Dear colleagues,

Together with other scholars, I am trying to put together a symposium for AoM 2013 on

Intercultural Engineering in an interconnected world

We think that this topic deserves special attention in theory and practice and has not yet been considered to its fullest.

We would be happy to get more scholars on board, so please let me know whether you would like to contribute to such a symposium.

For details, please see below or the document attached.

Best regards,

Jasmin Mahadevan

mailto: jasmin.mahadevan@pforzheim-university.de

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Prof. Dr. Jasmin Mahadevan

Professor and Dean of Studies / International Management

Department of Business Administration and Engineering

School of Engineering

Pforzheim University

Germany

AACSB ACCREDITED

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Proposal for AoM 2013 Research Symposium                

Beyond cross-cultural management: Understanding, integrating and improving

Intercultural Engineering in an Interconnected World

Today's working spheres are interconnected through technology. Additionally, many individuals work across cultures and locations. We refer to these fields as intercultural engineering. With this term, we mean any intercultural professional, managerial or organizational field that is characterized by a high importance of technology and specialized knowledge of those working in this field. When speaking of intercultural engineering, we refer to all work contexts that integrate technology and specialized work practice across perceived borders of culture on micro-individual, meso-organizational or macro-societal level (see Mahadevan / Mayer 2012).

We argue that the field of intercultural engineering as defined above is currently underexplored in theory and practice due to two reasons. Firstly, cross-cultural management and intercultural communication theories tend to focus on the managerial context. Yet, intercultural competency is linked to contextualized professional skills. Hence, current intercultural theory and practice might not fit to the fields of intercultural engineering; additionally, intercultural / cross-cultural researchers and practitioners might lack the understanding of how cultural sense is made in technical fields. Secondly, many theories and practices of CCM learning are based on a pre-web understanding of intercultural interaction as being human-to-human interaction, e.g. through expatriation or actual physical moves across cultures. We, however, argue that humans and machines/systems are interconnected across the spaces of web 3.0. Based on supporting technology, intercultural collaboration has become complex and immediate. This involves human-to-human, human-to-machine and machine-to-machine interaction. We focus on human-to-machine and human-to-human interactions in these virtual spaces, thereby linking the cross-cultural to concepts such as the internet of things (IoT) or cyber-physical systems.

We argue that the fragmentation and compartmentalization of managerial thought and action along the demarcation line between technology/engineering and management/culture harms both fields: The technological experts do not have the theories and tools for enhanced and optimized processes of intercultural engineering. The intercultural experts lack the technological understanding of the fields in which actual intercultural engineering takes place. Consecutively, there are theories and best practice models for either engineering or the managerial sphere, but there is no best practice model for integrated intercultural engineering in an interconnected world.

In our symposium, we intend to conceptualize how culture, virtuality and technology intertwine and what that means for current cross-cultural / intercultural theory and practice. In doing so, we map the field of intercultural engineering in an interconnected world. By doing so, we intend to contribute to the development of intercultural theories and practice which fit to the technical fields of intercultural engineering and are meaningful to those working in them. We aim at bringing together experts of culture and technology to develop an integrated understanding of technological intercultural fields as intercultural engineering in an interconnected world.

How to contribute:

Please email your ideas and comments or a short outline of your proposed contribution to: jasmin.mahadevan@pforzheim-university.de    

References

Mahadevan, J. / Mayer, C.-H. (2012), Collaborative approaches to intercultural engineering, Intercultural Engineering, Special Issue of Interculture Journal 03/2012, pp.5-15.; www.interculture-journal.com

Mahadevan, J. (2012b), Are engineers religious? An interpretative approach to cross-cultural conflict and collective identities, International Journal of Cross-Cultural Management 12(1), pp. 133-149.

Mahadevan, J. (2012a), Engineering culture(s) across sites – implications for cross-cultural management of emic meanings, in: Primecz, H., Romani, L., Sackmann, S. (eds.), Cross-Cultural Management in Practice: Culture and Negotiated Meanings, London, E. Elgar, pp. 156-174.