Published Research
When Mickey Loses Face: Recontextualization, Semantic Fit and the Semiotics of Foreignness, Academy of Management Review, special issue on Language and Organization edited by Jeffrey Ford, 2004.
Abstract:
Foreignness is generally seen as a major liability to the multinational
enterprise (MNE) negatively affecting strategic fit and the successful transfer
of firm assets abroad. Language is a key aspect of the cultural context that
directly affects transmission and reception of firm assets.
Using semiotics the study of how language as a system of signification conveys
meaning and the Walt Disney Company′s experiences in internationalization, I
develop the notion of semantic fit as a necessary complement to strategic fit
and formalize a conceptual model of
recontextualization the process by which
firm assets take on new meanings in distinct cultural environments.
Key Words: foreignness, language, semiotics, internationalization,
transfer of firm assets.
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Partnering Across Borders: Negotiating Organizational Culture in a German-Japanese Joint-Venture, with Jane E. Salk, Human Relations, Tavistock Institute, London, Vol. 53 No. 4, pp. 451-487, June 2000.
Abstract:
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 individual′s cultural responses to events. The study
shows that structural/contextual influences together with individuals′
culturally determined sense-making in regards to specific organizational events
are more useful determinants of negotiated outcomes. Authors conclude that while
it is unlikely 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.
Key words: Organizational Culture; Negotiated Order, Joint Ventures,
Organizational Change; Complex Cultural Systems.
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Pursuing
the meaning of meaning in the commercial world:
An international review of marketing and consumer research founded
on semiotics
DAVID GLEN MICK, JAMES E. BURROUGHS, PATRICK
HETZEL, and MARY YOKO BRANNEN ( Semiotica 152-1/4 (2004 pp: 1-74.)
Meaning in the commercial world is essential and enigmatic. From product design
and packaging to advertising and retailing, marketers are continually
seeking to strategically facilitate meanings that contribute positively to brand
images, purchase likelihood, satisfaction, and the like. For their part,
consumers are continually acquiring, using, sharing experiences, and disposing in
substantial accordance with the meanings they attribute to products, ads,
purchase sites, and so forth. However, despite its indisputable role in marketing
and consumption activities, meaning has long been — and remains — one of the
most complex phenomena to
theorize and investigate (North 1990: 92–102; Ogden and Richards 1923;Schirato
1998).
Nearly a half century ago, pioneering North American scholars began to expose
the essentialness of meaning in marketing and consumer behavior (e.g. Levy
1959). However, during the 1960s and 1970s, most North American researchers
focused on information processing rather than meaning, as economic and
socio-cognitive psychological perspectives dominated the marketing and consumer
behavior fields. Elsewhere, in Europe particularly, research on meaning in
marketing and consumer behavior was less de-prioritized and carried out by
scholars who had been heavily influenced by semiotics, including Barthes (1967
[1964]), Durand (1970), Langholz-Leymore (1975), P'eninou (1972), Porcher
(1976), and Williamson (1978).
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Negotiated Culture in Binational Contexts: A Model of Culture Change Based on a
Japanese/American Organizational Experience. (Mary Yoko Brannen,
The University of Michigan Business School
Reprinted with permission of:
Anthropology or Work Review
Anthropology of Work Review Vol. XVIII. Nos. 2 & 3
"Negotiated Culture in Binational Contexts"
by Mary Yoko Brannen
©1998 Anthropology of Work Review
Introduction:
The expansion of foreign direct investment (FDI) in the United States, as well
as in other societies throughout the world, means that topics that have
previously been taken up exclusively in the realm of international business
studies are becoming critical to the reframing of traditional topics In domestic
management theory. As firms at home become increasingly internationalized, less
parochial management theories are necessary to reflect the complexities of their
emerging multicultural work environments (Adler 1983; Boyacigiller and Adler
1991). Mainstream U.S. management research has historically paid little
attention to intranational cross-cultural issues such as cultural diversity (Cox
and Nkomo 1990), let alone intercultural interactions between U.S. and foreign
parties (Adler 1983a; Boyacigiller and Adler 1991).
Organizational culture as a topic, despite an extensive research history in
domestic management theory, has not been pursued seriously' in the international
context. Of particular relevance to current organization studies as firms become
increasingly internationalized is how national culture affects the internal
culture of these organizations. FDI often leads to disharmony)' between and
within groups when individuals who do not share the same underlying codes of
meaning and conduct must work together to execute shared organizational tasks.
