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Abstract

This article analyzes a case of "sexual harassment" in an American subsidiary of a Japanese multinational firm, and captures a "movement of meanings" concerning gender, race, and class within the bi-national politics between Japan and America. It argues that organization theories must incorporate the political process of cultural representation, with a sensitivity to multiple self-identities and to intra- and inter-subjective dialogues about organizational control. This study dismisses the ethnocentric, frozen gaze of an outside observer, and instead employs the "emic " analysis of the native `s ethnologic, taxonomic, and affective discourses and categorizations. It denounces the elitist, management-centric, or author-centric monologue on organizational reality that often has a powerful silencing effect on the "cultural others." It calls attention to the complexity of cultural juxtapositions within the postcolonial, postmodern, and global organizational world, and demands a new, more flexible, paradigm for social research.

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Inventing Cultural others in Organizations: A Case of Anthropological Reflexivity in a Multinational Firm

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