An auto-ethnographic narrative of corporate intercultural training: Insights from the genealogical reordering of the material

Abstract

Intercultural training is common practice in many organizations. By cross-cultural management scholars, intercultural training is often critiqued as overly simplistic. The argument is that intercultural trainers lack sophisticated cross-cultural management knowledge. Based on 6 years of ethnographic and auto-ethnographic research, I argue that such a categorical rejection of intercultural training practice as inferior functions as a closure mechanism towards higher scholarly relevance: The problem is not that intercultural training practice is overly simplistic but rather that cross-cultural management scholars fail to consider the actual processes of how intercultural training emerges in a certain (simplistic) and not in another (sophisticated) shape. What is required, is thus an investigation of the actual contexts, actors and chains of events, and of the power-relations underlying them, that bring a certain reality into being. To achieve this goal, I propose a practice approach to genealogy (based on Foucault) which I apply to rich auto-ethnographic and ethnographic material. In doing so, I work with ethnographic material in novel ways and move beyond a previously held, more structuralist, archival and textual approach to genealogy. Exemplifying the benefits of genealogy, I show how intercultural training is implicated by other, more intertwined and local, power-effects than those considered by academia, such as intersections of gender (women trainers), job precariousness, dominant male professionalism, organizational pressures and personal agendas. In walking the reader through the construction of a sample genealogy, I provide academics with a concrete approach of how to challenge taken-for-granted scholarly assumptions and make more impactful contributions to practice.

Introduction

Corporate intercultural training activities are a key component of the corporate Human Resource Development (HRD) toolbox, in particular in large and multinational companies (MNCs) (Pusch, 2004). Drawing from models and theories of intercultural communication (ICC) and cross-cultural management (CCM), these activities wish to prepare people for interacting with representatives of other national or societal cultures (Dahlén, 1997).

By academia, intercultural training practice has been critiqued as perpetuating national culture as a stable, distinct, timeless and homogeneous category (Goxe, 2020; Szkudlarek, 2009). This approach to culture is strongly opposed as overly simplistic (Fougère and Moulettes, 2012; Lowe, 2002; McSweeney, 2009) and has been labelled a ‘perpetuation of cultural ignorance’ (Venaik and Brewer, 2016). Often, the root cause of simplistic national cultures training is identified in the person facilitating the activity: the intercultural trainer. This group has been critiqued (1) for overstressing the traditionality of other cultures in order to remain in business (Goxe, 2020), (2) for exaggerating cross-cultural differences in order to construct themselves as the sole experts who can help companies overcome them (Dahlén, 1997), and (3) for promoting the interests of presumably ‘culture-free’ and modern Western managers over those presumably ‘culture-bound’ and traditional non-Western others which are commonly (mis-) represented in intercultural trainings (Szkudlarek, 2009). In simple terms: the prevalent idea in academia is that intercultural training has a simplistic national cultures focus because of what intercultural trainers do worse than academics.

I argue that this categorical academic critique of intercultural training is equally simplistic because it neglects the actors, contexts and processes by which a certain reality, in this case: simplistic national cultures training, comes into being. Moreover, it falls prey to the same mechanisms which are critiqued by it as insufficient intercultural training practice: it (1) operates with simplistic, dichotomist and decontextualized categorizations of difference (academia versus practice, similarly to the idea that the target culture of the intercultural training activity must be different from the culture of those trained), it (2) constructs inferior and fundamentally different others who are so embedded in their ways of how to normally do things (culture) that they cannot reflect upon their own doings (intercultural trainers, similarly to how members of the target culture are represented as ‘victims’ of culture), and it (3) portrays those others as inferior to the collective ‘self’ who is affirmed as possessing superior knowledge (superior academia, similarly to how Western managers’ culture-free superiority is affirmed over ‘traditional’ and culture-bound non-Western others). It thus reproduces the exact same patterns which it identifies as sub-standard intercultural training practice.

Against this background, I suggest that ICC and CCM studies consider the organizational and historical embeddedness of intercultural training practice and the processes which bring it into being in a certain context and over a certain period of time. In simple terms: there is no single, general reason as to why intercultural training with a simplistic national culture focus prevails. Thus, what needs to be remedied, is not intercultural training practice as such but the neglect to investigate how, when and why such practice came and continues to come into being. Such an investigation requires treating each organizational context into which intercultural training practice is embedded as unique and local, to study the actual processes and contingencies of emergence that create it, and not to subsume intercultural training practice under the categorical presumption that its knowledge-base must be inferior.

For pursuing such an investigation, I propose practical genealogy (Foucault, 1983) as a means of investigating how intercultural training emerges in context. I apply this technique to empirical material originating from several years of participant observation (see Moore and Mahadevan, 2020) conducted in a multinational company, and to auto-ethnographic reflections (Tomkins and Eatough, 2010; Woolgar, 1988) of my own activities as an intercultural trainer over the course of several years.

The immediate contribution of this paper is that it challenges a presumably universal academic truth about the corporate intercultural training business, namely that intercultural training is simplistic ‘by design’, due to the inferior knowledge-base of those facilitating it. Out of this emerge alternative angles by which intercultural training practice might be investigated by academia, for instance, with regard to its gendered substructures (Acker, 2012) or in relation to inner-organizational power-plays. On a wider level, this paper thus exemplifies the relevance of a more contextualized and interconnected viewpoint which academia could employ to reach more ‘surprising’ and ‘puzzling’ insights on a certain organizational reality (Van Maanen, 1979), beyond what seems normal and is generally taken for granted. By offering a practice-approach to genealogy, this paper re-orders dominant knowledge that is presumed to be ‘true’. It promotes the idea of a reflexive pragmatism (Alvesson, 2003) and lends itself to the reflexive co-production of knowledge in academic-practitioner research (Orr and Bennett, 2009), an approach requiring power-sensitivity and an awareness of the larger power implications of individual actions upon actions.

In order to make this contribution, I proceed as follows: First, I outline the background and relevance of my argument. Next, I highlight the main premises and principles of genealogy. Afterwards, I walk the reader through a sample genealogy applied to material from a phenomenon-based ethnography (Marcus, 1995) which is made visible via (auto-) ethnographic vignettes (Agar, 1990). This way, the presumed ‘truth’ about intercultural training practice, as presently held in academia, is reordered by means of five principles which are central to practical genealogy (Burrell, 1988; Foucault, 1983). Out of this, methodological, theoretical and empirical contributions emerge, leading to a concluding summary.