Consequently, the meeting of cultures leads to heightened organizational
complexity that frequently results in confusion and conflict for individual
actors within multicultural organizations.
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Culture as the Critical
Factor in Implementing Innovation (Mary Yoko Brannen,
From Business Horizons,
Volume 34, Number 6, November-December 1991)
In International Management Literature, the word "culture" often refers to
national culture. In this article, however, I will draw upon current
anthropological theory to define culture in a different sense. By the words
"culture" and "cultural," I mean a historically situated and emergent system of
negotiated meanings and practices common to the people in an organization.
"Culture" in this sense is endogenous --not given to a particular firm, but
developed and shaped by the ongoing interactions of the people in the firm as
well as by the strategic choices these people make.
Cultural barriers to change have become an increasingly relevant research topic
as U.S. industries have begun to lose their competitive advantage in the global
marketplace. The loss of market share to international competitors in
traditional mature industries such as automobiles and, more recently, shoes
spawned a catalytic reaction among American decision makers of considering
radical changes in management techniques.
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The Practice and Uses of
Field Research in the 21st Century Organization (William N.
Kaghan, Sakson & Taylor,Inc. Seattle,WA; Anselm L. Strauss
University of California, San Francisco; Stephen R. Barley Stanford University;
Mary Yoko Brannen University of Michigan Business School; San Jose State
University; Robert J. Thomas, Arthur D, Little,Inc., Cambridge, MA)
Journal of Management
Inquiry, Vol. 8 No: 1, March 1999 67-81 ©1999 Sage Publications, Inc.
The transcript that follows is an edited version
of a transcript of a symposium that I organized for the 1995 Academy of
Management Meetings in Vancouver, BC, Canada. The symposium was entitled, "The
Practices and Uses of Field Research in the 21st Century Organization." My
motivation for organizing the symposium rested on some difficulties I had been
facing when working on my own dissertation. I had come back to graduate school
with 7 years of experience as a practicing research and development engineer at
the Boeing Corporation. To no surprise, I entered school with some clear
research interests based on my previous work experience, but I possessed a
certain naiveté about what academic research was.
In developing my dissertation research, I had come to feel strongly that understanding organizations in the 21st century would involve the sort of detailed knowledge of activities like research and development that I was bringing into the Ph.D. program. Initially, I found it hard to deploy that knowledge in my own academic research. As much by chance as by design, I took a field research class from Howard Becker in the Sociology Department at the University of
Washington. In taking his class, I found out three things. First, field research was a very good vehicle for drawing on and challenging the lessons that I had learned in my previous career. Second, actually doing field research was quite different from what I had been led to believe in some of the methodology classes that I had taken in the business school. I found that field research forced me to employ many of the same inductive problem-solving strategies that I had employed as an engineer, and I felt very comfortable doing this sort of research. Finally, I found that doing field research well was very demanding in terms of time and, conceptually, it was very challenging. Field research was time consuming precisely because field researchers had to be both open and systematic. They had to be open to having their pre-conceived notions being falsified by what they were observing. At the same time, field researchers had to be systematic in collecting data, analyzing data-qualitative or quantitative -- and extending and refining their research in ways suggested by both their own observations as well as previous empirical research.
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ENGINEERED IN JAPAN
Does Culture Matter?
Negotiating a Complementary Culture to Support Technological Innovation
(Mary Yoko Brannen)
Editors:
Jeffrey K. Liker, John E. Ettlie and John C. Campbell
New York Oxford
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1995.
On October 7, 1989, a group of American and Japanese managers joined by members
of the union committee performed e modified ritual of the traditional Japanese
ground-breaking ceremony to celebrate the completion of the 40 million dollar
expansion of the plant. Traditionally, a Shinto (the aboriginal religion of
Japan) priest would have blessed the new machinery by performing a formal
'baptismal' in the context of a Shinto ritual to ensure prosperity for the
plant. Mindful of the strong Catholic composition of the work force, TSP's
Japanese president decided upon a middle-of-the road approach which blended
Western and Japanese ground-breaking rituals. The Western portion of the ritual
was comprised of a traditional ribbon-cutting and white-gloved starting up of
the machinery by the Japanese chairman of the board. The Japanese portion of the
ritual was the 'sake' (Japanese traditional rice wine) cask-breaking ceremony
where Japanese managers were joined by their American counterparts and union
officials in donning “happi” --- coats --- and performing a song and
hand-clapping ceremony to celebrate the success of the expansion. (Brannen,
1993, p. 107)
In December 1989 the Dexter Paper Company, located in a small town in western
Massachusetts, was acquired by the Tomioka Paper Company of Japan. Japanese
management rehired most of the former American workforce and renamed the plant
the Tomioka Specialty Papers Company (TSP). The primary goal of TSP's management
during the first two and a half years after the acquisition was to transform the
plant into a state-of-the-art specialty paper-production facility concentrating
on capturing a lion's share of the facsimile paper market in North American as
well as the newly developing market for thermal and pressure-sensitive label
technology.
