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Journal of International Business Studies (2011) 42, 654–671

& 2011 Academy of International Business All rights reserved 0047-2506 www.jibs.net

Holistic ethnography: Studying the impact of multiple national identities on post-acquisition organizations

Fiona Moore School of Management, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, UK Correspondence: F Moore, School of Management, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, Surrey TW20 0EX, UK. Tel: þ 44 1784 276 116; Fax: þ 44 1784 276 100; E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract Ethnographic research in international business studies focuses mainly on small group case studies, ignoring other genres of ethnography and limiting its role. I argue, based on a study of BMW MINI, that holistic ethnography allows multiple perspectives on the organization, making it particularly useful for studying cross-border acquisitions. I analyze cross-cultural relationships in the organization, the interaction of manager and worker perspectives, and the expression of national identities within the firm as its culture is negotiated, allowing for greater understanding of the conflicts that, in its managers’ view, affected the integration of the acquired subsidiary. Journal of International Business Studies (2011) 42, 654–671. doi:10.1057/jibs.2011.11 Keywords: qualitative/quantitative comparisons; national culture; role of local cultures; labor/management issues; post-merger/acquisition integration; ethnography

INTRODUCTION Although the benefits of ethnographic research for achieving a detailed, experiential perspective on organizations have often been recognized, it is, as Hodson (1998) notes, still underutilized, and ethnographic studies in international business (IB) tend to be of limited methodological range. I will here argue, based on a case study of BMW MINI, that “holistic” ethnography allows explorations of tacit discourses of national culture that are hard to obtain by other qualitative methods. Through this, I will contribute to IB by elucidating the roles played by multiple national identities and the complex layers of culture in organizations in shaping postmerger and acquisition (M&A) organizations, and the impact that worker perspectives have on the formation of culture in multinational enterprises (MNEs). The research questions under discussion are How do tacit aspects of discourses of “national culture” between different groups in an acquired organization affect its integration into a multinational enterprise (MNE), and can holistic ethnography provide better insights into this than more traditional qualitative methods?

Received: 17 September 2009 Revised: 19 December 2010 Accepted: 27 December 2010

In order to answer these, I intend, first, to demonstrate that a holistic ethnographic perspective on the organization, obtained by studying multiple groups within it in relation to each other, provides different insights into the tacit aspects of the negotiation

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of discourses of national culture than other qualitative methods, through a literature review. Second, I will use holistic ethnography to explore the negotiation of such discourses in an acquired organization, and their impact on its integration, through a case study of BMW MINI. Finally, I will combine the two to argue that holistic ethnography has advantages that make it more useful than surveys, in-depth interviews or small-group ethnography in examining cross-cultural management in a post-acquisition organization. The contribution of this article to the IB literature is, first, to explore the role played by national identities in cross-border M&A, considering crosscultural relationships, the multiple and complex identities within the firm, and their impact on the integration of the branch, building upon Brannen and Salk’s (2000) work on “negotiated culture” in international joint ventures. Second, I will elucidate the way that the perspectives of workers, and not only managers, have a qualitative impact upon integration in acquired organizations. The contribution of this article to methodological literature in IB is to highlight the usefulness of ethnography in providing insights into cross-cultural phenomena, and to demonstrate that ethnographic techniques have wider applications than is currently the norm in IB. In particular, I will demonstrate how holistic ethnography can be used for studying issues in cross-cultural management that require a broadbased but experiential approach, for instance during a merger or acquisition. In order to achieve this, I will, first, analyze holistic ethnography through a literature review; second, provide a case study of holistic ethnography in context; and, finally, bring the two together to consider the theoretical and methodological implications for IB.

LITERATURE REVIEW: HOLISTIC ETHNOGRAPHY, CROSS-CULTURAL MANAGEMENT AND MERGERS AND ACQUISITIONS Definitions and Uses of Ethnography in IB “Ethnography” refers to a research process in which the researcher’s experiences, as observer and participant, form the core of the methodology and analysis (Sanday, 1979). It should be distinguished from other qualitative methods that contribute a similar level of detail but lack the experiential aspect, such as interviews and narrative studies (van Maanen, 1979a). Ethnography can be defined for

the purposes of this article as experiential data collection, with the researcher him/herself as a tool for gathering information and analysis through their own experiences, tempered by adherence to standards of observation. Ethnographic research has formed a part of IB studies since the late 1970s (see Baba, 1998). Its value is, first, that it allows researchers to understand the activities of organizations, fleshing out the lived experience that underlies ideal-typical descriptions of work (Chapman, 1997: 15, 21; see Barley, 1996; Morris et al., 1999: 781–782). As Gephart (1978: 554) notes, “[quantitative studies] do not, and perhaps cannot, explore the microsociological processes which occur in situated, face-to-face interactions.” Second, it is useful for uncovering tacit (as opposed to explicit) discourses – that is, things that are not directly spoken about, perhaps because they are “taken for granted” by people within the organization (van Maanen, 1979b: 544–548), because people are not consciously aware of them (ibid: 546–547), or else because the subject is taboo. Finally, it is often used as part of a process of “triangulation,” combining and comparing data obtained from qualitative and quantitative methods to obtain a balanced image of organizational culture (Harris, 2000; Jick, 1979). However, its use has been limited: little has changed since Hodson (1998: 1174) noted that “ethnographies are used to provide ‘texture’, and sometimes to generate new concepts. Less often are they used to test hypotheses derived from other methods.” Although anthropological uses of ethnography are varied, including such genres as the life history (Black Elk & Lyon, 1990), experimental anthropology (McFeat, 1974), ethnohistory (Douglas, 1993) and single-incident case study (Gluckman, 1958), ethnography in management studies has largely been limited to the (relatively) long-term study of a single group, by a single ethnographer or (as in Miles, 1979), a small team (see, for instance, Barley, 1983, 1990, 1996; Gephart, 1978; Moore, 2005; Sakai, 2000). While a detailed discussion of how this has come to pass is outside the scope of this article, one can briefly explain it as partly an artifact of the research process, as ethnographic data take a long time to collect, and partly due to the use of ethnography in IB as a means of generating case studies and/or exploring hypotheses produced by other methods. The assumption is that wider perspectives on organizations are provided by quantitative methods, or broader-based qualitative methods, and ethnographies serve

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mainly as means of fleshing these out (Miles, 1979; Sackmann & Phillips, 2004).

