8. Using Multiple Case Studies To Generalize From Ethnographic Research

124
8. Using multiple case studies to
generalize from ethnographic
research
Mary Yoko Brannen
INTRODUCTION
Ethnographic method has been praised for its utility in inducing theory.
Noted for its high level of external validity,1
this is at once the key meth-
odological strength and weakness of ethnography. On the one hand, there
is no question (provided the ethnographer is well trained and disciplined
in the methodology) that the research has verisimilitude with the research
site. On the other, it is unclear whether what has been learned is generaliz-
able to other sites. In this chapter, as an organizational theorist trained
as an ethnographer, I reflect upon my own research trajectory to show
how I naturally fell into a way out of this methodological conundrum.
Over time, fuelled by intellectual curiosity not only to describe interesting
organizational phenomena but also to build theory, I developed a meth-
odology of using multiple follow-up case studies to deductively test con-
structs and frameworks induced from what I term a ‘focal ethnography’.
In addition to providing advice for choosing and using case studies as
a supplement to ethnographic method in international business research,
this chapter provides an in-depth illustrative research example that led to
the development and refinement of the construct of recontextualization
how transferred firm offerings take on new meanings in distinct organi-
zational contexts. I first review what ethnography is – method and intent,
strengths and limitations – and what I see as its potential contribution to
international business research, showing several ways in which researchers
have strived to generalize from ethnography. I then formalize the method
of ‘focal ethnography with multi-case study triangulation’ by means of
a framework, while firmly establishing the distinction between ethnog-
raphy and case study research, and provide an in-depth example of the
use of this method around the induction and testing of the construct of
‘recontextualization’.
M2576 - PIEKKARI PRINT.indd 124 17/02/2011 15:40

Using multiple case studies to generalize from ethnographic research 125
ETHNOGRAPHY
As Fiona Moore points out in Chapter 17, ethnography is a research
method specifically developed for describing cultural phenomena. If we
go back to the Greek roots of the word ‘ethnography’, we can break it
down into two parts: (i) ‘ethnos’ (έθνος) meaning people (generally of the
same race or nationality) who share a culture; and (ii) ‘graphein’ (γράφειν),
meaning writing. In other words, ethnography is writing about culture;
and, as Van Maanen and Barley (1984) have argued, although culture is
a group-level phenomenon, it is enacted and sustained at the individual
level by ongoing interactions between people in a specific organizational
context. Ethnography then is the method of choice when seeking to illumi-
nate holistic accounts of people’s cultures.
Anthropologists originated and honed this method predominantly for the
sake of description alone – the method reaching its descriptive peak within
the field of interpretative anthropology with Clifford Geertz’s (1973) coining
of the term ‘thick description’. Ethnographies written by anthropologists
generally read as heavily textured narrative accounts (at best) or rather dry
catalogues (at worst) of the behaviours, values and norms of a given group
of people. Perhaps the most unique aspect of ethnography with respect to
other research methodologies is that the researcher, as participant observer
– deeply ensconced in the field site – is in and of him-/herself the primary
research tool. As such, special care is taken in the field of anthropology to
explicate methodological issues concerning the ethnographer’s own effect
on the research site. In fact, the criticality of the role of the researcher in
ethnographic method spurred what became known as the ‘crisis of anthro-
pology’ in the late 1980s, and continues to be debated in epistemological
writings on ‘ethnographic authority’ and ‘reflexivity’ (for example, Abu-
Lughod 1986; Clifford and Marcus 1986; and Marcus and Fischer 1999).
Validity and, to a lesser extent, replicability (or ‘restudy reliability’ as
it is often called in anthropology; see Kirk and Miller 1986) of the eth-
nographic findings matter in order for the research to contribute to an
authentic body of knowledge regarding specific cultures and to our under-
standing of world cultures in general. Perhaps the most public case of the
subjective variability of ethnographers on research is Derek Freeman’s
(1983) critique of Margaret Mead’s classic, Coming of Age in Samoa
(1926). Generalizability of ethnographic findings, however, has not been
a key concern of ethnographic inquiry. In fact, given that ethnographic
method was developed with the intent to illuminate specific cultural con-
texts, the generalization of ethnographic findings would seem to contra-
dict this original intent, if not the core epistemelogical foundations of the
interpretative research paradigm whence it arose.