Background and relevance

The intercultural training business

Intercultural training refers to a 1- or 2-day activity by which a group of participants is trained for working together with representatives of another national culture who are not in the room (Szkudlarek, 2009). This national culture is usually referred to as the ‘target culture’.

As an organizational practice, intercultural training rests on three premises. First, it involves the idea of its being useful and instrumental to individual, organizational, or, sometimes, national effectiveness (Leeds-Hurwitz, 1990; Szkudlarek, 2009). Secondly, there is the belief that one does not need to understand the whole of culture in its anthropological sense, but that it is sufficient to focus on selected aspects which will manifest themselves in interactions across national cultures (Leeds-Hurwitz, 1990). Thirdly, there is the convention that intercultural training is an intensive, full-day activity that takes learners out of the context for which they are trained and thus needs to include appropriate methods, in particular experiential learning (Kolb, 1984), to simulate this context during the activity (Leeds-Hurwitz, 1990; Pusch, 2004).

Such intercultural training activities are usually offered by external consultants, the so called ‘interculturalists’ (Dahlén, 1997), who position themselves as specialists for the activity, and who are commonly specialized on target cultures. Intercultural training activities are usually commissioned by the corporate Human Resource (HR) department or function, for a certain group of people who have asked for or are deemed to be in need of an intercultural training. This might be the case, for instance, because a team has been tasked to work together with an offshore organizational unit, partner or other stakeholder, or because managers are being sent abroad or required to work across cultures virtually (Mahadevan, 2011).

Intercultural training practice thus involves at least three interest groups: the corporate HR department organizing these activities, those conducting them (‘interculturalists’) and those receiving them (employees and managers of a certain department, function or unit). From an interpretive viewpoint, these three groups forming the intercultural training triangle can be assumed to perceive the same reality of intercultural training differently, and from a critical viewpoint, their perceptions and actions can be assumed to be linked to aspects of power, potentially also inequalities in terms of knowledge, resources or other aspects. This implies: Rather than making a generalized claim about this practice, academics need to employ a contextualized and in-depth approach that uncovers what happens at the intersections between these – and potentially more – interest groups, and that can shed light onto how a specific localized reality comes into being.

Previous studies and research gap

Despite numerous publications that consider CCM education, learning and training in general, there are only a few in-depth studies that focus explicitly on corporate intercultural training.

Dahlén (1997) conducted ethnographic research on how intercultural trainers ‘package their knowledge’. He finds that external intercultural trainers – ‘interculturalists’ – are driven by market pressures: If national cultures were not different, then they would not be able to construct themselves as the ‘experts’ who can overcome this difference, and they would also not be able to ‘sell’ this expertise to companies. Thus, they have an interest in overstressing the importance of national culture.

Szkudlarek (2009), and Romani and Szkudlarek (2014) consider the ethics and ethical dilemmas of intercultural training. Szkudlarek (2009) challenges the idea that intercultural training is always useful, and states that it is often Western managers who are trained, and that the activity presents ‘non-Western’ others ‘through Western eyes’. She argues that trainers are responsible for the actions of those whom they have trained. Romani and Szkudlarek (2014) investigate how SIETAR (Society of Intercultural Education, Training and Research), the optional professional body for intercultural trainers, deals with ethics.

What the existing studies have in common is that they focus on the position and activities of the intercultural trainers or their profession, not on the organizational context and history into which this activity and the person conducting it are embedded, or on the interest groups which contribute to the corporate intercultural training triangle. There is thus a lack of in-depth studies investigating how intercultural training actually takes place in the corporate setting, or, in other words: how does it happen that intercultural training emerges in these, and not other potential ways in a certain organizational context? Thus, the general critique against intercultural training as such suffers from the same limitations as the phenomenon which it critiques: ‘intercultural training’ is constructed as a homogeneous, static, stable and distinct ‘way of doing things’ without considering the internal variations and potential contradictions of such practice, and without contextualizing it in time and space. This paper proposes the genealogical examination of rich ethnographic material as a potential way of closing this gap.

Genealogy

Genealogy has been discussed by a variety of authors, in particular in critical accounting (Hoskin and Macve, 1986, overview in Kearins and Hooper, 2002), but also in organization studies (overview in Raffnsøe et al., 2019). Most authors trace it back to Nietzsche (1996) and Foucault (1970, 1977, 1979, 1983, 1984, 1995 [1972]), who has developed his understanding of genealogy throughout his writings. At present, there are only two academic texts that put forward a genealogical investigation of CCM. Prasad (2009) makes the point that presumably ‘universal’ CCM knowledge is actually rooted in a specific Western history. He shows how genealogy can be a means of moving beyond the Westocentric nature of the CCM knowledge-base. Mahadevan (2020a) traces how the concept of culture in CCM, for example as selected universal and thus comparable aspects of macro-cultures, such as values, came into being. She illustrates how genealogy is a means to contextualize disciplinary history and excavate hidden alternatives of disciplinary knowledge which have not been selected as relevant in the present, yet, might rejuvenate a field. In ICC, there are several, also critical, historiographies (Leeds-Hurwitz, 1990; Pusch, 2004; and, in particular, Leeds-Hurwitz, 2010), yet, no analysis of which presumably universal knowledge has attained the status of ‘truth’.

History as a method

From a genealogical viewpoint, history is a method with immediate and practical implications (see also Alvesson, 1996: 95). Its purpose lies in problematizing the present (Kearins and Hooper, 2002: 736–737). Problematization (Alvesson and Sandberg, 2011: 247) refers to the analysis of underlying assumptions in order to highlight that what seems ‘normal’ and ‘natural’ is limited, selective and implicated by power-effects. The underlying idea is that any knowledge that has attained the status of ‘truth’ functions as a closure mechanism, and the historical investigation of contexts in their uniqueness (genealogy) is the way of moving beyond it.

