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.