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Ethnographic International Management Research
(Mary Yoko Brannen, University of Michigan)
(Chapter 5 from book entitled " Handbook for International Management Research",
edited by Betty Jane Punnett and Oded Shenkar. Publisher: Blackwell Publishers,
Inc. Copyright BettY Punnett & Oded Shenkar ' 1996. All rights reserved.)
This chapter weaves a dialogue between theory and practice in using ethnographic
methodology in international management research by presenting the current
issues in ethnographic inquiry from the field of anthropology and providing an
in-depth account of ethnographic fieldwork I employed to study an international
organization in transition. The larger study from which the narrative examples
herein are taken is a longitudinal ethnography of a takeover by Japanese
management of a North American paper plant (Brannen 1994). In this project I
documented the experience of both the American workforce and the Japanese
management team at the plant (referred to as the Tomioka Specialty Paper plant,
or TSP for the remainder of the chapter), a microcosm of the cultural change
process recurrent in many industrialized nations today.
In addition to providing advice for choosing and using the ethnographic method
in international management research, this chapter provides an in-depth
illustration of the ethnographic methodology, the process of developing “strong
constructs” from field data, a discussion of the concomitant tensions and
synergies in data generated from ethnography as compared with data generated fro
ma quantitative extension1 of the research. Due to space and time limitations,
the discussion of construct development is centered on single construct that I
term “bicultural alienation,” a condition of malaise associated with
organizational actors not feeling integrated into the dominant culture of the
organization due to a perceived hegemony of national cultural difference.
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“BWANA MICKEY”: CONSTRUCTING CULTURAL CONSUMPTION AT TOKYO DISNEYLAND
(Mary Yoko Brannen)
Chapter 12 from book entitled, "Re-Made in
Japan" edited and with an introduction by Joseph J. Tobin; Publisher: Yale
University Press; Copyright @ 1992 by Yale University. All rights reserved.
Though the Walt Disney Company wished to diversify
its first foreign theme park by including some home-country attractions such as
a “Samurai Land” or a show based on a Japanese children’s tale like “Little
Peach Boy,” the Japanese owners of Tokyo Disneyland, the Oriental Land Company,
insisted that the original park be duplicated as closely as possible. The
phenomenal success of the theme park, which opened on April 15, 1984, suggests
that the Japanese owners’ reading of consumer preference was correct. In 1988
attendance reached 13,382,000, making Tokyo Disneyland one of the most popular
diversionary outings in Japan. The Japanese spend more money at Tokyo Disneyland
than do their American counterpart either Disneyland, in Anaheim, California, or
Disney World, in Orlando, Florida – most of it on such souvenirs as Mickey Mouse
dolls, pins, T-shirts, and designer accessories. The theme park is not only a
sensational hit among Japanese consumers of leisure-time activities but also a
favorite destination of students on school pilgrimages (shūgaku ryokō).
Previously such groups had preferred to visit traditional historical areas such
as Kyoto or Nikko, the sites of ancient temples and shrines referred to in their
history books and classical literary texts. In 1998, some 1,171,000 of the park
visitors were students on such organized school outings.
The Tokyo Disneyland annual report of 1989 attributes these substantial attendance and sales figures in part to Japan’s rapid rise in economic status over the last decade, resulting in a significant increase in per capita disposable income and a new attitude toward relaxation and recreation. Another major factor in Tokyo Disneyland’s success is that the Disney philosophy of creating a “dream world” coincides with the current consumer trend of yuttarism (from yutarri, meaning easy, comfortable, and calm), an attitude of attaching importance to relaxation and comfort. According to the Dentsu Avertising Agency, which handles the Tokyo Disneyland account, consumers are “seeking quality in this world rich with things, [and] are starting to pursue affluence of the mind, time and environment.”