This requires analysing and interpreting events within the local context of their emergence, in their own chronology (chain of events), and with paying attention to how different actors position themselves in terms of compliance and resistance to any then-existing status quo (Foucault, 1995 [1972]: 22–27). Emergence is the ongoing process by which something comes into being (Foucault, 1984: 83, see also Jørgensen, 2006: 25). Via tracing it, one can understand how a certain present came into being: one can identify the descent of certain practices (Jørgensen, 2006: 10–12). Descent describes the genealogical principle that history emerges from multiple contexts, actors and chains of events which need to be understood in their singularity in order to fragment presumed unities and totalitarian claims to ‘truth’ by which a certain reality, in this case: intercultural training practice, is codified (Foucault, 1984: 82–83; see Jørgensen, 2006: 15–21). In this case, the aim is to challenge the presumed universal ‘truth’ of intercultural training as simplistic, and its ensuing categorical rejection as involving inferior knowledge, but rather to investigate its descent via asking how this practice came into being in a certain context, as involving certain actors, and as shaped by certain chains of events.

Power as part of every relation

Power is an inevitable part of every history, because history is made up of relations, and power is part of every relation. Every relation is thus a relation of power (Jørgensen, 2006: 25). This means that power, as the key feature of how the present has emerged, comes down to individual acts of positioning in terms of compliance and resistance in relation towards a then-existing status quo. At the same time, power does not originate solely from single individuals. For instance, when proposing that the CCM skill-set is ‘useful’ for managerial education and learning, such a perspective is ‘powerful’ because others have said so before. Even those who resist the idea (e.g. Szkudlarek, 2009) then need to position their resistance against historical and present ideas of ‘usefulness’. As a result, some explanations (‘intercultural training is useful’) gain precedence over other potential local knowledges which are then submerged by history, understood as individual actions upon actions.

Foucauldian power is not primarily suppressive but a creative and productive force which brings about certain – and hides other – knowledges and truths (see also Jørgensen, 2006). Individuals are the vehicles for the emergence of power-effects, but no individual has ‘invented’ the power-effects of their actions (Foucault, 1980, see Jørgensen, 2006: 22–26). For example, no individual interculturalist has invented the idea that intercultural training increases international managerial and organizational effectiveness. Nonetheless, this purpose underpins the actions of many individual interculturalists, and is also part of what is normally considered to be ‘true’ within this professional community, also in academia (see, e.g. Kedia and Mukherji, 1999). Likewise, no single academic has invented the idea that intercultural training is simplistic due to the inferior knowledge-base of those facilitating it, nonetheless, the idea ‘rings as true’ amongst academics.

What makes an investigation genealogical?

A genealogical analysis is not based on specific rules or regulations, but Foucault (1977) has nonetheless proposed certain recommendations for implementing a genealogical perspective.

Firstly, ‘the focus is on the past [only] insofar as it helps us to understand the present’ (Kearins and Hooper, 2002: 739). This means that history is considered with a purpose, namely as a method for challenging the present. In this case, the aim is to understand how a certain presumed ‘truth’ as held in academia about intercultural training practice came into being, namely the interrelated ideas that intercultural training practice is designed simplistically because intercultural trainers – in contrast to the thus constructed more knowledgeable academics – ‘do not know better’.

Secondly, the genealogical investigation needs to be directed towards a body of alternative or local historical facts (an ‘archive’) which are presently not considered (Jørgensen, 2002: 36). In this case, it is the organizational contexts and the interest groups which it involves that are placed centre-stage.

Thirdly, this archive needs to be interpreted critically in order to challenge people’s understanding of the present (Jørgensen, 2002). For doing so, one needs to formulate a problem statement of what should be learned about the present via examining the past (see also Kearins and Hooper, 2002: 742). In this case, the aim is to figure out how intercultural training comes into being beyond a mere categorical and decontextualized explanation. Or in other words: to bring the uniqueness and locality of the organizational dimension into the analysis.

Next, genealogists need to delve back into the archive to find out how what they have identified as problematic in the present has come into being (Kearins and Hooper, 2002: 741). In this case, my goal is to move beyond the present closure mechanism of how academia categorizes intercultural training practice.

Originally, Foucault has conceptualized the archive in terms of a textual archive, thus: of texts, which have not been considered when history was ‘written’. In this case, the material chosen is ethnographic material from own research as well as auto-ethnographic reflections. Together, they form two pillars of a multi-sited ethnography (Marcus, 2008). This approach is rooted in the idea of culture as text (Geertz, 1973) and the understanding that it is, for instance, interactional processes by which reality is constructed socially (Berger and Luckmann, 1966). If one proceeds from this assumption, then also lived experiences, for instance, as approximated by in-depth interpretive methods, such as ethnography (Mahadevan, 2020b; Moore and Mahadevan, 2020), can be considered an archive. This archive then fits the goals of the genealogical analysis, namely to uncover hidden contextualized organizational interests and actors.

Elements of a practice-approach to genealogy

There are different phases in Foucault’s work, which are classified as ‘archaeological’ (more structuralist and focused on archival techniques) and as ‘genealogical’ (more postmodern and focused on reordering knowledge and suggesting alternative ways of approaching problems and ordering material). Burrell (1988) argues that Foucault himself ‘lost sympathy with [the] quasi-structuralism [of archaeology]’ (p. 224) and identifies this turning point in a series of interviews which Foucault gave in the years prior to his death in 1984 and which are published in Dreyfuß and Rabinow (1983) and Rabinow (1984). Burrell (1988) states that the separation between archaeology and genealogy became more distinct for the late Foucault, with archaeology assuming ‘a very minor role’ (p. 224). He writes that ‘in relation to archaeology, practice now becomes much more important than theory’ (Burrell, 1988: 224, summarizing Dreyfuß and Rabinow’s, 1983, reading of Foucault. This then makes the genealogist ‘a diagnostician who is interested in power, knowledge and the body and how they interrelate’ (p. 224).

This paper follows the aforementioned reading of Foucault’s genealogy and argues that, if the focus is on how power, knowledge and the body interrelate, then genealogy might also be applied to in-depth embodied researcher experiences, such as delivered by means of ethnography and auto-ethnography. In doing so, it promotes a practice-approach to genealogy, following the call for a ‘pragmatic reflexivity’ (Alvesson, 2003), which is guided by the wish to improve upon practice via reflecting upon people’s actions in context, including oneself.