Holistic Ethnography Some anthropological studies exist, however, which indicate that it is possible to integrate two or more perspectives on the same group using “holistic” ethnography. I define a holistic ethnography as one that combines the detailed, experiential perspectives of multiple groups within a social unit, by developing an overarching narrative through participant observation in these groups, to obtain a fragmented and integrated perspective on the social unit (cf. Pentland, 1999). This can range from Gluckman’s (1958) use of a particular event as a lens through which to reveal different elements of a society, to Mayer and Mayer’s (1961) research on the complicated cultural discourses among urban laborers in Southern Africa. Their monograph, in Spiegel and McAllister’s (1991: 2) words, “showed how and why social and cultural diversity occurred within a population that would otherwise have been regarded as culturally homogeneous,” indicating the research value of this type of ethnography. A few examples of holistic ethnography exist in the anthropology of work. Lo’s Office Ladies, Factory Women (1990) is a study comparing the experiences of two types of workers at a Japanese company. Barley’s (1986, 1990) longitudinal study of the introduction of scanning technology in hospitals considers how radiologists and radiological technologists reacted to this development, and how they interacted with each other in line with their different roles. More recently, Sharpe (2006: 318) obtains a holistic picture of an Anglo-Japanese MNE by studying “strategies of control and resistance of key actors at the point of production.” Studies in which different groups can be seen interacting within a wider system through the use of holistic ethnography thus are demonstrably useful in IB studies. Holistic Ethnography and Issues in Mergers and Acquisitions I argue that holistic ethnography, comparing the perspectives of different groups within organizations in the context of the wider system, can be valuable for understanding cross-cultural issues in the integration of acquired organizations. That national and organizational cultures have an impact, positive and negative, on integration and on post-acquisition performance has been documented by non-ethnographic research, both


quantitative and qualitative (e.g., Hebert, Very, & Beamish, 2005; Kristensen & Zeitlin, 2004; Morosini, Shane, & Singh, 1998; Schweiger & Goulet, 2005; Vaara, 2003; Vaara & Monin, 2010). In particular, culture is said by these studies to affect knowledge transfer (Hebert et al., 2005), communication between groups (Morosini et al., 1998), and the ability of the acquired organization to develop a good “fit” with its acquirer, in unpredictable ways (Vaara & Monin, 2010). However, quantitative methods are not so useful for exposing the processes whereby explicit discourses about national identity and culture become, at the tacit level, sites for dominance, for resistance and for collaboration, the very factors that contribute to the unpredictability of the outcome of M&A (see Zollo, Reuer, & Singh, 2002: 701). Schweiger and Goulet (2005: 1478) note that while national culture documentably contributes to the success or failure of an acquisition, the way in which it contributes varies unpredictably from case to case, suggesting that there is something about the impact of national culture that cannot be discerned by methods focused on explicit discourses. While many methods can reveal explicit aspects of culture in organizations, the active role of the researcher as interpreter is needed to reveal the tacit ones (Gephart, 1978), and holistic ethnography can provide a major contribution in exposing the tacit discourses underlying explicit discourses of national culture, as well as providing a more ambiguous, less positivist view of culture, which might be of greater use in analyzing its effect on M&A. Other qualitative methods, such as those used in Kristensen and Zeitlin’s (2004) historical study or Vaara and Monin’s (2010) critical analysis of interviews, do more to examine these processes, but still are not ideal for accessing the tacit knowledge and beliefs within the organization that influence the processes in question (van Maanen, 1979b). A traditional ethnographic study is likely to yield only a single perspective on the organization, as in Moore (2005). Vaara (2003), however, conducts a kind of holistic ethnography, employing mixed methodologies, including participant observation, to analyze sense-making processes in the Finnish acquisition of three Swedish companies. He thus demonstrates that an ethnographic approach that takes more than one perspective can allow for the study of complex cultural discourses in a post-M&A situation, again indicating that holistic ethnography can make a genuine contribution in this area.


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BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY Methodology This article is based on participant observation, interviews and archival research at an AngloGerman automobile factory (cf. Leonard-Barton, 1990). The resulting data were analyzed, using close reading techniques, by an anthropologist trained in the structuralist, Marxist and postmodern schools of thought, who has worked in critical management studies, leading to a combination of internal and external perspectives on the organization (cf. Morris et al., 1999). The first part of the study took place over a 9-month period in 2003, 3 months of which I spent working on the line in the Final Assembly Area (“Assembly”) as a temporary employee of the firm, with the permission of the management. The workers on the team were informed once I had sufficient grasp of its micropolitics to do so without causing misunderstandings (see Briggs, 1986). The aim of the study was to identify reasons why the firm was, at the time, having difficulty recruiting and retaining female employees. As statistical instruments and interviews were generating inconclusive results, it was determined that an ethnographic approach using a female ethnographer would assist the identification of the tacit, unconscious aspects of working as a woman in the factory that were causing problems (van Maanen, 1979b; see also Hodson, 1998). I also gained permission to gather data on national and ethnic identity to further my own research on ethnicity in MNEs, and which provides the data analyzed here in the context of national identity in acquired organizations. I was restricted in my ability to select a team; however, the team I worked in was unusually ethnically diverse (compare Tables 1 and 2), which allowed me good access to discourses regarding ethnicity and national culture. To provide the context for subsequent analyses, I will briefly indicate the ethnic makeup of the workforce (adapted from an in-house survey using contract workers, about one-third of the workforce, as an indicative sample) and of the team that I studied. Following accepted ethnographic practice (see Sanday, 1979), detailed field notes, with a focus on gender and ethnic identity, were made as soon after each working session as possible, with notes being made whenever opportunities arose. Formal interviews were conducted with 18 staff members (see Ferner & Quintanilla, 2001: 712). Six were office

Table 1 Ethnic and gender composition of the plant labor force (2003; permanent contracts only)

Ethnic origin

Female

Male

4 6 0 0 0 0 1 52 2 0 5 70

59 54 3 1 8 4 21 725 17 1 133 1026

Asian Black Black Caribbean Black other No information available Oriental Other White White European White other White UK Total Source: Human Resource Department survey.

Table 2 Demographics of sample team (permanent and temporary contracts, 2003)

Ethnicity Asian Black African Black Caribbean White Eastern European White UK White other Total

Female

Male

0 0 0 1 0 1 2

2 1 2 0 5 1 11

managers with the Human Resources (HR) division or the temporary labor agencies’ on-site HR teams, selected because they were involved with recruitment and retention. Three were shopfloor managers or trainers, who provided information on shopfloor practices. Most interviewees were from Assembly, with four from the Paint Shop and one from Body in White (the area where the unpainted car is assembled), to provide an element of comparison with different areas of the organization. In cases in which the allocated time had not allowed all relevant issues to be covered, or in which the interview had thrown up new lines of inquiry, follow-up interviews were conducted. Until the end of 2003 I lived in Oxford, meaning that I was able to observe how the plant interacted with its community, following Sharpe’s (2006) approach. Ethnographic interviews (informal, unrecorded discussions; see Briggs, 1986) were held with workers on the line and in the canteen. The workers with whom I regularly spoke consisted of my team members and about 10 individuals from other



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teams whom I approached in the canteen, selected to include as wide as possible a range of age, gender and ethnic groups. This approach was taken because my earlier research had confirmed Briggs’s (1986) findings that people in the lower strata of an organization prefer informal discussions to interviews. As these took place repeatedly, they provided longitudinal data regarding individuals’ opinions. The second phase involved 18 months’ intermittently working with managers from the HR department on two related projects, one involving the development of a management education program based on ethnographic techniques, and one aimed at assessing and improving the plant’s extant management culture, meaning that I had a specific mandate to gather data on culture and identity among the managers. I attended five meetings more or less evenly spaced out over this period, attended by between three and ten managers and myself, and conducted two group interviews with two sets of three managers, selected from the different divisions of the plant in order to obtain a diverse range of opinions on management style, as well as keeping in touch with the project members via phone and e-mail. During this phase I was able to follow up my research in Assembly through visiting one of the company’s German plants and interviewing five former expatriates, mainly in HR, chosen because they had been involved in the initial restructuring of the plant, and thus could provide perspectives on HR practices in the wider organization. The firm did not ask for confidentiality, and, given its unique position in the market, it would be impossible to conceal its identity; however, for partial confidentiality, I have disguised the identities of participants.

