural research into the discipline of speech communication. While in the U.S., psychologists have claimed their predominance on intercultural research for a long time (Haas, 2009: 81), linguists particularly in Europe have striven to develop concepts for the description of culture in communication (Busch, 2009).…”