Dreyfuß and Rabinow (1983), in their attempt of crystallizing the aforementioned understanding of genealogy by the late Foucault, conducted an interview with him wherein he states (Foucault, 1983: 223–224) that any genealogy must establish the following five points in order to fulfil its purposes:

• (1) What is the system of differentiations that permits one to act upon the actions of others? Here, Foucault refers to the ideas of what differentiates individuals and groups (e.g. status, culture, privilege, law, language, competencies).

• (2) What are the types of objectives pursued by those who act upon the actions of others? Here, Foucault speaks of maintaining privileges; accumulating profits; and exercising statutory authority, functions or trade operations.

• (3) What are the means of bringing power relations into being? Here, Foucault refers to how power is exercised.

• (4) What are the forms of institutionalization? Here, Foucault differentiates between more pervasive forms (e.g. laws) or less pervasive forms (e.g. practice, customs).

• (5) Which degrees of rationalization underlie the manifestations of power? Here, Foucault states that power manifests itself in relation to other factors, such as the effectiveness of the instruments for exercising power, the certainty of the results, or possible costs.

This reading of Foucault’s approach to genealogy is by no means the only or dominant one, yet, it is the one that is the most concerned with the actual ‘doing’ of genealogy. I will use these five guiding questions to reorder material on corporate intercultural training which is rooted in lived experiences, such as ethnographic fieldnotes, researcher experiences in interaction, and processes of social sensemaking. My goal is to split up the dominant and categorical perception of intercultural training practice into actors, contexts and chains of events.

Exemplifying a genealogical analysis of intercultural training practice

In this section, I exemplify a genealogical analysis of corporate intercultural training practice. In my step-by-step approach, I follow Kearins and Hooper’s (2002) understanding of genealogy as a practical methodology which has been discussed by Burrell (1988) and which crystallizes in Foucault’s (1983) own brief description of it. My intention is to walk the reader through the construction of a sample genealogy that re-orders existing knowledge by means of considering five ways in which power manifests (Foucault, 1983). Out of this emerge relevant local knowledges which challenge the dominant categorical rejection of intercultural training as inferior due to intercultural trainers’ insufficient knowledge-base.

Building the archive

Due to the stated understanding of genealogy as a practice wherein power, knowledge and embodied experiences intersect (see previous), I build the archive from my own experiences as a researcher and an intercultural trainer. Together, they form the pillars of a multi-sited ethnography (Marcus, 2008).

Multi-sited ethnography involves the notion that it is the researcher who creates a multi-sited ‘field’ by ordering it around a certain phenomenon: it is phenomenon-based. Conversely, classic ethnography is locality-based: it investigates specific locations (fields) by means of longitudinal physical immersion referred to as participant observation (Mahadevan, 2020b; Moore and Mahadevan, 2020; Van Maanen, 2006). Yet, organizational phenomena such as Wall Street cannot be conceptualized in such a manner: they are at the same time a distinct location (the Wall Street) as they are an immaterial concept, idea, discourse and practice produced by numerous people and webs of meaning (Ho, 2009). In short: they require multi-sited ethnography, understood as the need to ‘follow the people, follow the thing, follow the metaphor, follow the plot, story, or allegory, follow the life or biography, or follow the conflict’ (Marcus, 1995: 91–92). Theory, researcher, method and phenomenon are thus inseparable.

The multi-sited ethnography of this case spans 6 years and covers the intercultural training field for India, my main target country as an intercultural trainer, in Germany between 2002 and 2008. As an ethnographic researcher, I was conducting 2 years of full-time participant observation in a German high-tech company offshoring part of its activities to India (see also Mahadevan, 2011). During that time, I was neither aware of genealogy nor was the original research informed by it (and also the events studied were not yet ‘history’). For the purpose of this paper, the original fieldnotes are re-examined in new light.

I contextualize these fieldnotes with auto-ethnographic recollections of my own experiences as intercultural trainer. These recollections are presented as a condensed story or vignette, an established means of literary ethnographic writing (Agar, 1990) by which the ethnographer (as writer) enables readers to walk through other people’s lived experiences (Van Maanen, 1979; Woolgar, 1988).

Vignette 1: Becoming an interculturalist

I am a female, mixed Caucasian-South Asian German national who has lived and worked in more than a dozen countries and who identifies as German. After graduating, I started working, and, at that point in time, the intercultural training business in Germany, my country of residence, was just emerging: it was easy to get in. Being slightly disillusioned by corporate life, I thought that this might be an exciting experience. I got my first job as a trainer for intercultural conflict management as part of a funded research program for underprivileged ethnic minority youths just because I had, as it was said, the right kind of ethnic minority background: ‘This will speak to the participants’, I was told. ‘They will buy the role’. In contrast, my graduate degree in International Business, Languages and Cultural Studies did not receive much attention. I was given a training manual and received a day of introduction on how to guide experiential learning activities, and then I started giving trainings, 10 in total within a year.

Therefore, my own experiences are fully representative of what Dahlén (1997) has identified as a lack of professionalism in the intercultural training business, with trainers’ main qualification being their ability to ‘play’ a culture in the eyes of the participants.

About a year afterwards, a lot of technical companies in Germany started to internationalize to India, the country wherein part of my family roots lay, in which I had lived in my youth, and upon which I had partly focused in my studies: Suddenly, I became a sought-after freelance intercultural trainer for India, and I started to work for four of the then five top intercultural training agencies in existence in Germany. These were companies, normally run by a single or a handful of people, who marketed the services of ‘country experts’ to MNCs. For this, the freelance intercultural trainer received a daily-rate by the agency who took a certain share of the profit, ranging from 30% to 50% of the trainer’s daily rate. As I figured out when trying to approach MNCs directly, corporate HR preferred to work with agencies rather than individual trainers because, as it transpired, agencies provided a reliable, standardized offer for a variety of countries via a single customer interface. By some training agencies, I was given standardized slides in advance, others just required that I used their corporate design.

Because country experts were scarce, the same freelance interculturalists (me included) operated under the corporate design of various agencies, and we all knew of each other and also recommended each other as replacement, in case one of us was not available. At that time, I was only doing this part-time, because I had figured out that, in order to get good clients and a decent daily rate, I might need a doctoral degree, especially because I was a young woman working with predominantly male and older clients in a technical industry.