The Organization: Cowley Works The plant at which the study was conducted, Cowley Works, was established by a domestic British car manufacturer, Morris Motors, in the early 1910s (Newbigging, Shatford, & Williams, 1998: 12). It was a focus of social activity for its workers, developing its own sports teams, volunteer organizations and clubs (Bardsley & Laing, 1999: 86, 95–104; Newbigging et al., 1998). While the company prospered initially (Whisler, 1999: 49–52, 342–346), it was hit by the decline that affected industrial Britain from the early 1960s. Nationalized in 1968, it continued to decline, and was reprivatized in the 1980s as part of the Rover Group (Chapters 3, 10), owned by BAe (with Honda later acquiring a 20% stake), finally being acquired by


BMW in 1994 (Financial Times, 1998; Greenhalgh & Kilmister, 1993. A useful timeline compiled by Rover enthusiasts can be found at http://www .aronline.co.uk/index.htm?histindexf.htm), giving the plant a history of acquisitions of varying degrees of friendliness. Although BMW initially took a hands-off approach to Rover, the company’s poor financial performance meant that the decision was taken to sell parts of it around the turn of the millennium, although it kept Cowley Works and the MINI, a car based on Morris’s original Mini. As Cowley Works produces this make of car exclusively, the plant is known in the MNE as BMW MINI. The HR-related goals of the integration at the time when which the study was taking place, as articulated to me by British and German managers, were, first, to improve the branch’s performance in terms of communication, staff morale and the development of a positive Anglo-German managerial culture; and, second, to integrate the branch into the wider international organization while retaining its connections with the local community. Holistic ethnography can thus provide some insight into the achievement of these HR goals at that point in time. BMW MINI is thus an acquired organization with several lines of potential cultural fragmentation. I will now use holistic ethnography to consider the different perspectives on the organization among the firm’s German and British managers, followed by a similar treatment of managerial and worker perspectives, and the impact these had on achieving the HR goals of the managers at this stage of the integration process. This will allow greater understanding of the complex impact of national and ethnic culture on post-M&A integration.

MANAGERIAL PERSPECTIVES ON COWLEY WORKS: WHERE GERMANS MUST DOMINATE? The managers of the plant defined themselves as having two main social categories, the shopfloor managers and the office managers, the latter of whom they further subdivided into British and German (or local and expatriate, since the two ethnic groups were roughly contiguous with expatriate status). The designations “British” and “German” used here do not refer to any particular objective “national cultures” that can be defined through the identification of “cultural traits,” but to social categories defined by the managers at BMW MINI, which draw on other external definitions of these social categories,


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encompassing various performances of “Britishness” and “Germanness” (see Brannen & Salk, 2000: 479). National culture was thus relevant to the organization not because of any particular inherent national traits, as implicit in the more functionalist literature on culture (see McSweeney, 2002), but as a set of “native categories” (Harris, 2000) through which the problems and successes of the integration were filtered and understood, and which colored the interactions of the two national groups of managers with each other. The managers tended to be physically divided in terms of where they worked (the shopfloor or the office), which, tacitly, also related to the social class and career background of the managers (shopfloor managers were often former workers, and were symbolically associated with the workers through their location). Office managers were also divided in terms of who they associated with, where they worked, their national origin and their career pattern. The German managers were further subdivided, being either professionals who had been brought in specifically to help with issues relating to the acquisition, or part of general management, as BMW had an “international stream” whereby managers were encouraged to take up expatriate positions in other branches. Most German managers at the time remained in their position at Cowley for 3 years or less; all the ones of whom I was aware were white, male, and in their thirties or early forties. Among the British managers, the gender ratio was roughly one-third female to two-thirds male; most were white. Time spent at the branch ranged from 3 months to 30 years. Some had worked at other branches, through exchange programs or joining the “international stream.” There were also managers from temporary labor agencies, who, while they acted in many ways like the British HR managers (having offices on site, dressing the same way, using the same vocabulary, and carrying out similar functions), were officially employees of the agencies and not of BMW. The managers thus developed complex discourses of culture based around folk definitions of national identity, location of office, age and corporate affiliation.

Some German Managerial Perspectives on the Organization On the surface, the Germans interviewed for this study took the view that national culture was irrelevant to the acquired organization. Their

attitude is exemplified in a quote from an interview with a German expatriate: If you have a clear mindset of a production system, you can have this production in Britain successful, in Zimbabwe successful, and you have it in Germany successful. Maybe you need in Britain a different set of flow charts or a different way of training the people, adapting to their local behaviory but if you remember that everywhere the people are the same, and if you measure in the same way, you can achieve the same targets.

While the decision to name the plant “BMW MINI” reflects the idea that Cowley Works should retain an individual identity while still forming part of the group, the choice of name is telling, defining the plant not in terms of its cultural milieu, but in terms of its product. The German top management encouraged employees to focus on the company as an international group, for instance sponsoring exchange programs for both workers and managers. This could backfire, however, as when a top (and thus, by implication, German) management decision was taken to import workers from a Portuguese plant temporarily to fill a staff shortage. From the point of view of the managers this was simply a staffing decision, but some British managers described it in terms that suggested it encroached on their authority over local matters. The Germans also engaged in tacit symbolic discourses of national culture, with their explicit discourses about running the plant and being part of the company containing subtexts in which they continually presented themselves as efficient and productive, and the British as clever but overly romantic. These characterizations relate to longstanding definitions of national identity (Hoecklin, 1998), which have also, crucially, linked in to a similarly long-standing tradition by both national groups of defining themselves against each other (Ramsden, 2006). When I was taken on a tour of a German plant by a German former expatriate, the text of it was to indicate similarities with Cowley Works, but the unintentional subtext was that the German plant was more efficient (pointing out, for instance, that the line speed was faster, and a greater number of makes were produced). Whether or not the plant was more efficient is largely incidental; the key issue was that the Germans presented it as such. The marketing and in-plant imagery surrounding the MINI incorporates the “Swinging Sixties” iconography of 1960s Britain, and model names from this period have been revived (e.g., Clubman for the hatchback model).



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However, the new MINIs are visually distinct and aimed at a more affluent target group than the original, in a clear implication that the Germans have taken the “romantic” British product and, by adding what they perceive as greater efficiency, made it more “successful” in their terms, exploiting long-standing external discourses of national culture to justify their actions, couching it in a way that the British themselves can also identify with. The Germans thus used discourses of national culture to justify their actions, to reduce local resistance to integration (see Vaara & Monin, 2010: 4), and as a means of transferring knowledge from other areas of the group to Cowley Works (see Hebert et al., 2005), working toward improved communication, integration and similarity of managerial culture. However, to assess the success of this we must also consider the perspectives of the British managers.