126 Rethinking the case study
Ethnography and International Business Research
In international business, we generally want to know about culture in order
to understand how culture might affect foreign direct investment (FDI),
mergers and acquisitions, market entry, transfer of technology, organiza-
tional processes, norms and the like. Despite the fact that the term ‘culture’ is
more often than not used synonymously with national culture in the field of
international business, it is decidedly a multifaceted and complex construct
involving the coming together of various spheres of culture – including
national, regional, institutional, organizational, functional and so on – that
people negotiate on an ongoing basis (Brannen and Salk 2000). Moreover,
research settings in international business are rife with multilevel cultural
interactions due to diverging cultural assumptions brought together in real
time by the merging (often virtually) of individuals across distance and
differentiated contexts (Brannen 2009). Consequently, traditional positiv-
ist approaches to understanding culture fall short in adequately capturing
the complexity of cultural phenomena in international organizations (see
Lincoln and Guba 1985; Baghat et al. 2002). Ethnography with its two
essential elements – fieldwork, including its central methodological building
block of participant observation, and a focus on culture – is, as many have
argued, perhaps the most effective method for gaining insights into micro-
level embedded cultural phenomena (Van Maanen 1988).
Another equally important aspect of ethnographic methodology that
is particularly useful to international business research is that it is one of
the most effective methods to utilize when the organizational phenom-
enon under study is relatively new. In an otherwise heated debate on the
strengths and weaknesses of single versus multiple case study methodol-
ogy taken up by Dyer and Wilkins (1991) and Kathleen Eisenhardt in the
Academy of Management Review (1991), there is agreement that in-depth,
single case studies are particularly useful for inductive theory building
in the early stages of a field of research. The strength of in-depth, eth-
nographic studies, such as those of Whyte (1943), Gouldner (1954) and
Dalton (1959) – classics in the field of sociology – and Van Maanen (1975),
Weick (1993), Perlow (1997) and Kunda (2006) in the field of organiza-
tional studies, are in their generation of strong constructs that advance
theory and may in fact serve as the basis for deductive theory testing. As
these examples illustrate, ethnographic methodology has ventured outside
of the realm of anthropology to induce relevant and cutting-edge theory
in organizational settings. However, rarely has ethnography been used in
international business research. This is due in part to the difficulty of con-
ducting ethnographic research in one’s home culture, let alone a foreign
one, and to the time commitment involved. These barriers are, of course,

exacerbated by the bias towards positivist, large-scale quantitative deduc-
tive studies in management research in general.
Nascent and evolving contexts such as changing geographical bounda-
ries, emerging markets, countries with economies in transition, new
workplace demographics such as people with mixed cultural origins (for
example, biculturals, multiculturals and global cosmopolitans) are the
sine qua non of international business. As such, ethnographic method
has much to offer international business research. In sum, it is particu-
larly useful under the following conditions: (i) when the research agenda
involves understanding micro-level cultural phenomena and (ii) when
the organizational phenomenon is relatively new and there is very little
research on which to base one’s theoretical orientation.
Generalizing from Ethnography
Anthropologists have never denied that the observations of the ethnogra-
pher as participant observer are limited, subjective and often speculative.
The discussion cited above on ethnographic authority and the importance
given to reflexivity as a way of contextualizing the role of the ethnographer
makes this quite clear. As research becomes less about description and
more about theory development, there is an increased risk that ethno-
graphic observations will become even more limited (Naroll and Cohen
1973). The crisis of anthropology precipitated researchers to shy away
from simply presenting thick descriptions of cultural phenomena and to
begin augmenting such studies by using the observations to generate ideas
and constructs that might apply outside of any specific culture. This new
aim for ethnography is in keeping with the need in international business
research to find a way of linking the understandings gleaned from ethnog-
raphy to the multiplicity of cultural contexts in international businesses.
In order to extract general theory from empirical ethnographic observa-
tions, some type of comparative analysis must be utilized. Doing so calls
for a comparative approach between extant theory and practice where
the researcher looks for the repeating categories, thinks about relation-
ships among them and then begins to ask why such relationships exist.
This involves a new orientation to ethnographic and also qualitative
research in general because it implies a shift from the ‘ideographic’, in
which the researcher strives to offer a thick description of the research
site, to the ‘nomothetic’, where the researcher searches for constants and
regularities in the data (see Burrell and Morgan 1979). The shift towards
nomothetic research then pulls the researcher into making inferences and
validating interpretations, practices that have been refined by quantitative
researchers (Preview and Fielding-Barnsley 1990).