I therefore conceptualized a doctoral research project – I had always wanted to do ethnographic research – and managed to gain access to a German high-tech company which was offshoring part of its activities to India, and, for 2 years, my main focus was on conducting ethnographic research there, complemented by about 20 days of work as an intercultural trainer per year.

Therefore, my entry to academic research was in a way equally ‘un-professionalized’ as my entry to the intercultural training business.

After the completion of fieldwork and my doctoral defence 1 year later, I started my own business as an intercultural trainer, conducting 40–50 trainings per year for 2 years. I like to think that the market knowledge which I gained through working with most of the freelance agencies, was one important asset for success.

Formulating a problem statement

During my own practice as an intercultural trainer, I have used the applicable and easy-to-process models and theories which are assumed to be instrumental to improved individual and organizational performance (Leeds-Hurwitz, 2010; Leeds-Hurwitz, 1990). I employed metaphors such as ‘culture as an iceberg’ or ‘cultural glasses’ which are frequently used to make culture tangible to those trained (Pusch, 2004). I dug into principles and methods of experiential learning (Kolb, 1984), such as roleplay and simulations, and I developed intercultural simulations on my own which I later published (Mahadevan, 2013). All of this I have initially learned from working together with more experienced intercultural trainers, so, for me, they were a source of inspiration, and attending SIETAR conferences was an enriching and rewarding experiences, much similar to how I later experienced academic conferences as a junior academic.

It was only when I became an academic about 15 years ago that I encountered the negative perception of interculturalists as described before. Out of this experience emerged the problem statement for this paper: The categorical rejection of intercultural training practice as being based upon the interculturalists’ presumably inferior knowledge prevents an actual investigation of how a simplistic national cultures approach to intercultural training practice comes into being in its organizational context.

Challenging the dominant universal ‘truth’ by means of local history

An investigation of the past in order to challenge the present is the beginning of actual genealogy. The idea is to re-order prevalent knowledge (the presumed ‘truths’ of intercultural training) by means of local history, as involving unique contexts, actors and chains of events. The result of this investigation is then structured in lines of the five points proposed by the late Foucault (1983).

Vignette 2: Tales from the field

After I had managed to negotiate corporate access, I conducted 2 years of full-time ethnographic fieldwork at ChipTech (pseudonym), a German global player between 2004 and 2006. As required, I documented observations, including conversations, via memory protocol from the beginning onwards, also during the access and exit phase of fieldwork. The focus of my research was on a research and development unit, to be called Technical Unit (TU). Within TU, a few hundred predominantly male engineers worked together across sites in Germany, India and France to develop an integrated hardware-software system used by internal clients for further technological product development. TU employees identified as being very far away from ‘management’, let alone central functions, such as the HR department. When I started my research, TU had just offshored part of its research and development to India. Not all employees at German headquarters were happy about this development: there was a fear of losing one’s job to the new low-cost Indian research engineers, but that is a different story (Mahadevan, 2011). At that time, the intercultural training business for India was just emerging on a large-scale in Germany. At ChipTech, however, HR did not yet have an intercultural training program for India in place.

A TU quality manager, a male ethnic German in his mid-fifties with a doctoral degree in mathematics, had been part of a TU team that had visited the Indian site on a ‘field trip’ the previous year. He came back ‘fascinated by Indian culture’, and decided to organize a ‘culture training’ for India. He also remembered that he himself had organized and participated in a ‘culture training’ for France 11 years ago when ChipTech had bought a small research company in France, which then became TU France. For starters, he recalled the French trainer’s name and contacted her. He convinced the German head of TU to ‘give money for culture training’. Additionally, he said, ‘I even asked the HR-women for assistance but, as usual, they didn’t know a thing’. HR-women, as I figured out, was a derogatory term for non-technical, young and presumably inexperienced central employees who, as it was generally phrased, ‘do not know a thing about actual work’. Being a young woman, I was careful not to be put into that category throughout my research.

Here, one can thus see how one actor uses opportunities in a given system to his interests (he was not tasked to do so, and it was not part of his job description) and to achieve his goals.

The ‘French trainer’ (this being a label given to her by ChipTech employees), then a woman in her mid-forties, is a self-employed intercultural trainer. Born in the capital of a former French colony, she holds a degree in languages. Her website of now (2021) states that she started her own business in 1993, and that she provides cultural expertise for France, Germany, India and Spain. She writes that she provides intercultural training for India since 2004, which is the year during which she began her India training activities for TU. In a conversation in 2005, she had told me that the job for TU was the first time that she offered a training for India, a country of which she had previously known little of. One might thus assume that the ‘India expertise’ which she now sells on the market originates from her TU activities.

What she has suggested to TU in 2004 was a joint team-development for TU employees of all three sites The reason she gave was that ‘it is always better to learn about each other together with others than merely speaking about them’. This made sense to the TU manager, and team-development workshops were conducted in 2004 and early in 2005.

From a training perspective, a joint-team development is a very sensible proposal: Preparatory training is said to be less efficient and effective than joint events wherein ‘the other’ is present (e.g. Deardorff, 2006). Also, this might be a more ‘ethical’ solution that counter-balances critical effects such as the Westocentric nature of CCM knowledge (Prasad, 2009) or the notion of non-Western peoples and cultures as inferior (see Szkudlarek, 2009). In any case, it meets much of the academic demands of a ‘good’ training (Cant, 2004).

As suggested by the ‘French’ trainer, she conducted the workshops together with another trainer. This was a somewhat ‘risky’ suggestion, because it doubled corporate expenses. It might have been less of a problem, as the training was organized internally, by TU, with a big budget to be spent on innovation and advancement. As the TU manager told me, ‘culture training’ was simply budgeted as part of the innovation requirements, which was ‘fine for the corporate cost accounting people’. Money not being a problem, the ‘lack of India expertise’, which must have been a problem for the ‘French’ trainer in 2004, and which led her to suggest a co-trainer, then led to the creation of actual expertise:

Trainers learn from the stories of their trainees, after all, and they use these experiences to put together teaching material (see Rogers et al., 2002).

The second trainer was a woman in her mid-forties as well. I call her ‘the American trainer’, because this is how TU employees labelled her. She is bi-national by birth and has lived in several countries, her husband is from Pakistan, and she predominantly resides in Canada and India. She holds a degree in creative writing. During the trainings, she (not being ethnic Indian) wore a Sari. An Indian participant commented to me that he found a ‘white woman’ wearing a Sari ‘strange’.