Some British Managerial Perspectives on the Organization The British managers seemed to share the same goals for the acquired organization as the Germans, in that they said they wanted both to belong to an international group and to retain a distinct local identity. Whenever I asked a British manager, whatever their division or the circumstances of the question, what they liked about their workplace, the answer invariably involved the prestige of the BMW brand. British narratives about the takeover, colored by the plant’s history of acquisitions of varying degrees of friendliness, were not so much hostile as resigned to the German presence, with the event portrayed as necessary to preserve the company. At the same time, the managers expressed fears about assimilation: as one HR manager put it, “this site has a history, good and bad, and all the qualities seem to have been stripped away.” The British thus had tacitly reversed the emphases on the goals of the Germans: they wanted to remain locally distinct while keeping the prestige of belonging to BMW. British views on national culture in the merged organization also bore surface similarities to the German view, as well as to outside stereotypes of both cultures (see Ramsden, 2006). The Germans were constructed as efficient and formal, and the British as casual and people-friendly, as these two examples indicate: (1) Rover seemed to be a lot more laid back, where BMW, it sounds silly, but it seems to me to be a lot more rushing around. But that’s not a bad thing y it’s more professional.


(Male white British Paint Shop manager, one-to-one interview) (2) German organizations have a different style. y .There’s more of a need for people skills [here] than in Germany. In Germany it’s very much against culture so you need different people skills. Over here you need to be more woolly and pink and fluffy with people. (Male white British Body in White manager, group discussion)

The Germans were thus again described as “efficient” and the British as “romantic”; however, here the emphasis was less on the image of the plant and its product and more on the HR difficulties incurred by the contrasting approaches, indicating that what seems to be exactly the same discourse of national culture can differ strongly in terms of its subtext. National culture thus formed an invisible line of fragmentation in the acquired organization, as indicated by the British manager blaming communication problems with workers on the Germans’ “different style” rather than, for instance, on the personalities of the managers involved. At the same time as acknowledging the problems that they saw as arising specifically from the AngloGerman nature of the firm, the British also denied that national identity was the cause, as in this excerpt from an interview with a white British HR manager in his early thirties: We are used to the German style of management, so it isn’t an issue of nationality, but we know our German directors are only here for a few years; they are put into positions that are higher than in Germany, and they don’t have to live with the consequences, because they move every few years. From the side of management – it is not to do with German management style but it is a German problem.

The manager identifies that some of the perceived problem has to do with the international management development strategy of the company. At the same time, though, he is not able to separate the Germanness of top management from their strategy, suggesting that to do so is to create an artificial distinction, and equally that the British do see the “Germanness” of the management as a source of division. It is worth noting, also, that not all the managers who “move every few years” are German, but their association with Head Office renders them conceptually “German.” The complex connections between perceived traits of “national culture,” organizational culture and the plant’s integration are thus shown, as is the complexity of the way in which managers express, rationalize and deal with conflicts arising between local managers and their German counterparts.


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National culture is thus significant within the integration process as an organizing trope, a means by which potentially unpopular changes (such as the Germans taking a more hands-on approach to managing the plant) can be understood, and nonquantifiable problems within it (such as friction between British staff and the German managers) can be rationalized and understood. It also colored each group’s attitude to, and actions toward, the other, with the British anticipating that the Germans would have trouble communicating with the workforce, and the Germans doubting the British ability to run a business efficiently. According to interviews and discussions with HR managers, this led to incidents of friction and conflict between members of the two groups, further dividing, rather than integrating, them. The incidents outlined here thus indicate that discourses of culture were affecting the development of a branch. While one might argue that all acquisitions, international or not, include a degree of friction and conflict, nationality was of clear significance for this study’s participants as a means of understanding and working through these. Again, whether “national culture” exists as a quality or not in and of itself, the fact that the managers believed in it gave it reality as an influence on their actions, for instance by blaming the “German style” of the expatriates for communication failures, or by making presuppositions about how the other group would react to a particular policy based on their “national traits.” The subtle differences in interpretation (for instance on what is meant by a locally distinct plant within an international group) also provide a way for researchers to understand otherwise-invisible lines of conflict between the groups, which can hinder the process of integration, as implied by the HR manager’s critique of the expatriate managers. Taking the British managers’ views in combination with those of the Germans thus indicates areas where culture could (and, in the cases mentioned above, did) cause problems for integration, knowledge transfer and employee morale.

A Meeting of Cultures While a single-group ethnography could have uncovered the layers of contradiction, negotiation and subtext in both groups’ views of the role of national culture in the acquisition, it is when considering the two groups relative to each other that areas of tacit conflict and collaboration become apparent. The fact that both appear to

have the same goals, but, as the methodological approach indicates, interpret those in different ways (see Gephart, 1978: 558), could go some way toward explaining the divisions that occur for no apparent reason in post-M&A organizations, including BMW MINI. The case of the Portuguese workers mentioned above provides a good example of a conflict that appears seemingly “out of nowhere” and yet can be explained through understanding the company’s tacit lines of fragmentation. The Germans, seeing BMW’s identity as an international firm as most important, did not expect hostility from the British, whom they assumed held the same view. However, the fact that the British clearly expressed tacit concerns about German cultural dominance (as in the excerpts in which the HR manager denies that he has a problem with the German presence while at the same time linking the plant’s operating problems to the career strategies of German managers) indicates that the Germans making such a decision would be seen as encroaching on local culture, leading to hostility toward the German managers, which they had not expected, and consequently found difficult to deal with. Similarly, the German managers expressed bafflement as to why, although the British managers supported the “Back to the Track” program, in which managers would spend a week working on the line, uptake was limited (the usual stated reason being lack of time). This concerned them, as they viewed it as crucial both to the British integrating into the organization and to the development of a managerial culture that was more responsive to worker issues, and some hinted that they saw this as resistance to integration on the part of British managers. However, as most British managers expressed positive feelings toward the program and the philosophy behind it, their reticence is better explained by the British class system, under which an office manager taking part could be seen as inappropriately familiar with the workers (see Fox, 2005). At the same time, the fact that some German managers, having no such taboo, were approaching the workers to canvas their opinions on programs and practices also made the British inclined to draw their own cultural lines more rigidly. It also had the effect of making the German managers seem friendlier to the workers (albeit not producing the sort of alliance the Germans had hoped for – see below), and making the British feel, as in the Portuguese example above, that their authority was being undermined, leading to further



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communication problems between British and German managers (see Vaara & Monin, 2010: 4). A holistic perspective thus allows researchers to explore tacit cultural negotiations surrounding the integration of the acquired organization, of which its members may not be aware or willing to articulate, elucidating the way in which national culture, as a native category used as a means of explanation and social positioning within the organization, influenced the managers’ integration of the branch and transfer of knowledge in ways both advantageous and detrimental to the successful integration of the branch, and to the flow of communication within the group. The holistic ethnographic account thus suggests that one common cause of unexpected conflict in cross-cultural encounters – and possibly in any sort of acquisition, international or domestic – may be the fact that different groups have, at the tacit level, divergent interpretations of their supposedly collectively held values. These conflicts have an influence on the process of integration, as the expatriates’ ability to get the local managers to trust them, work with them and implement their proposed improvements without ambivalence was hampered by incidents such as those described in this section.

