Analysing gender and diversity management issues across cultures from multiple perspectives: a Thai-German case

Abstract

One repercussion of the globalisation of the world’s markets is that managers are increasingly forced to deal with cross-cultural processes also including issues of gender and diversity. In an international context, the regulation and determination of organisational practice flows both ways, that is to say from headquarters to the local business units and vice versa, creating a so-called ‘paradoxical’ tension of competing forces. Multinationals are the ‘receivers’ as well as the ‘promoters’ of these paradoxical movements of convergence and divergence in management practice. Staff at headquarters are under pressure to take into consideration the norms and rules of their specific cultural context. The example of the Thai subsidiary of a German engineering company is used as a case study to illustrate the paradoxical tensions and dilemmas which arise when gender and diversity issues are managed in two very different cultural contexts.