An obvious way of spanning the breadth of this shift would be to utilize
a multimethod approach involving qualitative/quantitative between-
method triangulation. An example of this would be a ‘T’ design where the
horizontal part of the ‘T’ would be an ethnography or an in-depth qualita-
tive study. This would serve to induce constructs and perhaps scale items
that could then be deductively tested at the site by means of a question-
naire (for example, Brannen and Peterson 2009) and then expanded into
a large-scale cross-sectional study – the vertical aspect of the ‘T’ – that
would serve to generalize the findings to a larger population.
Brannen and Peterson used this type of between-method design to
induce and test the construct of alienation in bicultural work contexts. A
between-method triangulation was performed at the ethnographic site to
(i) test whether the construct was prevalent and (ii) build the scale items to
complement previous alienation scales. The scale items can then be used in
a cross-sectional study of a population of cross-border merger and acquisi-
tion sites to deductively test the generalizability of the construct. Thus, the
‘T’-design can be used to generalize to the whole of an organization or to a
larger population (such as all Japanese-owned companies/FDI). This type
of a between-method design is the most challenging for an ethnographer to
execute as a single researcher because it calls for an epistemological schizo-
phrenia of sorts and it may be the best choice to do such a method in a
pairing up of a qualitative and quantitative methodologist (Romani 2008).
Distinction between Ethnography and Case Studies
It is important to underscore here the distinction between ethnography
and case study. For an anthropologist, there is a significant difference
between them, but for the average organizational researcher the focal
ethnography described above may seem nothing more than an in-depth
case study. In other words, it seems that the distinction between the two
methods is generally seen by organizational researchers as a difference in
degree rather than kind. Some noted qualitative researchers in the field of
strategy have even coined a new methodological term, as it were, by refer-
ring to their own work as ‘mini-ethnographies’ (a term that would be an
obvious oxymoron to anthropologists).
In fact, the distinction between the two methods is a matter of both
degree and kind. In kind, ethnographies and case studies differ with regard
to subject matter, research intent, methodology and research outcome. If a
researcher conducts a case study, it means that there is a specific research
site and the methodology of choice is to interview key players at the site
with regard to the research question. Case studies are designed to elicit
accounts of specific incidents, events or decisions and offer an academic

interpretation of one instance or event that is the object of research. As
such, case studies are generally retrospective. Although the intent of case
studies is usually to build theory, case study methodology may also be
used to test theory, as is often done in multiple case study research where
structured or semi-structured interview schedules are employed in order to
replicate and deduce the generalizability of research findings.
Ethnographic study is decidedly more restricted in focus as it is a method
designed specifically for the study of groups of individuals (cultures) with
the intent to describe and understand how they function – their norms and
patterns of behaviour, values and basic assumptions. The research intent of
ethnography is also more restrictive than the case study eliciting either thick
description in and of itself, or induced theoretical constructs, models and
frameworks around cultural phenomena that are new and undiscovered,
and/or emergent and evolving. Although it is possible to conduct a historical
ethnography using secondary data and narrative accounts of experienced
cultural phenomena, ethnographies are generally conducted in the present
moment and are focused on understanding ongoing cultural phenomena.
The research outcomes of ethnography are detailed narrative accounts of
cultural phenomena told as much as possible from the native’s point of view.
Both approaches involve field study (in other words, research conducted
in situ as opposed to in an ‘ivory tower’ as is the norm for survey research,
lab experiments, simulations and so on). However, because the intent of
ethnography is to gain a close and intimate familiarity with a given group
of individuals and their practices, capturing as much as possible the native
point of view, participant observation is a key aspect of the methodology.
The method originated in fieldwork of social anthropologists, especially
Bronistaw Malinowski and his students in Britain, the students of Franz
Boas in the United States, and in the urban research of the Chicago School
of sociology. A key principle of the method is that one may not merely
observe, but must also find a role within the group under observation from
which to participate in some manner, even if only as ‘outside observer’.
Participant observation, therefore, is limited to contexts where the com-
munity under study understands and permits it.
The discussion of participant observation brings up a final and impor-
tant distinction between case studies and ethnography that is perhaps
more in the order of a difference in degree rather than kind. Both case
study researchers and ethnographers want to elicit an understanding of
phenomena from the field site. However, the amount of time spent in
the field and the methodological approach to collecting the data vary
significantly by degree between the approaches. Since the ethnographer’s
aim is to understand predominantly tacit, complex, contextually embed-
ded, existential phenomena, the amount of time spent in the field must be

