Shifting Frames: Contextualizing Biculturalism in International Business Research

Bicultural individuals, who identify with and internalize more than one culture, represent a growing and valuable workforce demographic with unique skills to work and bridge across cultures. Not only do biculturals often speak multiple languages – they also possess superior metacognition, which is crucial for today’s complex global organizations. While extensive research in experimental psychology and international business (IB) has significantly advanced our knowledge about biculturals and biculturalism, studies involving biculturals inside actual organizational settings are limited. Therefore, questions about whether global organizations recognize the innate potential of biculturals and how biculturals manage their identities and utilize their latent skillsets at work remain largely unanswered. Understanding employees’ cultural identities is vital for global organizations to effectively translate and transfer knowledge across cultural, institutional and linguistic boundaries. Yet, we know little about what motivates and shapes the individual enactment of biculturalism. This raises two fundamental questions: how does ‘biculturality’ emerge in the interplay between context and agency, and how does this process impact organizational outcomes?
This dissertation explores these fundamental questions through three interconnected academic papers, drawing upon ethnographically inspired fieldwork totalling 6 months at two Danish companies in Japan. Adopting a social constructivist stance, it posits that cultural identity is continuously negotiated in social interaction, and thus never fixed or stable. Through one conceptual and two empirical studies, the dissertation contributes to organizational scholarship by contextualizing and situating theoretical concepts such as biculturalism, biculturality, and cultural identity within real-life Danish-Japanese organizational settings. In the conceptual study, the dissertation problematizes current organizational scholarship on biculturalism and calls for an epistemological shift from a stable objectivist-functionalist approach to a dynamic constructionist-interpretivist and/or constructivist-intersectional approach to allow for a more agentic view of how employees strategically manage and enact their biculturalism. In the first empirical study, it employs a micro-sociological lens to examine biculturalism as a resource for self-presentation. In the second empirical study, it applies a translation theory lens to explore how bicultural metacognitive skillsets shape cross-border knowledge transfer. Using an ethnographically inspired up close and grounded explorative approach, the dissertation reveals how biculturals enact their identities to achieve their goals and maintain internal consistency and authenticity. By applying a time-sensitive processual lens, it identifies when, how, and why language and cultural skills are utilized separately and in conjunction in organizational translation processes involving cross-border negotiations, global teamwork, and multi-directional knowledge transfer.
The dissertation makes four overall and distinct contributions. First, it synthesizes and problematizes existing IB research on biculturalism, challenging the field’s overreliance on psychological constructs like bicultural identity integration (BII) and cultural frameshifting (CFS) to sustain investigations of biculturalism from a distance. Instead, it promotes a negotiated and dynamic perspective on culture and identity, emphasizing that biculturalism comprises multiple stories situated within specific contexts. Second, through two empirical studies it provides rare insights into the phenomenon of biculturalism as it is experienced, managed, and reflexively enacted by biculturals. These studies highlight the lived experiences of biculturals and qualitatively assess how these experiences may productively (or unproductively) shape organizational processes of knowledge transfer through the way bicultural individuals reflexively enact their ‘biculturality’. Third, the dissertation contributes a more nuanced understanding of the overlaps and differences between linguistic and cultural skills in facilitating processes of knowledge translation and transfer, thus teasing apart the similar, yet fundamentally different constructs of biculturalism and bilingualism. Fourth, it shows how the interplay between context, agency, and skillsets predicated upon culture and language becomes a vital ‘translator competence’ shaping organizational efforts to translate and change deeply embedded practices despite cultural, institutional and linguistic barriers. Overall, this dissertation underscores the importance of considering how biculturality is socially negotiated and individually enacted in real-life organizations ultimately determining whether and how the promise of latent biculturalism is fulfilled.