Intercultural Understanding and Transcultural Identity Work in Globalised Work Contexts
Globalisation is characterised by the cooperation of people from different cultural contexts. Working in intercultural teams is becoming the norm as globalisation progresses. The members of such teams are required to develop forms of intercultural cooperation (intercultural practices) and to establish communicative connectivity (intercultural understanding). People are required to develop ways of working and communicating that relate the different cultural perspectives to each other in a solution-oriented way. Intercultural cooperation in such work teams creates a new social framework. This framework can only be kept relatively stable if people are willing and able to reshape their identities rooted in their cultural orientations accordingly. What is required of them is transcultural identity work. With our project, funded by the German Research Foundation, we are pursuing the goal of working out typical aspects of transcultural communication and identity work in work contexts in a qualitative sociological study of knowledge.
For the implementation of our study, we have won Deutsche Lufthansa as a cooperation partner and thus found access to a field suitable for an empirical analysis. Lufthansa AG enables us to analyse the interaction of Indian and German flight attendants who work together in teams on Lufthansa's Indian flights on the basis of qualitative expert interviews with the management, narrative interviews with the Indian and German flight attendants and participant observations. This field of interaction, the intercultural flight attendant teams, is very well suited for our concerns because here the differentiation of cultural identity (trans)formations under conditions of globalisation is taken to extremes and becomes empirically tangible. Thus, with regard to communication, cooperation and motivation of intercultural working groups, answers can emerge that are of theoretical as well as practical relevance.
DFG project in cooperation with the University of Duisburg-Essen and the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, Essen (KWI)
KWI project page