WORKER PERSPECTIVES ON COWLEY WORKS: HIDDEN STAKEHOLDERS The workers at BMW were a diverse group, engaged in discourses with managers and outside organizations, and possessing complex relationships to national and ethnic cultures that are distinct from the managers’. The workers fell into two categories: those with a permanent contract, and those hired through a temporary labor agency. It was impossible to tell the difference between them in terms of appearance or duties. As Table 1 indicates, the core of the workforce was white, British and male, with some visible minorities and white non-British (mostly Eastern European), and a smaller number of women. Time spent at the factory ranged from 3 months to over 30 years. Numerically they were the largest category of personnel at the factory, and the ones actually involved in producing the product, and their morale and attitude to the factory had an impact on the achievement of the managers’ goals. German Dominance and British Categorization While the workers are excluded from having much official input into the integration process, they


were affected by the changes, as in this excerpt from my field notes: Although the average worker is surrounded by German (most of the signs on boxes are in German, some of the signs around the plant are bilingual, some of the processes appear to have German acronyms, the [cars’] onboard [satellite] navigational systems are all in German, although presumably other languages can be programmed y) very few German people ever appear on the line. Germans thus achieve a kind of mythological status, as exotic beings confined to the upper-management region who are responsible for all the strange decisions and have little to do with the plant itself.

There thus appears to be a German dominance effect (Smith & Meiksins, 1995), with German terms and ideas replacing the British norms, suggesting the successful integration of the branch into a German-dominated group. However, the workers’ characterization of the Germans as exotic creatures allowed them to create, or reimpose, their own norms. A German senior manager who paid a visit to the line was referred to as “the guv’nor, the big cheese” by my team-mates (British working-class slang for “the boss”). During an incident in which I nearly collided with a German visitor who had wandered onto the line, my team-mates, in reassuring me that I was not at fault, emphasized that he was a manager and a German, the tacit corollary to these identities being that he would therefore naturally be ignorant of shopfloor safety procedures (even though, for reasons mentioned above, German managers were generally more familiar with shopfloor practices than were British managers). The German managers who took part in the Back to the Track program were described by the workers as an amusing novelty rather than as breakers of class boundaries; as outsiders, they were permitted liberties that local managers were not allowed, but were also unable to affect local barriers. The workers’ challenging of German dominance thus indicates that, within the plant, there were discourses of national difference that reinforced a local identity at the expense of an international one, but which were unlikely to be easily identified as a barrier to integration by the managers. While one might assume this to be the product of the same sort of cultural tension that characterized the British managers, ethnographic research indicates that the situation on the shopfloor is subtly different. There did not seem to be particular anxiety about the German presence, and no more hostility toward the German managers than toward


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the British ones. A reason for this is suggested by the workers’ accounts of the plant’s ownership history, in which previous owners were judged, not by nationality, but by whether they supported the plant and the community; the one who came in for universal criticism, as an “asset-stripper” who “didn’t care” about the plant, was British. In light of the frequent changes in ownership, the workers had developed a way of coping with changes in the nationality of top management that involved ignoring these, assimilating them to their general characterization of “managers” regardless of nationality, or altering them to what were constructed as British norms. The workers thus had ways of constructing the change in ownership that, on the one hand, allowed them to maintain relatively good morale and a good level of output at work, but which, on the other hand, also allowed them to resist integration into the group at a cultural and knowledge-sharing level.

Discourses of Localness and Multiculturalism The ethnic diversity of the line, as opposed to the binational division of the managers, also mitigated the sense of “us versus them” that underlay the managers’ interactions with each other. The key cultural issue for the workers was less the degree of “Britishness” vs “Germanness” (terms that, as the above discussion indicates, differed subtly regarding their meanings and referents to the same terms used by managers), than the plant’s ethnic diversity: [The induction leader] says that the fact that we only have nine ethnic groups represented here today is disappointing; last week, there were thirteen. He says they are trying to build up their own axis of evil for George W. Bush; “we have Iraqis, Iranians, Syrians and Libyans working here, so if any of you know of any North Koreans or Cubans, send them to us.”

Consequently, a code of behavior had developed to forestall cross-cultural conflict. Fights on the line incurred automatic dismissal; at the same time, there was a strong unspoken awareness that ethnic and/or national divisions could be a source of friction. Ethnicity and nationality were largely taboo subjects on the line, and conversations were confined mainly to subjects of common interest across cultures (principally, football, sex and hiphop music). However, the groups that sat together during breaks were frequently ethnically based, with Indians sitting with Indians, Romanians with Romanians, and other groups doing likewise. Coethnics meeting each other would acknowledge

this with jokes and use of native language. The divisions in question, while having an ethnic and/ or national dimension, were not along rigid national lines of the type that might be identified in a survey: for instance, Anglophones who spoke French could be invited to sit with Francophone colleagues (supporting the observation made regarding the managers, that national culture exists in organizations less as a real, measurable object and more as an organizing trope or native category). The workers thus at one level express multicultural solidarity, while acknowledging tensions at another, allowing them to continue working in an environment with potential for friction between cultural groups. The local nature of the firm’s identity was crucial to the workers’ process of solidarity-building. Several were second- or third-generation factory workers, and Cowley Works’ place in local culture is indicated in a conversation with a female white worker in her sixties: She talks about the role that the factory played in the community. “My father built that tower,” she says. y . “Then they just knocked it down and put up them houses. They want to get rid of that bridge, too, but that’s another part of local history that people don’t want to be rid of.” She reminiscences about “going to feˆtes, when we were kids, behind the Romanway [Rover Workers’] Social Club, in the field back there. Nothing special, but when you were a kid it was very exciting.”

As the multicultural nature of the local community has been explicitly noted in other studies (e.g., Shaw, 1988; Ward, Stuart, & Swingedouw, 1993), characterizing people as “local” provided a way of negotiating perceived cultural difference. It also was a yardstick by which to judge the plant’s owners: briefly included in the woman’s account is a tacit swipe at the “asset-stripping” former owner for selling the land upon which the tower stood (she also assumed that I, despite being a three-month contract worker, would know who the “they” in question were). This is also a way of, as above, maintaining continuity in an acquired organization, by focusing not on the changes brought by the acquisition, but on the plant’s image as a local community member, again with positive implications for the continued performance of the plant. The workers thus used discourses of local and international culture as ways of coping with a difficult workplace situation, but as a result reinforced the image of the plant as a distinct local entity, removed from any group that might make a claim to ownership.