From this statement, one can on the one hand infer a certain idea of ‘Indian culture’ which fits the idea of a ‘natural’ and ‘reified’ ‘national culture’, underpinned by ideas of ethnic homogeneity, as promoted by CCM (McSweeney, 2009): it is not only something projected onto the country by outsiders (such as intercultural trainers) but rather something which is also constructed by those who identify with it. One can also infer that the intercultural trainers, despite their individual biographies being much more culturally fluid and cosmopolitan, are characterized in terms of national culture and are also expected to represent them. On the other hand, trainers themselves feel the need to represent national culture, for example, by means of embodying it, in this case: by means of the stereotypical female garment signalling ‘professional femininity’ in India (Banerjee and Miller, 2003): the Sari.

In 2005, the ramp-up of TU India was almost completed. Meanwhile, media had spoken of an ‘endless chain of management mistakes’ of ChipTech top management, and its Swiss CEO had been replaced by another CEO from Taiwan. In his first internal speech that was broadcasted to all employees worldwide, the new CEO announced – much to the dismay of the workers’ council at German headquarters – that ChipTech was required to change, should it survive on the global market. In very laconic, Chinese-coloured English, he made the dramatic, and later on much cited, statement: ‘This company is like dinosaur. And what happened to dinosaur? Dinosaur died’.

At TU at headquarters in Germany, where I was at that time, there were suddenly a lot of incoming e-mails: Corporate HR sent something, corporate communications sent something, organizational development sent something, and all these central functions suddenly announced big and positive changes, or so it seemed.

And then there were no more TU team-development workshops.

The TU manager told me with a sneer, that, ‘now, the HR-women are responsible’. As I found out, the HR department had undergone a complete restructuring, in order to maximize efficiency and effectiveness, also of intercultural HR development. Jobs were lost, and new, cheaper employees, such as recent graduates, had been hired. The remaining senior employees told them the story of the new CEO’s speech and how he had shaken the ‘dinosaur’, and it seemed that most of them expected to be laid off soon. Under the new order, HR development activities were categorized into training, coaching and team-development, with different people (management graduates specialized in HRM, all of them women) being responsible for each theme, each of them being supervised by a male boss. From then onwards, any intercultural HR development activity needed to fit one category or the other. I was told that, as TU had organized a combination of all three categories, the activity could not be certified, and thus, had to be discontinued. Besides, I was told, it had been much too expensive for the company, and its contribution to TU’s innovative capacity had remained unproven. Therefore, and in order to certify intercultural training activities, the HR manager responsible for ‘training’ was now looking for a single provider of intercultural training for all countries, as were the HR managers responsible for ‘coaching’ and ‘team-development’, respectively.

For intercultural training, an intercultural agency was certified as the sole provider. The agency offered tandem training with a ‘German’ and a ‘target culture’ co-trainer. Only the ‘German’ trainer was a constant part of the team, the co-trainers would be chosen from a pool of freelancers who – having been one of them at a certain point in time – were paid a daily rate that was approximately one third or one fourth of what a successful freelance interculturalist could asked for.

The ‘German’ trainer assigned to TU was German by ethnicity and nationality. A then recent female graduate of International Management and Cultural Studies, with an interest in backpacking and travelling the world, she taught culture from the manual provided by the intercultural agency. The manual included, for example, metaphors of culture, cultural dimensions, culture shock ( Oberg, 1960 ), and stages of intercultural learning ( Bennett, 1986 ). In addition, there were role-plays involving the Indian co-trainer. ‘It’s a job’, the German trainer told me (in the role as ethnographer), ‘and as soon as I have another one, I will be off’.

I had also worked as a co-trainer with the same trainer for other clients for some time, and when I was at the intercultural agency’s offices and saw all the young graduates in their first job copying training manuals and packing their wheeled training suitcases, I got the impression that many might share this feeling. Some also told me their salary, and, knowing the industry, I found it not to be much. It seemed to me that the male founder of the intercultural agency pursued a very smart strategy. The agency’s headquarters are located next to a high-ranked international university which attracts students from all over Germany and which is located in a region with not many job opportunities: What better than to hire these graduates cheap and directly from the lecturing room? Obviously, this also now fitted the internal needs of HR, being under pressure for cost-efficiency and having to prove its usefulness.

The ‘Indian’ co-trainer was male, in his mid-fifties, and held a doctoral degree in electrical engineering. He was married, with children, to a German citizen and, since the family’s relocation to Germany, he had not succeeded in finding qualified employment. When we talked during breaks, he vented his frustration and expressed that he felt like a ‘young woman’s dancing bear’ during sessions. Having just quit my co-trainer activity for this agency, I could relate to his frustration, but not to the gendered-way in which he phrased it: the daily rate paid to co-trainers was, indeed, little more than what an unqualified worker might receive, and this is also why I had moved on.

The intercultural agency has been founded in the 1990s as one of the first of its kind in Germany. As of now (2021), the intercultural agency still exists, and has won several awards for its innovative business ideas. The founder of the intercultural agency, now in his late fifties, holds a doctoral degree [in a non-technical field]; he is well-known as a public speaker and he has constantly re-innovated this business. According to his current website, new themes are innovative mobile user apps and integrated global mobility, and the co-trainer approach seems to be a theme of the past.

Insights: Establishing five main points

In the previous section, I have narrated small and local manifestations of the exercise of power, keeping in mind to question the five main power-sensitive questions which should be answered by practical genealogy (Foucault, 1983: 223–224). These are differentiation, objectives, means, institutionalization and rationalization of exercising power. They lead to alternative knowledges which emerge from the genealogical reordering of the material.

The systems of differentiations which permit individuals to act upon the actions of others – National culture, preparatory training and gender/age/degree

National culture is crucial to intercultural training at ChipTech but it is not an idea which every individual holds (e.g. the founder of the intercultural agency): Rather, it is a system shaped by actions upon actions. The difference that genealogy makes is that it shows the specific and divergent ways of how a system of differentiation comes into being.

