Date/Time
Date(s) - 24/02/2026 3:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Audience:
LUBS Online Guest Lecture Series
Ethnography in International Business: Learning from the Field
With Professor Mary Yoko Brannen
Tuesday 24th February 2026 (15.00-17.00 UK time, online via Zoom)
Summary
In today’s globalized world, a deep understanding of how culture affects international business phenomena is critical to scholarship and practice. Yet, armed with only superficial measures of national cultural differences proliferated by easy-to-use, statistically testable, aggregated cultural dimensions, scholars and practitioners find themselves stereotype rich and operationally poor where culture meets real-world international business context. “Culture” is often used synonymously with national culture. It is substantially more complex than this and is made up of multi-faceted interacting spheres of culture (national, regional, institutional, organizational, functional) differentially enacted by individuals many of whom are multicultural themselves.
Settings in international business are therefore rife with multilevel cultural interactions as individuals with diverging cultural assumptions are brought together in real time (often virtually) across distance and differentiated contexts. Consequently, traditional positivist approaches to understanding culture fall short of adequately capturing the complexity of cultural phenomena in international organizations. Ethnography with its two essential elements – fieldwork, including its central methodological building block of participant observation, and its focus on culture – is the most effective approach for gaining insights into such microlevel embedded cultural phenomena.
Drawing from her new book on ethnography in international business (Cambridge University Press), Professor Mary Yoko Brannen will address three distinct analytical modes of ethnographic inquiry relative to IB theorizing building with increasing scope from the most micro level of analysis—that of a single organization—building up to the global strategic context of the multinational corporation.
Speaker bio
Mary Yoko Brannen is Professor Emerita at San José State University and Honorary Professor of International Business at the Copenhagen Business School. Professor Brannen pioneered the use of ethnographic methods in IB to understand and theorize from complex cultural phenomena. Her early in-depth studies of the internationalization of large multinational firms such as Disney and NSK Ball Bearings are noted for contributing the constructs of negotiated culture, recontextualization, and biculturals as natural boundary-spanners to the field. She was appointed Fellow of the Academy of International Business in 2016 having served as Deputy Editor of the Journal of International Business Studies for two consecutive elected terms (2011-2016).
At a time when large-scale, cross-sectional, quantitative studies were the norm in the field’s leading journal, Professor Brannen is credited with broadening the range of research methods recognized by IB scholars to include qualitative mixed methods studies, ethnography, semiotics, and linguistical analysis.Professor Brannen previously held the Jarislowsky East Asia (Japan) Chair of Cross Cultural Management at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada and has served as a Visiting Professor at INSEAD, Fontainebleau, France, Stanford University, California, U.S.A, and Keio University, Tokyo, Japan. She was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Department of International Economics, Government and Management at CBS in 2016. She currently sits on the Advisory Boards of the Master of International Business at the Stockholm School of Economics in Sweden, the Groupe d’Études Management & Language (GEM&L) in France, and the Center for Japanese Studies at Portland State University in the U.S.
How to register
If you would like to join this online session, please register via the link at the top of the page.