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The Workers in Context Although most studies of mergers and acquisitions, like most case-study-based papers in IB, leave out the role of the workers in developing postM&A culture (e.g., Haspeslagh & Jemison, 1991; Hebert et al., 2005), a holistic perspective builds on Aguilera et al.’s (2008) argument that different groups in an organization play different roles in the integration process, to show that the workers do influence the integration of the branch. Had the workers not developed the coping mechanisms discussed above, and staff turnover worker morale, at the very least, would have been affected. Managers told me that their usual indicator of worker discontent, a rise in turnover rates (which happened, for instance, when, around 2003, on-the-job training was substituted for an earlier, more extensive, formal training period), cost the plant in terms of time and money for recruitment and training, as well as for reduced performance while the new workers learned their jobs. Regardless of whether or not it really did have this financial impact, the managers certainly perceived it as an indicator of poor company performance, which, as with national culture above, had a genuine impact on their behavior, policies and social standing. Holistic ethnography thus indicates a largely overlooked way in which organizational culture and internal micropolitics can have real impacts on an integrating organization, as the workers’ culture had a tacit effect on the managers’ actions and perceptions of their company’s success. The influence of the workers on the organization was, however, something that the managers at the plant found difficult to understand, owing to its being couched in tacit discourses. All managers believed that keeping up workforce morale was crucial, emphasizing to me the cost of rises in turnover rates. However, they often seemed unclear on what demoralized the workers, as in one British HR manager’s critique: [At] the new [Managing Director]’s first conference, they said there would be a change in management style but couldn’t say what the change would be. Result is demoralized staff.

However, while the office staff may have been demoralized by the lack of information, ethnographic research indicated that the workers were unconcerned about how the managers defined their “style,” and demoralization tended to occur, as indicated above, in response to things that


directly affected shopfloor practices. Furthermore, German managers incurred friction with workers when they attempted to change locally established reward practices; a shopfloor manager described in a group interview an incident where the managers handed out cakes to the workers at Christmas, which led to “cake thrown all over” the car park. While the workers may have had no official say in the acquisition process, it was evident from such incidents that they caused problems for management when their culture was poorly understood, either by leaving the firm or by informal resistance activities, and a lack of understanding of the workers’ view of the process could thus cause problems for the goals of the integration. The results of my research on why the firm was having difficulty recruiting and retaining women illustrate the way in which such misunderstandings occurred, leading to what managers perceived as significant costs to the organization. First, in the wider British culture, people’s associations regarding automobile factory work are that it is physically demanding, dangerous and masculine, even though the reality is quite different. Academic and professional colleagues, learning what I was doing, were surprised that “a little girl” like myself was working in a car factory, and asked whether I found the work difficult, or was harassed by male colleagues (neither of which was the case). Even a woman I encountered during induction testing, who was applying for a job at BMW after being made redundant at a factory in another industrial sector (and who was therefore familiar with factory conditions), observed that her application “didn’t stand a chance, with all these big strong men here.” Second, while the management had put in place work–life balance measures to allow women with families to work at the plant, they were aimed mainly at people working a managerial schedule: the staff cre`che, for instance, opened some time after the early shift at the factory began, and there were no similar facilities for staff working the night or weekend shifts. The consequence for the firm was that they were having difficulty recruiting and retaining a section of the workforce who they needed, as, leaving aside their desire to be seen as an equal-opportunities employer, certain jobs (including the one I myself did) were seen as more physically or mentally suited to women, meaning that BMW felt the need to employ women in these positions.


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Furthermore, the cost of replacing and training new workers due to staff turnover was named as a cause for concern by HR managers; it was perceived to be a significant enough issue to warrant getting in outside assistance to resolve. While the general problem of recruiting women pre-dated the acquisition (see, for instance, Sweeney, 1993), it gained a new significance in the post-acquisition context, as BMW placed great value on its policies aimed at increasing the number of women in the workplace, and thus the German managers took a particular interest in improving performance in this area (for instance initiating outreach programs to encourage schoolgirls to consider jobs in the auto industry). This means that the concerns about the recruitment and retention of women form part of the negotiations for power between the Germans and the British. MINI’s gender issues were thus due partly to tacit, unconscious assumptions about gender and work in British culture, and partly to managers mistakenly assuming that the workforce’s perspectives were the same as their own, but these assumptions had what managers described as significant impacts on turnover, which were used as a lever by the German managers in their negotiations for power. However, the German managers achieved some success with the workers in that they, in keeping with BMW’s overall philosophy of corporate social responsibility, encouraged workers’ philanthropic activities and sponsored local charities, indicating that they were willing to situate the plant as a good local citizen. Similarly, changing a practice of rewarding the team who came up with the best money-saving idea with corporate logo T-shirts (reflecting the managers’, but not the workers’, identification with the brand) to one instead involving excursions to local attractions popular with the workforce, such as the dog track (dog racing being a traditional British working-class pastime) proved successful. Again, this builds on Aguilera et al.’s (2008) description of how different groups in the acquired organization internalize efforts to integrate them into the firm in different ways. An understanding of areas of fit between worker and managerial cultures, provided by a holistic perspective, can encourage the retention of a trained and happy – and consequently productive – workforce willing to remain in their jobs and engage in constructive dialogue with managers, achieving the HR goals of the organization at this stage of the integration, and reducing perceptions of failure among the management.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS Findings of the Study I will here consider how this article has met the study’s aims, answered the research questions, and contributed to IB. In terms of the first aim, I have built upon earlier research to show that a holistic ethnographic perspective provides new insights into the operation of tacit discourses of national culture in organizations. While ethnography on single groups provides rich data about national culture, it is only when we compare the groups’ perspectives that we are able to see how certain problems developed, why there is a particular fit between different worldviews, and what the consequences were, which is a crucial way in which holistic ethnography can contribute to IB research. In terms of the second, arguably more important, aim, of how tacit discourses of national culture (as defined and perceived by the study participants) affect the integration of an acquired subsidiary into an MNE, the use of holistic ethnography has shown that these discourses act as complex factors within the integration process, incorporating simultaneous elements of domination, acquiescence, resistance and negotiation, which could, together or separately, positively or negatively, influence their possessors’ actions toward their local or head office counterparts. Although both German and British managers explicitly agreed that the ideal situation for Cowley Works in terms of its post-integration culture would be as a firm with a distinctive local identity but a connection to the wider organization, for instance, this apparent synergy of values hid a sharp divergence at the tacit level, which led to unforeseen conflicts brewing up apparently spontaneously (see Hebert et al., 2005). The workers, meanwhile, rejected internationalist discourses, focusing on the plant’s local connections. Nonetheless, ethnographic research indicates that they were receptive to managerial overtures that met them on their own cultural territory; what might seem a straightforward anti-management stance can be seen, through holistic ethnography, to have more complex meanings, which affected the achievement of the HR goals of the organization. Furthermore, holistic ethnography allows for the acknowledgment of ambiguities within the integration process, rather than simple questions of “merger success” or “merger failure.” Furthermore, by focusing on “success” and “failure” not through using etic numerical metrics, but in terms of the managers’ perceptions of the same, we achieve a



