Event Description

In this guest lecture, Professor Jasmin Mahadevan (JM) outlines five perspectives in Cross-Cultural Management (CCM) studies which she assumes to constitute to a Critical CCM. The comparative CCM perspective and the interactional interactionist perspective constitute the mainstream CCM approach, but she argues that we need to add three more for doing the realities of contemporary CCM justice. These are the cultural perspective which acknowledges the complexity of culture in the anthropological sense and moves beyond the selective approach to what culture involves as currently prevalent in CCM (e.g. culture as immaterial values or communication). Together, these three perspectives enable us to reflect upon culture, to uncover relative differences between cultures and to potentially move beyond them in intercultural interactions. Furthermore, JM suggests that CCM needs to take diversity, cultural hybridity and multiple identities seriously (critical multiple cultures perspective), and to acknowledge power as major constituent of CCM (power-sensitive perspective). These five perspectives are conceptual and not completely separate in research and practice, nonetheless thinking about a Critical CCM in terms of these perspectives serves to contribute to a more culturally- and historically-aware, power-sensitive and reflexive CCM theory and practice.

Short Bio
Jasmin Mahadevan is professor of International and Cross-Cultural Management at Pforzheim University, Germany. She received her master’s degree in International Business and Cultural Studies, and her doctoral degree in Cultural Anthropology and Intercultural Communication. Her background can be described as multi-cultural, multi-lingual and multi-ethnic; she has lived an internationally mobile life and has experienced cross-cultural management as a researcher, as an intercultural trainer and consultant, and as an academic. Her research interests include critical cross-cultural management, diversity and identity, reflexivity, postcolonial studies, and ethnography. She is also the author of the Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book about Cross-Cultural Management (Sage, 2017).

https://www.hs-pforzheim.de/en/profile/jasminmahadevan/

Professor Jasmin Mahadevan can be contacted at jasmin.mahadevan@hs-pforzheim.de.