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This paper contributes to the ongoing debates on HRM in head office/subsidiary relationships and the uses of expatriates in corporate strategy, focusing specifically on the literature that argues that expatriates are used by the head offices of multinational corporations primarily for social control. Taking Erving Goffman's theories of strategic se...

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In the 2020s, the number of the over 60s in the workforce will continue to increase. The book ‘Arbeit und Altern 2020’ (Work and Ageing 2020) takes stock of the state of knowledge on work and age and ageing, and on progress in the areas of work design and human resources. It presents academic findings, practical design models as well as company and...
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In the 2020s, the number of the over 60s in the workforce will continue to increase. The book ‘Arbeit und Altern 2020’ (Work and Ageing 2020) takes stock of the state of knowledge on work and age and ageing, and on progress in the areas of work design and human resources. It presents academic findings, practical design models as well as company and...
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In the 2020s, the number of the over 60s in the workforce will continue to increase. The book ‘Arbeit und Altern 2020’ (Work and Ageing 2020) takes stock of the state of knowledge on work and age and ageing, and on progress in the areas of work design and human resources. It presents academic findings, practical design models as well as company and...

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... Power as perception Moore (2006) Dominance and suppression Power as ability to influence, power as perception Geppert and Williams (2006, p. 53) ". . .political control over uncertainties and scarce resources" ...
... On the positive side, global leaders use their power to empower and connect others (Farh et al., 2021;Kane & Levina, 2017;Moeller et al., 2016;Neeley & Reiche, 2022), to limit the impact of language barriers in teams (Tenzer & Pudelko, 2015), and to reduce conflict in negotiations (Schotter & Beamish, 2011). However, there is also plentiful evidence that global leaders exercise power to benefit themselves at the expense of others or their organization (Moore, 2006(Moore, , 2012, for instance by controlling the flow of knowledge and communication (Kane & Levina, 2017;Marschan-Piekkari et al., 1999) or by deploying negative stereotypes against groups of people to enhance their own social power over subordinates (Sutton et al., 2013). ...
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Despite its central role in the influence process, power has largely been overlooked by scholars seeking to understand global leaders' influence over their constituents. As a consequence, we currently have limited understanding of the varieties of power that global leaders hold, how power is exercised in global contexts, and what impact exercising power has in global organizations. The intended purpose of this chapter is to mobilize research on this important topic through systematic review. The review is organized around the following guiding questions: (i) how is power defined in global leadership research? (ii) what power bases do global leaders possess? (iii) how do global leaders exercise power? (iv) what factors influence global leaders' exercise of power? and (v) what are the outcomes of global leaders' exercise of power? Based on a synthesis of extant insights, this chapter develops a foundation for future research on power in global leadership by mapping critical knowledge gaps and outlining paths for further inquiry.
... Such information asymmetry increases fear of agency problems (i.e., self-interested behaviours and incompetence) (Hendry, 2002;Hoenen and Kostova, 2015;Kostova et al., 2018) and therefore the need for senior managers at headquarters to control and coordinate subsidiary activities (Boyacigiller, 1990). Because they have internalized the company's values (Kobrin, 1988), expatriates are an appropriate social control mechanism, especially when uncertainty about subsidiary activities is high (Moore, 2006). As Gong (2003) explains, in distant environments where uncertainty is high, senior managers at headquarters can hardly rely on output or behavioural control mechanisms, because these either shift risks entirely to the subsidiary (in case of output control) or constrains subsidiary discretion in responding to local conditions (in case of behavioural control). ...
Article
The allocation of financial resources to entrepreneurial initiatives in subsidiaries of multinational corporations is crucial to their realization. When allocating resources to these initiatives, senior headquarters managers face uncertainty that they attempt to address using various heuristics, which may bias allocation. Name‐based heuristics—cognitive shortcuts based on names associated with a decision‐making situation—have been shown to influence financial decisions ranging from food purchase to stock investment. Yet little is known about name‐based heuristics in the allocation of financial resources to entrepreneurial initiatives. We analyze 1308 resource allocation decisions made by 109 senior managers in an experiment in which we vary subsidiary country and subsidiary manager names. We find that psychic distance to the subsidiary country is negatively related to resource allocation when subsidiary managers’ names express a potential expatriate status. In contrast, this relationship is positive when subsidiary managers’ names express a potential local status. We contextualize our results by interviewing senior managers and discuss how reliance on name‐based heuristics to infer the context of an initiative or the interests and competences of subsidiary managers can lead to biased decisions.