substantial – to an anthropologist this means at least one year, though this
to most would still seem too brief especially if the site involves learning or
perfecting a new language on the part of the researcher. Case studies vary
largely with regard to length of time at the site, from a handful of on-site
meetings to spending a year at a production plant.
Further, depending on whether the case study is designed to build
or test theory, the data collection methods and, in particular, the care
given to making as sure as it is possible to elicit the native’s point of view
rather than impose a priori theorizing varies significantly between the two
methods. Anthropologists undergo strict and intensive training in order to
hone the skill of participant observation at practice research sites prior to
going into the field. This is undertaken in order to train the ethnographer
in how to maintain the important balance between being both an outsider
and an insider, while intensively interacting with people in their natural
environment over an extended period. Reaching and maintaining this
balance is not easy, but it is critical from the research perspective of an
ethnographer. Since the bulk of cultural phenomena is tacit, deeply social-
ized, implicit knowledge and as such, invisible, as it were, to insiders, the
ethnographer’s outside point of view is integral to being able to surface
the interlocking, taken-for-granted, aspects of the culture under study.
In other words, ethnographers must get close enough to the context to
look at it from the native point of view, but not so close that they lose the
advantage of their outside perspective.
Finally, it is important to note the distinction between action research
(a variant of case study research) and ethnography. Again, this may also
be a variance in degree as opposed to kind. Action research refers to a
method established in the field of social psychology (Lewin 1946) wherein
the researcher acts as a change agent for the field site. In this method, the
researcher goes into the field site with the clear intention of having an
impact on the organization much as a hired consultant would. The differ-
ence between action research and consultancy is that action researchers
aim to research the effect of change efforts on organizations. Accordingly,
they pay close attention to the effect they have on the research site by
employing pre- and post-measures regarding the object of the research,
attributing a large part of the difference to the effect of the outside agent
(themselves). With ethnography, the researcher is at pains to try not to
affect the research phenomenon while knowing full well that being at a site
intensively for extended periods of time will have an effect on it. This is a
significant operational conundrum for ethnographers and as such has led
to the formalization of the practice of reflexive inquiry wherein the ethnog-
rapher goes to great lengths to document his/her effect on the research site
(see Dwyer 1982; Abu-Lugod 1986as exemplars of this method).

