1st Edition

Transnational Business Cultures Life and Work in a Multinational Corporation

By Fiona Moore Copyright 2005

    This volume explores how the idea of 'culture' is used and exploited by transnational managers to further their own ambitions and their companies' strategies for expansion. It thus provides a more complex picture of culture than has previously been presented in business studies, in that it deals with the strategic value of culture within organizations rather than viewing it as a neutral concept and, through using qualitative methodologies, gives us a full picture of the lived experience of culture in a multinational corporation. It also considers the impact of global corporate activity on both national and organizational cultures, as well as looking specifically at the ways in which communications technology is used as a site of conflict and negotiation in business. This book will be an invaluable resource for both researchers and professionals, yielding important new insights into the roles of local and global cultures in the operation of transnational corporations.

    Chapter 1 Introduction; Chapter 2 Transnational Culture’s Consequences: Theorising the Global and the Local; Chapter 3 Community, Interrupted: The German Businesspeople of London; Chapter 4 A Financial Utopia: The “Global City” of London; Chapter 5 Branch Mentality: Change and Self-Presentation in a German MNC; Chapter 6 “Mobile Phone Wars”: Language and Communication in the MNC; Chapter 7 Global Culture Revisited: The Transnational Capitalist Society; Chapter 8 Conclusion: Defining Transnational Business Cultures;

    Biography

    Dr Fiona Moore is Senior Lecturer at the Kingston University Business School at Kingston University, UK.

    'By engaging head-on with the growing and increasingly complex literature on transnationalism and globalisation and relating it constructively to key ideas in symbolic anthropology, Fiona Moore presents not only a masterly overview of the different groups who work in the banks she studied (and how their worldviews collide), but also addresses key themes in the study of contemporary business culture.' Professor Roger Goodman, University of Oxford, UK