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Recontextualization and Internationalization: Lessons in Transcultural Materialism from the Walt Disney Company (Mary Yoko Brannen, James M. WilsonIII)
ABSTRACT. This paper presents a comparative analysis of the Walt Disney Company’s two attempts at international diversification. Our analysis suggests that a successful internationalization strategy must go beyond the simple dichotomous choice between global integration or local responsiveness to incorporate the notion of ‘recontextualization’ – the unpredictable evolution of meaning of a product in a foreign culture. We posit this as an essential aspect of fit – process of aligning organizational resources with environmental opportunities and threats to increase the probability of survival of the film and conclude by providing different strategies for assessing, managing, and monitoring the process of recontextualization.
All kinds of countries export products across national borders (e.g. French yogurt, German cars, Swiss watches, etc.), a variety of US companies have been very active in this regard (e.g. Coca-Cola, McDonalds, Kodak, etc.), but while most international managers are aware of the meaning of the products they are sending, they don’t realize that the meaning is contextualized within an environment. Often enough the meaning of the transferred product in its new locale is a long way off from the original intent. Let’s look at a few examples.
In Japan, Mickey Mouse – who is hardly a symbol of reliability in America – is used to sell money market accounts. Also in Japan, the American individualistic Cowboy is seen as a quintessential team player and fast foods, like Kentucky Fried Chicken and Denny’s, are considered ‘ethnic food’ restaurants. In the same vein, McDonalds is considered more upscale in France than in the US – note the location of one outlet on the Champs Elysées. Guinness Beer is seen as an elixir for impotency in South Africa. Mercedes Benz’ are seen as luxury cars in the US, but are used for taxi cabs in the Middle East and Israel. Coca Cola serves in the place of alcohol as an after-dinner drink in the Middle East. Leibfrauenmilch, dismissed as a cheap, barely drinkable wine in Germany, is sold (ungrammatically as ‘Liebfraumilch’) in the US as a refined dinner wine. Japanese futon (its lightness and foldability being its most valued trait in Japan where living space is at a premium) have become overstuffed immobile pieces of furniture in the US and Europe. Quaker Oatmeal, a common breakfast cereal in the US, is used in the Andes to make aswa, a mild alcoholic drink. Spam, a canned, processed ham substitute that brings to mind hard times or Army rations for most Americans, sells as a luxury item in Korea.
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REMADE IN AMERICA
Recontextualization and Factory to-Factory Knowledge Transfer from Japan to the United States
The Case of NSK
(Mary Yoko Brannen, Jeffrey K. Liker, W. Mark Fruin, New York, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999)
One of the biggest concerns for managers with respect to international technology transfer is the fit between what they are transferring-a nexus of work, technology, and organizational practice---and a new environment. As many researchers have noted, moving technology into new user---operations often leads to a degree of misalignment between the technology and a new environment (see, for example, Busche, 1988; Leonard-Barton, 1992, 1995). Most of the research on internationalization in organizational studies has focused on strategic fit or finding the right corporate strategy to match products and technologies to foreign markets (for useful literature reviews, see Ghoshal, 1987; Kogut, 1989). In addition, these studies have typically concentrated on the tangible or "hard" side of the technologies being transferred. Such work is important in helping us understand and assess the various modes of foreign entry and management available to firms, but its selective view of internationalization as exportation or transnational transmission leaves out an important and increasingly hard-to-ignore part of the story.
As internationalization moves from being export-oriented to concentrating on foreign direct investment (FDI) and transferring abroad whole organizational systems, the tacit, intangible or "soft" side of technology transfer has become more and more important. A fuller account of internationalization needs to examine the host country's response and to include equal scrutiny of the accompanying process of importation or what might be termed cross-cultural acquisition of intangible firm and factory assets (Fruin, 1997; Hall, 1993). Some of the current writings on global strategy have shifted to reflect these changes by concentrating on how the global firm should structure flows of tasks within its world-wide value-added system (Ghoshal and Nohria, 1989). But, by emphasizing the importance of rationalizing task flows that govern the transfer of products and technologies, the importance of internal processes---such as information flows, work practices, organizational culture, and other aspects of the social system in which the products and technologies are embedded-is deemphasized