FOCAL ETHNOGRAPHY WITH MULTI-CASE STUDY
TRIANGULATION
Another type of between-method approach that is more in keeping with
the epistemological orientation of ethnography is to follow up a focal eth-
nography with multiple case studies to expand and test the theory so that it
can be generalized to other industries and organizational contexts. This is
an especially useful approach when not much is known about the research
question. Since this is a methodological approach that has not been docu-
mented previously, the rest of this chapter offers a detailed description of
the method illustrated both graphically (Figure 8.1), as well as by means of
a detailed example of this methodology used in my own research around
the building and deductive extensions of the construct of recontextu-
alization. While the use of multiple case studies (see Figure 8.1) needs no
further explanation than previously discussed herein and in this volume, I
shall now briefly discuss the less familiar elements of this research design
– the focal ethnography and optional comparative ethnography – before
explicating this design with my own research examples.
The Focal Ethnography
The focal ethnography is the starting point from which general under-
standing and the inklings of new constructs are induced. In order to induce
theory, several within-method triangulations are used to check for internal
validity (see focal ethnography ellipse in Figure 8.1). These ethnographic
strategies for validation included the following: (i) the use of multiple data
collection methods for primary and secondary data; (ii) the documentation
of different perspectives on the phenomenon under study by means of con-
ducting formal and informal ongoing interviews with key informants from
differing functional, hierarchical, departmental and national groups; and
(iii) the repetition of data collection over time for each method employed.
This third strategy is frequently operationalized by conducting prolonged
participant observation at a field site and by interviewing the same inform-
ants at different time periods throughout a course of study. The following
are examples from my own work using focal ethnographies to induce
theory: (i) a model of issue-driven, contextually negotiated culture for
understanding organizational culture evolution over time in cross-border
mergers and acquisitions (Brannen 1994; Brannen and Salk 2000); (ii)
the construct of bicultural alienation as a variation on work alienation in
complex cultural arenas (Brannen and Peterson 2009); (iii) the construct
of recontextualization – how firm offerings take on new meanings in new
contexts (Brannen 2004); and (iv) understanding biculturalism as the new

workplace demographic and as a hidden yet critical strategic human
resource (Brannen et al. 2009).
Optional Comparative Ethnography
A comparative ethnography is often helpful (see Figure 8.1). This can
be conceived of in two ways: as part of the original research design,
done simultaneously (for example, Barley 1996; Brannen et al. 1999),
or post hoc as a follow-up to the original ethnography (see Brannen and
Salk 2000; Brannen 2004; O’Mahony and Bechky 2006). Comparative
Semi-structured interview schedules
developed from Ethnography
Focal Ethnography
Multiple Data
Collection
Methods
Multiple
Perspectives
Multiple Time
Periods
Collect, Compare
and
Contrast
Multiple Case Studies
Between-method
Triangulation
Within-method
Triangulation
Comparative Ethnography (Optional)
Figure 8.1 Focal ethnography multiple case study triangulation

ethnographies in the field of anthropology are generally conducted in
order to collect, compare and contrast diverse ethnographic data that can
be used in cross-cultural analyses of human culture and behaviour. Each
ethnography is a ‘stand-alone’ study that is then compared with other
ethnographies on specific cultural content areas such as kinship rela-
tions, coming of age rituals, eating habits and so on. The Ethnographic
Database Project (EDP) is a web-based interface for the collection and
standardization of such comparative ethnographic data. Founded by the
Societé Internationale d’Ethnologie et de Folklore (SIEF) established in
Athens in 1968, the EDP enables anthropologists to enter information
about their field research using a set of standard codes developed for
cross-cultural application. The codes relate to a society’s organization,
kinship and marriage practices, subsistence economy, and pattern of
sexual division of labour.
In organizational studies in general, and international business research
especially, comparative ethnographies are useful in order to further gener-
ate theory by comparing and contrasting two like pairs of field data that
vary just slightly, for example, across distance or differentiated contexts
(national cultural, organizational, institutional, technological and so on).
A comparative ethnography in this sense is another type of within-method
triangulation where a whole ethnographic study is mirrored or replicated
as the case may be. This might also be seen as an ethnographic extension
of the constant comparative method (see Glaser and Strauss 1967) to
uncover further aspects of a construct that might not have been gleaned
by studying a single field site. It is often the situation that one can uncover
more about the nature of what something is by learning more deeply of
what it is not within the confines of multifaceted similitude.
A CASE ILLUSTRATION OF THEORY
DEVELOPMENT AROUND THE CONSTRUCT OF
RECONTEXTUALIZATION
The Initial Focal Ethnography
Recontextualization is the transformation of the meaning of firm offerings
(technologies, work practices, products and so on) as they are uprooted
from one cultural environment and transplanted to another. The origi-
nal ideas around this construct were developed from an initial descrip-
tive ethnography of Tokyo Disneyland that I conducted as a graduate
student from a radical humanist perspective (Burrell and Morgan 1979)
as a graduate student in cultural anthropology, in which the main thesis