... Interpretive ethnography thus stresses the value of participant observation the most and is highly skeptical towards alternative attempts at a "quick ethnography" (Handwerker, 2001). deliver new insights related to specific national contexts, such as Japan and Indonesia (Shimoda, 2013), as well as new implications for headquarter-subsidiary relations in a multinational corporation in general (Moore, 2006). ...
... Interpretive ethnography is useful for IHRM studies in multiple ways: When studying individuals, interpretive ethnography uncovers the everyday experiences of those working in multinational and international organizations(Ybema et al., 2009;Westney and Van Maanen, 2011;Weeks et al., 2017). For instance,Moore (2006) andShimoda (2013) both describe how expatriates negotiate their position and the relation to host-nationals, thereby shedding new light onto critical IHRM challenges associated with expatriation or local-host tensions associated with staffing decisions. Both studies also ...
... Commitment (Houlihan, 2002, HRMJ); strategic fit (Samnani and Singh, 2013, HRM); transfer of strategies and practices in MNCs (Dobosz-Bourne and Jankowicz, 2006; Moore, 2015; IJHRM); expatriates' cross-cultural competence (Charleston et al., 2018, IJHRM) Empowerment (Styhre, 2004, IJHRM); expatriate experiences (Moore, 2006;Shimoda, 2013 both IJHRM); workers' experience of work-life balance (Root and Wooten, 2008, HRM); HR as strategic partner (Pritchard, 2010, HRMJ) Critique of strategy (Vickers and Fox, 2010, IJHRM); Western dominance and migrant workers' coping strategies (Liao et al., 2017, IJHRM) HR managers' identity and the construction of claims to HR expertise (Pritchard and Fear, 2015, HRMJ) Diversity discourse and powerimplications for Muslim minorities at Western workplaces (Mahadevan and Kilian-Yasin, 2017, IJHRM) Abbreviations: ...
Article
This article provides a first conceptual discussion of the usefulness of ethnography for International Human Resource Management. In line with its original anthropological meaning, ethnography is understood as a multi-paradigmatic mindset involving five interrelated strands, all of which have the potential to contribute to International Human Resource Management studies. Structural-functionalist ethnography enables deep comparison and can thus contribute, for instance, to meeting the structural and institutional integration challenges of International Human Resource Management. Interpretive ethnography sheds light onto the hidden realities of International Human Resource Management and can thus help, for example, to acknowledge the diversity of employee and stakeholder experiences. Critical, postmodern, and postcolonial ethnography reveal the power-inequalities associated with diverse frameworks, practices, and work experiences in a global context. They can thus help overcome the inherent power-inequalities of International Human Resource Management and might utilize previously marginalized knowledge for the development of alternative International Human Resource Management strategies and practices. Yet, leveraging the full potential of ethnography for International Human Resource Management studies requires International Human Resource Management scholars not to borrow pre-selected ethnographic approaches, such as interpretive ethnography, from related disciplines, such as International Business and Cross-Cultural Management, because these might not fit the specific needs of International Human Resource Management. For facilitating this goal, this article provides a first multi-paradigmatic discussion of the development and principles of ethnography in anthropology, and its present and potential contributions to International Human Resource Management studies. It is not a guide of how to do ethnography, but a roadmap enabling future International Human Resource Management researchers to choose their ethnographic research strategy consciously, reflexively, and as their research interest demands for.
... In part, this is explained by the fact that contemporary cross-cultural management studies largely originated in North America and were strongly influenced by social psychological models that lay behind monocultural management studies (Tung 2006). Social psychology has been strongly positivist, and although social anthropologists have reacted strongly against this positivism, their cross-cultural and multicultural analyses have been more or less ignored by business and management scholars (see Moore 2006;Lauring and Selmer 2009;Caprar 2011 for exceptions). Social anthropology's ethnographic, descriptive, and interpretive styles were not easily built into the positivist models that dominated business and management studies' journals, and its concentration on single examples (ethnographies) did not lead to generalizing or predictive conclusions required for management journals or conferences (Chapman 1996;Bjerregaard, Lauring, and Klitmøller 2009). ...