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picture arguably closer to the lived experience of “success” and “failure” for managers, following Harzing and Christensen’s (2004) approach to expatriate failure. Holistic ethnography thus contributes to IB by addressing a key issue: elucidating the complex and contradictory role of culture, and of manager–worker dynamics, in the post-M&A integration process, and their consequences. While it is a valid argument that similar sorts of problems might occur in a domestic acquisition in which the acquirer imposes its norms and practices on the acquired, the fact remains that the events of the integration were understood through a set of symbols and tropes specifically related to national identity, which were absorbed through the external high and popular cultures of both nations (see Ramsden, 2006), which affected the decisions managers took, and how they understood and rationalized their actions. It is thus not so much the case that national culture has an effect on mergers and acquisitions that is qualitatively different from that of any other sort of culture (despite the assumptions of, for instance, Morosini et al., 1998), but that it is understood and perceived by participants to have a distinctive impact, and this perception affects the way in which they conduct themselves within the integration and operational processes. A domestic acquirer, for instance, might be able to call upon discourses of shared national culture to build solidarity, whereas here the British managers’ interactions with the Germans were colored by indigenous stereotypes of Germans as a traditional “enemy” figure (Ramsden, 2006: Chapter 10). The holistic ethnographic approach thus improves on earlier approaches to cross-cultural management by exploring more thoroughly the complexity of the impact of national culture on post-acquisition integration: as a focus for explanation, categorization and sense-making that affects how managers understand, and consequently act upon, decisions and points of conflict. Furthermore, the holistic ethnographic approach contributes to IB by allowing M&A to be explored in terms of their unique situations. While one might, for instance, argue that there are similarities between this case and that of Daimler-Chrysler (see Badrtalei & Bates, 2007), both involving the takeover of an iconic, but failing, Anglo/American automobile company by a more successful German one, when seen from a holistic ethnographic perspective the differences become more apparent, as the relationships between the groups of managers, the histories and market positions of the


companies, the conceptions of national cultures, and the nature of the workforce are all quite different. Rather than showing German and British national culture as solid, unified “billiard balls,” or as integrating unproblematically to form a seamless whole, the holistic view shows how, as in Brannen and Salk’s (2000) case, discourses of national culture can at once mesh and fail to mesh, and how these same discourses are affected by others, such as class, multiculturalism and local identity. Managers must have an understanding of such tacit discourses in order to facilitate integration, and be aware of the different dynamics that underpin acquisitions, mergers and joint ventures, which can affect knowledge transfer and worker satisfaction. In terms of the research questions, then, the tacit categorizations of national culture within the organization that underlie discourse about the merger are demonstrated to generate areas of conflict and of collaboration, and a holistic perspective is needed to show how these affect the integration process, and the perception of its “success” or “failure.”

Implications for Post-M&A Integration In terms of its implications for post-M&A firms, this article contributes ways of addressing a longstanding issue in the mergers and acquisitions literature. Such organizations, as discussed above, involve unpredictable areas of friction: as Vaara and Monin (2010: 3) put it: Despite extensive research on mergers and acquisitions, we do not seem to fully understand the dynamics of postmerger integration. In particular, there is a paucity of knowledge on the pathological dynamics that often lie behind merger failure.

What a holistic ethnographic perspective can contribute is insight into the tacit (meaning “unspoken” or “unconscious”) aspects of Brannen and Salk’s (2000) process of cultural negotiation that underlies the above-mentioned “pathological dynamics,” thus providing a way of understanding, and, in some cases, of arresting them before they have done much damage (as with my own research on gender on the line, which led to changes in policy and practice at Cowley Works). Furthermore, unlike Dore (1973), it does not only compare and contrast, but also shows how the different groups interact, shape each other and react to each other’s decisions, which Schweiger and Goulet (2005: 1478) see as crucial to the achievement of


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integration. The situation between the British and German managers, for instance, includes elements of acquirer/acquired dynamics as well as German/ British and large firm/small firm ones, and these dynamics are also clearly shaped by the firm’s history. The consequences, also, were not uniformly “pathological” or “beneficial,” but a mixture of the two. Finally, by focusing not on quantitative metrics of “success” or “failure,” but on the perception of these by managers, we can answer the question of how, for instance, a merger or joint venture that appears to be functioning on paper might subsequently fall apart. A holistic ethnographic perspective also allows us to take the embeddedness of the organization into account. Some of the lack of understanding of the dynamics of post-merger integration stems from the fact that, in IB, organizations are often portrayed as if in a vacuum, without understanding of the context (as argued by Chapman, 1997: 13). The literature on network theory (e.g., Andersson, 2003) argues that we should view companies as part of integrated social networks; however, as McSweeney (2002: 93–95) notes, more quantitative and/or interview-focused methods artificially exclude other connections aside from those being directly analyzed (which, as the Daimler-Chrysler comparison above indicates, is crucial to understanding the origins of conflict in M&A), and one might argue that even a more ethnographic perspective, if it focuses on a small group, could be similarly isolationist. The value of holistic ethnography is to be able to better understand the social dynamics that underlie an organization’s perceived successes and failures.

Methodological Implications This study suggests that there are situations in which a holistic ethnographic perspective has advantages over quantitative methods, surveys, interviews and single-group ethnography. Whereas a survey can provide some sense of how people self-identify in an organization, and data on the frequency of intergroup interaction, it cannot measure categories the survey designer does not know about: BMW’s in-house survey missed the fact that most white non-British workers were Eastern European. Surveys also are less good at identifying negotiation and exchange between groups, and at explaining motivations, as BMW quantitative data identified that many women resigned in their first three months, but not why this was so. Holistic ethnography can keep the

broad perspective through including diverse groups, but also showing the connections and divisions between them, for instance exploring the way the workers were affected, unwittingly, by managerial discourses at MINI. It can consider tacit motivations behind explicit actions (such as why women were leaving the organization) and contradictions, as in the ways the English managers simultaneously blamed German culture for their problems and denied they were doing so. While a survey could provide the information that both British and German managers shared the same ideal for the plant as a distinct entity in a global group, it could not tell you that they meant this in different ways. Interviews can flesh out the details exposed by surveys. An interview could explore the nuances of the different meanings the German and British managers held for the common ideal of the plant as a distinct entity in a global group. An astute interviewer can read between the lines and pick up on tacit discourses underlying explicit statements. Interviews could also provide cross-group data, although they are limited by the fact that the interviewer may not be aware of some of the groups in the organization (although “British managers” and “German managers” formed an obvious division, it was participant observation that indicated the office/shopfloor manager divide). However, interviews can only identify discourses that people are aware of or willing to talk about. Had I not learned through other methods about the tension over the “asset-stripping” former owner, I would not have known to ask about it in interviews. It is also worth noting that the interviews in this article have been interpreted in light of participant observation data; had I not seen how British managers avoided the shopfloor, I might have taken at face value their statements that they did not participate in the “Back to the Track” program because of a lack of time. Single-group ethnography, finally, provides more detail on tacit knowledge and discourse, thus allowing the researcher to gain insight into the mindsets behind people’s actions and statements. It provides an in-depth, interpretive view of the activities of a particular group, and can, as in Gephart (1978), explore the layers of meaning within that group to a high degree of complexity. The problem is that, even following Burawoy’s (2003) suggested program of repeated revisits, single-group ethnography does not provide much of a cross-group perspective: had the MINI case



