Transcultural ethnography is about understanding the flows of culture and its consequences as organizations expand their global reach across national boundaries. This scope of research focus beyond a company’s nation of origin is precisely what distinguishes international business from other types of business studies that are primarily domestic. Yet, the concept of national borders is fraught with controversy both in real world actuality as well as in ivory tower discussions. An ethnographic perspective that considers both culture and borders as concepts that are often overdetermined in our efforts to put together aggregated understandings of a world increasingly characterized by cultural flows as well as barriers is essential to theory building. Since transcultural ethnography involves research at globally distributed sites, a comprehensive understanding of how changing cultural contexts affect multinational enterprises (MNEs) and in turn the reciprocal effects of the MNEs on the host environments is essential to advancing transnational theory.

This chapter identifies five fundamental trade-offs of supply chain management. Four of them are operational trade-offs impacting firms’ supply chain networks, resource utilization, and exposure to supply–demand mismatches. The last one is between revenue growth and supply–demand mismatches such that it affects the growth strategy. Elaborating on those trade-offs, this chapter proposes four effective strategies depending on firms’ sensitivity to supply–demand mismatches and business models.

Transcultural ethnography seeks to understand how culture affects the transfer of firm competencies abroad as it internationalizes and seeks to integrate its operations on a global scale. Decidedly comparative by nature, this form of ethnography focuses on cultural contradictions or anomalies belying traditional international business (IB) constructs. Here the IB ethnographer seeks to understand how national culture affects an organization and how this in turn affects its internationalization.

Intracultural ethnographic research involves studying the flows of culture(s) in all its different expressions – national, occupational, functional, and so on – as they function, co-evolve, and affect the day-to-day lives of individuals within a single organization. The focus here is on the internal organizational challenges and dynamics that are ubiquitous to such complex cultural contexts as foreign direct investments, cross-national mergers and acquisitions, and international joint ventures. The micro context of these kinds of organizations is in fact the global meeting ground where people experience the everyday challenges of working with diverse Others in today’s culturally complex world. Part I of this book explores the challenges and opportunities facing organizations when there are competing national cultural assumptions around how work is done, language differences, and multiple sources of power and influence.

In today’s globalized world, a deep understanding of how culture affects international business phenomena is critical to scholarship and practice. Yet, armed with only superficial measures of national cultural differences, scholars and practitioners find themselves stereotype rich and operationally poor where culture meets real-world international business context. “Culture” is substantially more complex than this, made up of multiple interacting cultural spheres (national, regional, institutional, organizational, functional) that are differentially enacted by individuals many of whom are multicultural themselves. Settings in international business are therefore rife with multilevel cultural interactions as individuals with diverging cultural assumptions are brought together in real time (often virtually) across distance and differentiated contexts. This coursebook on ethnography in IB is the first of its kind, offering students, academics, and executives a way to study, understand, reduce uncertainty about, and make the most of the effects of culture in today’s global and multicultural business contexts.

Strategic ethnography is an approach to organizational learning where a firm utilizes its internal human resources as insider-ethnographers to reflect upon their own operations and organizational culture. This kind of ethnography is distinct from intracultural and transcultural ethnography where the researcher is an organizational outsider. Here the ethnographic exercise is performed proactively by organizational insiders and designed to feed into the firm’s strategic mission to facilitate global integration, innovation, growth, and renewal.

As the prefix “intra” suggests, intracultural ethnography focuses on the cultural dynamics within a given organization. In the case of international business, the cultural arena under study is that of an international organization in one location and the research questions that arise from this kind of study are generally framed at the organizational level of analysis and are focused around making sense of the diverse beliefs, norms, values, and customs that the prople making up these culturally complex organizations use in their day-to-day work. Although culture is a group-level phenomenon, it is enacted by individuals. As such, the cultural identity of the individuals is introduced in this section as the key construct to understand for doing intracultural ethnographic research.

Lean manufacturers mitigate the mismatches between supply and demand by smoothing production and stabilizing demand. To stabilize demand, they follow an aggressive-selling strategy such that salespeople work relentlessly to keep sales at target levels. To smooth production, they cut all types of waste (i.e., in the form of redundancy, idleness, and rework) and move products according to a pull production model. This chapter delves into design and implementation characteristics of lean manufacturing and links them to the fundamental operational trade-offs. It also discusses challenges of lean manufacturing to highlight potential limitations of lean systems.

This study expands theoretical research on negotiated culture by testing basic assumptions in the context of a German–Japanese joint venture. Data collected by semi-structured interviews are analyzed using textual analysis software to uncover key issues that became catalysts for negotiation. Results include a model of cultural negotiation linking organizational events with issue domains as points of departure for negotiations. Results show that aggregate models of cultural difference are useful only to the extent that they serve as latent conceptual anchors guiding individuals’ cultural responses to events. The study shows that structural/contextual influences together with individuals’ culturally determined sensemaking with regard to specific organizational events are more useful determinants of negotiated outcomes. Authors conclude that, while it is unlikely that we can predict organizational culture formation in complex cultural organizations, we can understand the process of cultural negotiation and as a result be better prepared to monitor and manage in culturally diverse settings.