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Culture in International Business (CIB) literature has traditionally been dominated by the objectivist tradition, resulting in the following three problems: (1) grounded in the realist ontology, these studies detach culture from its social context, (2) since every paradigm has "blind-spots," an excessive reliance on one paradigm results in a body of knowledge that is partial at best, and (3) such studies oversimplify culture by reducing it to linear cause-effect relations. Consequently, some scholars have shifted from this dominant trend toward multiparadigmatic studies of culture, some of which are grounded in post-positivism and facilitate nonlinear and asymmetrical analyses of culture. This conceptual article offers four examples of multiparadigmatic studies of culture, which, it argues, offer more innovative insights into cultural phenomena than is possible through monoparadigmatic and linear cause-effect studies. Insights gleaned from this article are geared toward CIB scholars, but they are just as relevant to scholars in other management subdisciplines.
... Focus on actual interaction across cultures enjoys a somewhat longer attention in CCM (e.g., Chapman et al. 2004;Moore 2006Moore , 2012aMoore , 2012bLauring and Selmer 2009;Caprar 2011;Klitmøller and Lauring 2016). For example, Westwood (2004) includes dynamic representations of the Other from a post-colonial perspective-as negative forms of the Other in relation to a positive Self. ...
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This article argues that theorising Otherness and Othering of the cultural Other is integral to identity construction during intercultural encounters, but has largely been neglected in Cross-Cultural Management (CCM) research. Intercultural encounters entail the exchange of cultural identities and ideas when individuals from different cultures interact with each other or multicultural organizations. Otherness signals the ascribed qualities attributed to the Other and is expressed through conceptual boundary markers regarding what constitutes Us and Them. Othering, however, reflects the above boundary-production as an underlying cultural process which maintains (and reproduces) such boundaries. Consequently, the CCM research agenda has overly focused on “cultural differences,” values and broad-stroke dimensions of fixed “national cultures” at the expense of identity constructions that transpire when individuals from different cultures are interacting. This article builds theory through advancing the Otherness and Othering concepts, which are key missing interrelationships to Self in CCM research. This is achieved by coupling CCM theory with intellectual developments in Social Anthropology and Sociology.
... Relying mainly on qualitative methodologies, the constructivist view seeks to deessentialize the notion of culture by describing how interactions also come to constitute culture "from below" (cf. Moore 2006). Hence, it is particularly apposite for capturing the ongoing reconstruction of cultural identities in culturally complex organizational settings (Søderberg and Holden 2002). ...
Article
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The understanding of culture in international management (IM) research has often been approached from two different theoretical orientations. One stream of research has proposed that culture is a set of relatively stable collective values that are transmitted to the individual in a straightforward and linear manner. In this functionalist perspective, culture is perceived to be a fixed entity firmly delimited by the nation state. Hence, the cross-national distance between comparable values has been a central scholarly focus in this tradition. An alternative and less pervasive line of research has adopted a constructivist approach. Here culture is considered a complex, dynamic interpersonal process. These two perspectives have developed relatively independently and offer scholars and students of IM different analytical insights. In this article we account for key characteristics of the two approaches and offer an alternative, integrative perspective that takes into account some central insights of both research trends, namely practice theory. In doing so, we avoid some of the inherent analytical pitfalls associated with the more radical functionalist and constructivist perspectives.
... Ethnography has also been used to study company groups, especially multinational corporations, although not necessarily reflecting explicitly on IORs and their relation to hierarchy (Fayard and Van Maanen, 2015;Jordan and Lambert, 2006). For example, Moore (2006) followed expatriate managers in a German multinational bank and concluded that, although the head office regarded expatriates as a resource to maintain control, these expatriates actually facilitated dynamic negotiation between the groups. Laurig and Klitmøller (2015) followed another object -interactions -and traced the theme of 'corporate language-based communication avoidance' through eleven subsidiaries of three multinational corporations. ...