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been limited to a study of the shopfloor, the Christmas cake incident would just be seen as the rejection of a patronizing attempt at dominance, leaving out the managerial view that it was a well-intentioned idea that went wrong owing to a lack of cultural knowledge. The boundaries between single-group and holistic ethnography are fairly flexible: for instance, a small-group ethnography might, through spending brief amounts of time exploring different groups in a firm, approach the holistic, and multiple single-group ethnographies could come together to provide a holistic perspective. Holistic ethnography therefore provides both a broad perspective on the organization and access to tacit discourses. It allows researchers to see culture as having simultaneous elements of rigidness and fluidity, and positive and negative impacts on the organization. It also allows the exploration of internal discourses and how they affect different groups in the organization, and how these groups relate differently to external discourses. Holistic ethnography can build upon more conventional ethnographic studies (e.g., van Maanen & Barley, 1984) to provide ways of assessing how the tacit discourses of different groups affect each other. While a mixed-method study, for instance a survey combined with an ethnography, might be able to provide a broad-based perspective coupled with a detailed perspective on a small group within the organization, it would not be able to provide the same comparative perspective involving experiential data on many groups. As well as for mergers and acquisitions, similar techniques could prove useful in analyzing the dynamics of multicultural teams, or cross-cultural management issues, or in considering means of identifying and transferring tacit knowledge in MNEs, or indeed any circumstances involving multiple groups engaged in complex social relations. The findings of this study also suggest that more creativity in the use of ethnographic methods in IB could prove useful in addressing some current problems. It might be worth considering what the life history or the experimental ethnography could yield in terms of understanding organizational culture.

Limitations and Areas for Further Research The main difficulty of the holistic ethnographic approach is that the level of detail required for a successful project is extensive, as is the time needed to gather sufficient data. Furthermore, there is the issue that the ethnographer him/herself constructs


the narrative of the organization, making it open to contestation, and that both the ethnographer’s perspective and those of participants are in flux and subject to interpretation (see Gephart, 1978: 557–558). However, the fact that many anthropologists have successfully studied multiple groups suggests that it would not be impossible to do this. It is also not uncommon for anthropologists to work in teams to develop a more complex picture of a group (e.g., Mayer & Mayer, 1961). Equally, it is possible, as noted above, to do single-group ethnography with holistic elements. There is also the fact that any ethnographic approach can appear “anecdotal,” as the data consist of descriptions of incidents that, furthermore, take place at a particular moment in the history of the organization. However, more longitudinal data can be obtained through prolonging the study or through repeated revisits; furthermore, focusing in depth on a particular moment makes for deeper, richer data, which can be build upon through various other techniques. There are other issues, regarding what makes an ethnography “holistic,” and the methodological problem of defining groups and the level of analysis. While a holistic ethnography, in this case, includes the perspective of multiple groups, the groups defined are context-dependent. Indeed, the present study is not just a comparison between two or three groups, but includes subgroups, areas of overlap, and continually shifting definitions of personal and professional identity. As much as on different national groups or different types of employee within an organization, one could do holistic ethnography on different professional groups of the same status within the organization (e.g., Barley, 1990), or between multiple organizations (e.g., Vaara, 2003). However, as suggested by Brannen and Salk (2000), this makes it a better tool for studying such nebulous areas as “culture,” as it allows the researcher to adjust the definition of the group according to the nature of the study and the self-identification of the group, and allows for the flexibility to explore the complex nature of identity, “native categories,” and the formation and re-formation of social units. Identifying divisions should ideally be guided by the self-identification of people in the studied group(s), but may necessarily include external interpretation by the researcher (for instance, in this case, acknowledging that the managers in charge of temporary labor, although for the most part treated, and acting, the same as contracted BMW managers,


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were employed by other organizations) and others. The nature of the research question and degree of access therefore determine the level at which the ethnography is carried out, and both these and the self- and other-definition of the study’s subjects determine the group divisions, while recognizing that this is not necessarily the only way in which the organization could be defined or divided. Furthermore, although the present study has focused on comparison, holistic ethnography is not inherently comparative, but can also focus on the context of the study, the qualities of the ethnographer, and the interactions between ethnographer and studied group. The definition and nature of the groups, and the type of ethnography involved, are thus variables that must be addressed on a case-by-case basis, but this can be seen as a strength of the method, giving it greater flexibility and freeing it from externally imposed categorization. Team research, albeit difficult to organize, can also compensate for the biases and perspectives of the researcher (although in the case of single ethnographers, this can be surmounted through reflexivity and the acknowledgement of other voices; Burawoy, 2003). Working with other, nonethnographic qualitative researchers, or using multiple qualitative techniques (as in Leonard-Barton, 1990) could provide balance. A lone ethnographer studying many groups in one organization over an extended period raises other questions, such as how to ensure that the context is the “same” over such a period of study, so that the plurality of timeseparated groups are comparably part of the “same organization,” or that the ethnographer is the “same person” (see Burawoy, 2003; Pervin, 1989). This can be addressed through including in the study the element of change over time (see Barley, 1990). Access is also crucial: most ethnographers are fortunate to have detailed access to even a

single group in an organization. It is, however, not impossible for such a degree of access to be attained, for instance by Soulsby and Clark in their longitudinal research on Czech companies (e.g., Soulsby & Clark, 2007). The conclusions of this study are threefold. First, that many problems in the integration of postM&A organizations are caused by the tacit operation of discourses of culture, creating areas of lack of fit of which actors in the organization are unaware. Second, this study explores a little-used but effective means for identifying and acting upon these, through using a holistic ethnographic perspective on the organization, looking at the experiences of multiple groups together and in the organizational context. Finally, the study demonstrates that IB studies could benefit from exploring less conventional areas of ethnographic methodology. This study thus contributes by highlighting the uses of ethnographic techniques in exploring the role played by national identities in crossborder mergers and acquisitions, and the mutual impact of worker and manager perspectives on acquired organizations, as well as clarifying the actual impact of cross-cultural discourses on the success of post-acquisition integration.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Funding for this research was made possible by the Nuffield Foundation and BMW Ltd. This article has previously been presented at the Academy of International Business. An earlier and substantially different version of this article is published in R. Piekkari and C. Welch (eds.) (2011), Rethinking the Case Study Approach in International Business Research, London: Edward Elgar. Thanks are extended to all editors and discussants who have reviewed this article, and to Professor Ed Clark for providing invaluable comments upon earlier drafts.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Fiona Moore ([email protected]) was born in Canada and is currently resident in the UK. She received her doctorate from Oxford University, and is now Lecturer in Human Resource Management at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her main research interest is in the uses of ethnicity and identity in transnational corporations and expatriate communities, currently focusing on Taiwanese overseas businesspeople.

Accepted by Rosalie Tung, Area Editor, 27 December 2010. This paper has been with the author for four revisions.