Throughout the story, there is a potential alternative which never becomes explicit. One can approximate it via the theme of ‘tandem training’ that emerges throughout the story. Underlying this theme is the idea that representing a national culture is not enough: one needs to go beyond such differentiations. However, at ChipTech in the years 2004 to 2006, no one can (yet) imagine this alternative: the ‘French trainer’ feels the need for pairing herself with an ‘India expert’, the ‘American trainer’ feels the need to prove her ‘Indianness’ via her choice of dress, and their trainees label two culturally versatile individuals solely in terms of national cultures. Ultimately, the possibility ‘beyond national cultures’ never achieves the status of ‘knowledge’ or ‘truth’ – but it could have.

Likewise, preparatory training – and not, for instance, joint team-development – as key HR development tool emerges via specific contexts, actors and chains of events: The intercultural agency, being market-driven, might have suggested otherwise, had the HR department not been structured along the lines of team-development, coaching and training. And, because HR was structured like this, the previous, conceptually more advanced TU approach did not fit HR structure.

Another, implicit, system of differentiation is the combination of gender/age and type of profession/degree: The powerful actors of this case are male, middle-aged or older, and holding a doctoral degree. One could argue that the founder of the intercultural agency is a ‘marketing genius’ not merely by himself but also because he fits the image of ‘expertise’, as held in a German engineering company: He is male, he is middle-aged, he holds a doctoral degree, however, not in a field that is relevant to ChipTech. The male, middle-aged TU manager who, in the beginning, contacts HR for advice, mentions that ‘the HR-women, as usual, didn’t know a thing’. The ‘HR-women’ are young, their boss is middle-aged and male, and the only middle-aged, male, degree-holding male who is actually subordinate to a ‘young woman’, the Indian co-trainer, feels like a ‘young woman’s dancing bear’: he, too, frames his experience in terms of gender and age, which seems to be an established mechanism at ChipTech already. I, somehow perceiving these gender-issues (but not being cognitively aware of them at that time), choose to pursue a doctoral degree for better career options, thus also complying to the system of differentiation by which a certain idea of professionalization has become (and is still becoming) dominant.

The types of objectives pursued by those who act upon the actions of others – Personal interest, expertise, defence against pressure, market success

The types of objectives pursued in this case differ from each other, but also intersect in their consequences. A TU manager is fascinated by Indian culture and takes up the role of internal ‘culture training’ catalyst, based on his own previous experiences of how this should be done (interest). A French trainer is tasked with a training for a national culture which she is not familiar with and wishes to maintain professional status, and an American trainer feels the need to strengthen her claim to India expertise via her choice of dress (expertise). After a management change, HR feels the need to become more efficient and effective, and external facilitators are measured against this goal (defence against pressure). This contributes to an agency with a standardized approach being chosen over individual trainers.

The intercultural agency is a smart business, pursuing a clear marketing strategy. In the given case, it sells a tandem-approach to the client with the argument that the trainees will have both relevant cultures – India and Germany – in the room, for a price that is even lower than the average daily rate of an experienced freelance trainer (market success). However, this then implies the need to hire recent graduates and cheap co-trainers, and, suddenly, out of all these objectives, there is simplistic national cultures training.

The means of bringing power relations into being – Freedom, fear, economic pressure, marketing-orientation, formalized and explicit rules

In the given case, several actors have the freedom (or, in Foucauldian terms: the agency) to bring power relations into being: The TU manager who organizes the first culture training, the French trainer who defines its contours and the meaning of ‘country expertise’ (together with the American trainer), and those at TU with budget-responsibility who reframe the culture training expense as innovation requirement. In the end, a team-development activity emerges, not a preparatory training. The trainers, despite their national cultural labels, move beyond them in their cultural identifications. This setting meets many of the proposed requirements for an intercultural training beyond a simplistic national cultures approach.

But then there is the fear of downsizing and ‘dinosaur dying’ – whether real or purposively induced – and, suddenly, several units, including HR, feel the economic pressure to improve upon performance. Out of this, certain internal structures and selection criteria emerge: A ‘reliable’ and ‘good value for money’ training provider now becomes the ideal choice, and being marketing-oriented, the intercultural agency makes itself meet such needs. HR-facilitation of intercultural training at ChipTech is increasingly professionalized and thus characterized by explicit and formalized rules, with less loopholes than there used to be.

The forms of institutionalization on different levels – Individual biographies and reliable standardized national cultures training

There is no single path of how to become or ‘be’ an interculturalist: All interculturalists are diverse in terms of degree, education, life-experiences and so on. This is an opportunity to invent oneself by means of individual biography, but also a selection dilemma for companies.

The intercultural agency takes care of this dilemma for their clients by presenting a ‘German’ and an ‘Indian’ trainer: One teaches from the manual, the other represents ‘himself’. Together, they can be sold as the full package: namely as a team that is as culturally versatile as the individual biographies of the freelance trainers suggest (which are, of course, also marketing material). Having thus chosen the reliable standardization approach, the only aspect which HR can measure, certify and approve at low costs is the content of the training activity, and simplistic national cultures training becomes institutionalized.

The degrees of rationalization

Foucault (1983: 224) states that power relations are brought into play more or less in relation to other factors, such as the effectiveness of the instruments and the certainty of the results. The TU manager can only succeed in his goal because HR is not yet under tremendous pressure to prove its usefulness. The India experience of TU is comparably new, there are no other stakeholders, and the French and the American trainer can succeed because of corporate loopholes. After a top-management change, there is a process towards controlling corporate HR activities via a central function, and the idea emerges that intercultural training should be reliable and low cost, and contribute to corporate success. The perceived (or actual) urgency of global survival has been dramatically increased by the new CEO’s speech. When intercultural training is not about in-depth content and about trainer’s individual biographies anymore, its rationalization reaches the point which Foucault (1983: 223) identifies as problematic, namely ‘the form of an apparatus closed in upon itself, with its specific loci, its own regulations, its hierarchical structures which are carefully defined, [and] a relative autonomy in its functioning’.

Implications

Vignette 3: Reflections of an academic

Since having become a full-time academic, I have conducted the occasional intercultural training. I reflect more, I am more critical of the models I use, and I certainly facilitate intercultural trainings differently – but do I provide participants with more useful and beneficial experiences for their own skills development? I doubt it. In the end, a good intercultural training, like any experiential learning activity, is also created from the authenticity, the personality and the enthusiasm of those facilitating it (Friedman and Antal, 2005), which implies that a lack of a certain professionalization might have positive, not negative, effects on training outcome.