... Other motives were knowledge transfer, cultural carrier, individual development, internal coordination and control (Moore 2006;eds Özbilgin et al 2014), as well as to balance centralised policy-making and the autonomy of the subsidiary (Ferner et al 2004). In fact, expatriation has occurred for more than two hundred years, for example Catholic priests and secular organisationsa 'black box' in the adjustment literature (Brewster 2002, p. 129). ...
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This article introduces the novel concepts of expatriate ‘entry-modes’, ‘comb-patriates’, and ‘Fourth-Country Nationals’ (FCNs), emerging from an exploratory qualitative investigation of 51 Scandinavian expatriates in Hong Kong. Global mobility research has traditionally been overly focused on the characteristics and background variables of expatriates or accumulated experiences after arrival, and has neglected the phase and mode of entering the new host country. Unveiling new global mobility patterns is significant for multinational enterprises’ (MNE) global talent recruitment, and has implications for training and development. This is due to directing the focus towards the increasing numbers of those individuals who are not expatriating in the conventional linear fashion, such as between an MNE’s headquarter (HQ) and its subsidiaries overseas. The critical stance taken in this article is articulated through a theoretical lens comprising a social constructionist epistemology. Theoretical contributions, future research avenues, as well as managerial relevance and policy implications are also discussed.
... Bonache and Brewster, 2001;Ruisala and Suutari, 2004;Reiche, Kraimer and Harzing, 2009;Makkela and Brewster, 2009;Fang, Jiang, Makino andBeamish, 2010, Harzing, 2014), with fewer studies focusing the management development or coordination and control function (e.g. Kobrin, 1988;Harzing 2001a;Legewie, 2002;Paik and Sohn, 2004;Minbaeva and Machailova, 2004;Moore, 2006). This paper will examine all three of these functions individually, highlighting how the various functions overlap, and providing propositions regarding the expansion and current focus within each role. ...
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PurposeThis chapter will discuss the extent to which existing models on expatriate functions within the international business literature, still effectively capture the roles currently performed by expatriate managers. It analyse the Edstrom and Galbraith (1977) typology and present a conceptual framework on the roles currently performed by expatriate managers within MNCs. To do this, it will draw inspiration from the resource-based view (Barney, 1991; Peng, M. W. (2001). The resource-based view and international business. Journal of Management, 27, 803–829. Wernerfelt, 1984), and the organisation capability view (Grant, 1996). Following several propositions about managers’ key functions within MNCs, challenges of creating an all-encompassing framework on expatriate functions, and suggestions for future research and theoretical development will be identified. Methodology/approachThis chapter will present a conceptual framework on expatriate functions. Originality/valueFour decades since Edstrom and Galbraith’s seminal work, international developments have continued to impress upon the way MNCs organise and manage their worldwide activities. Yet, as the business environment progresses, theoretical models examining how international development impact the functions undertaken by expatriate managers within MNCs individuals are still relatively scarce. Hence, this chapter aims to contribute to the theoretical advancement in the area of expatriate functions by highlighting possible changes and expansion of expatriate managers within the current global business context.
... In organisation studies, Moore (2006) considers how communication is instrumental in power relations between expatriate and locally hired staff in a transnational banking organisation, and Krakel's 2005 paper looks at the benefits, for individuals and groups, of withholding knowledge in organisations. MacDonald and Piekkari consider how individual networks, connections and power relations in and outside of a particular company affect the transfer of knowledge (2005). ...
... Finally, this study suggests that identity, and the expression of identity, may play a greater role in international knowledge transfer than is normally suggested. My own ethnographic study of German expatriates has indicated that the expression and construction of identity plays a key role in the way in which they carry out their assignments, and whether they exchange or withhold information from local managers (Moore 2005;2006). Furthermore, in his study of transnational journalists, Hannerz speaks of them as surviving in transnational contexts through developing sets of "decontextualised knowledge," which can be recontextualised in different ways. ...
Article
The impact of translators and interpreters on transnational business is not often considered, and yet, they have the ability to ensure the success or failure of communication during transnational business ventures, and to shape and define the identities of organisations. As part of a wider ethnographic study of the Korean community in London (UK), I focus on the case of “Mrs Park,” a professional Korean interpreter and translator, and the ways in which she mediates between Korean and non-Korean organisations. We conclude that to understand the roles language and identity play in transnational business, the position of the translator/interpreter as a cultural intermediary must be taken into account.