At the same time, there are, of course, numerous dangers in applying overly simplistic ‘how to do’ models onto complex CCM realities (e.g. Fougère and Moulettes, 2012; Jack and Westwood, 2009; Romani and Szkudlarek, 2014; Szkudlarek, 2009; Tipton, 2008). Yet, to me, there is a problem which goes far beyond these actual and relevant dangers: namely a taken-for-granted attitude that the academic would necessarily know better. I have met a freelance intercultural trainer who holds a post-graduate degree in anthropology, publishes highly critical texts in avantgarde academic journals, is employed as a university lecturer and has not been granted tenure due to her being perceived as ‘too innovative’. Who can say that she is the inferior academic, and why must she be ‘the exception from the rule’ when it comes to how intercultural trainers are perceived by academics?

What virtually all intercultural trainers whom I met had in common, was that they were women, and that they often simply needed the income. Yet, to earn a decent living as an intercultural trainer (and not as a management consultant), this then means 80 or more training days, and this is simply exhaustive and impossible to achieve. At the same time, all founders of the intercultural agencies with whom I worked were men, and, to me, this is a more relevant story that needs to be told: one of the precariousness of the field and its gender-inequality, and how also CCM and ICC studies might be implicated by this gendered substructure.

Genealogy, with its focus on contexts, actors and chains of events, enables researchers and practitioners to excavate the history that obscures alternative local knowledges layer by layer and thus to challenge what seems universally ‘true’ in the present. For instance, the intercultural training triangle seems severely implicated by a gendered substructure (Acker, 2012), that is: institutionalized inequalities along the differentiating lines of gender which are inscribed into the system in such depth that any further action fails to reflect upon this condition and is at the same time characteristic of it.

Genealogy reveals how it is not the kind of intercultural training practice in existence which is problematic but rather the neglect to investigate academically how it comes into being in this, and not in another shape. The ‘real problem’ is thus rooted in the notion of academic superiority which prevents an actual investigation of how the simplistic national cultures approach to intercultural training comes into being in its organizational context, because even asking this question is not deemed relevant anymore. This way, presumed academic ‘truths’ function as a closure mechanism for the further advancement of disciplinary knowledge about a certain organizational practice. For instance, when an initial version of this paper was submitted to a journal, one of the reviewers remarked that ‘(t)he discourse and practice of corporate intercultural training primarily focus on practice without being interested in theory-building or drawing upon the more sophisticated CCM scholarly field’. Yet, how can we as academics be so sure of that the knowledge which we collectively believe in is ‘true’?

Feminist philosopher Sonja Harding (2015) argues that a more accurate understanding of the full dimensions of social power and inequalities requires an investigation that starts from the outside in two ways. First, one should focus on those groups whose knowledges and experiences of ‘the problem’ have been silenced or obscured. Second, one should start one’s investigation from knowledge beyond what is considered part of a discipline’s established theories, methods and knowledge. Out of this emerges ‘strong objectivity’ towards a problem, namely a critical awareness of what is known, how this knowledge is potentially totalitarian, and of who needs to be involved in order to include alternative standpoints and knowledge-reservoirs. This paper has exemplified how a practical genealogy, as applied to the categorical ‘truth’ about the intercultural training business in academia, is a way of reaching this goal.

By understanding history as an organizational phenomenon that involves actions upon actions, academics employing genealogy are enabled to move beyond a categorical critique of the intercultural training business as being rooted in the presumed inferior knowledge-base of intercultural trainers. They can then start to investigate this practice for its potential benefits to academia, for instance, as related to the increased need for experiential and learner-centred CCM learning activities as part of the curriculum (Cant, 2004; Deardorff, 2006). Out of this emerge opportunities for a reflexive researcher-practitioner co-production of knowledge (Orr and Bennett, 2009) beyond the barriers of a totalitarian present knowledge that has attained the status of ‘truth’. It also enables academics to understand the processes by which intercultural training comes into being from within, with ensuing opportunities for increased and more differentiated knowledge (Shotter, 2006).

When reviewing the ways in which Foucault’s work has been received in organization studies, Raffnsøe et al. (2019) find that organization studies need to gain a better understanding of genealogy and, moreover, to consider the performative dimension of agency in which agency is dispersed and co-produced. They (p. 176) write: ‘It is these co-productions and their effects that deserve our attention, empirically and theoretically’. This supports both the relevance of genealogy as a practice-approach for organization studies and the need to move the actual understanding of what genealogy entails and how it should be conducted beyond a mere textual analysis. This paper has answered this call by proposing genealogy as a potential means by which ethnographers might be guided in their phenomenon-based investigation.

Summary and conclusion

Academics tend to argue that corporate intercultural training is simplistic because intercultural training activities and those conducting them, as well as the whole business of corporate intercultural training, are implicated by an inferior knowledge-base. From this perspective, ‘they’ (the practitioners) simply ‘do not know better’. Against this background, the main contribution of this paper is to show that there is no general or universal reason for why intercultural training emerges in a certain – simplistic – way. By means of a genealogical analysis of ethnographic and auto-ethnographic material, this paper traced how it is small power-effects and actions upon actions, rather than a large and universal reason, such as trainers’ presumed inferior knowledge, that explain why, when and how a simplistic intercultural training practice comes into being in a certain organizational context over a certain period of time. Out of this emerge alternative systems of differentiation, such as gender, which might provide more impactful insights onto a field, or new ways in which to judge a perceived or actual lack of professionalization in a certain field. However, these aspects are not even explored as relevant by academia anymore because they have been submerged by dominant knowledge that has become accepted as ‘true’. By showing the value of genealogy as a methodology, this paper underscores the need for a more contextualized approach to organizational practice. It therefore exemplifies the relevance of in-depth methodologies, such as multi-sited ethnography (Marcus, 2008), for figuring out ‘how things work’ in management and organizations (Watson, 2011). It highlights novel questions to be asked and specific problems to be investigated in relation to organizational practice beyond existing closure mechanisms, in this case: the potentially obscured gendered substructure of intercultural training, and the problematic question of how exactly CCM and ICC studies might be implicated by this and other presently submerged systems of differentiation.