induced in the study was that a quintessentially American cultural artefact
was appropriated by the Oriental Land Company and used to advance a
sense of Japanese cultural hegemony in the Pacific Rim. To quote from the
original study, I surmised the following:
What is significant about this recontextualization of Disneyland is that it com-
plicates the usual way we understand cross-cultural hegemony. In the Western
imperialist model of hegemony, imported cultural artifacts are either imposed
intact onto the Other’s culture or are domesticated by the Other; in either case
the move is to make the exotic familiar. But, in the case of Tokyo Disneyland,
the owners have insisted upon constructing an exact copy of the original and
thereby keeping the exotic exotic to the point of effectively denying that they
have familiarized it. My explanation for this difference in the way that Disney
cultural artifacts are imported is that it represents a specific Japanese form of
cultural imperialism. The process of assimilation of the West, the recontextu-
alization of Western simulacra, demonstrates not that the Japanese are being
dominated by Western ideologies, but that they differentiate their identity from
the West in a way that reinforces their sense of their own cultural superiority, or
what we might call Japanese hegemony. (Brannen 1992, pp. 220–21)
The Follow-up Comparative Ethnography
After I had started my first academic assignment in a business school
and needed to focus my research more directly on management-related
outcomes, I conducted a follow-up comparative ethnography of Tokyo
Disneyland and Disneyland Paris to further develop theory around the
central question of how cultural contexts affect internationalization
(Brannen and Wilson 1996). This secondary study was motivated in large
part by the fact that the empirical evidence did not support extant theory
on internationalization. Specifically, whereas Prahalad and Doz’s (1987)
global integration versus local responsiveness framework suggests that
Disney should have favoured a global integration strategy in both cases
due to Disney’s globally recognized brandname and inimitable core com-
petencies, this strategy when employed in Japan was met with extreme
success but when employed in France was met with unanticipated failure.
To exacerbate matters, cultural similarity theory would have predicted
that Disney would have been more successful in the cultural context it
was most similar to (France as opposed to Japan) – yet the opposite was
found. Finally, FDI theory suggests that foreignness should be a liability,
but Disney’s first attempt at internationalization into Japan – a country
with high cultural distance from the USA – proved more successful than
Disney’s wildest dreams and continues to be so despite Japan’s ongoing
recession. In any case, many unexpected outcomes, both positive and
negative, emerged. Thus, I decided to conduct a comparative analysis

of ethnographic data from Tokyo Disneyland and Disneyland Paris to
explore the factors that led to these unexpected results.
The data were collected over a period of five years combining repeated
site visits, archival research at the Disney Archives in Burbank and at
the Anaheim Public Library in California, and in-depth interviews with
Disney executives, ride operators, and theme park customers in the US,
Tokyo and Paris. My aim was to uncover how the unexpected outcomes
came about so as to unbundle what otherwise might be attributed to
good or bad luck in the internationalization process by developing a
more sophisticated understanding of the issues of global integration and
local responsiveness that goes beyond strategic fit. From this comparative
ethnography, using semiotic analytic tools from linguistic anthropology,
the construct of recontextualization and the recipient host environment’s
role in transforming firm offerings (see Figure 8.2, initially presented in
Brannen et al. 1999 and fully expanded in Brannen 2004) were induced.
In brief, this comparative ethnography expanded my understanding
of recontextualization beyond observing its occurrence and the active
role the recipient culture has in cross-national transfer to being able to
more clearly articulate the process of recontextualization including the
identification of three distinct instances of semiosis (skidding of seman-
tic fit). Every cultural environment is embedded with its own system of
organizational signification involving distinct work-related assumptions,
Firm
Oﬀerings
Pre-existing
Meaning
Resultant
Meaning
Positive Negative
Reflexive
Semiosis
Initial
Semiosis
Ongoing
Semiosis
New Institutional Context
Figure 8.2 The process of recontextualization of firm offerings

behaviours and practices. Given this, misalignments easily occur between
what is sent from abroad and how it is perceived locally. The compara-
tive ethnographies showed that recontextualization involves both how
firm offerings are initially understood as well as how meanings evolve in a
new environment. By comparing and contrasting the two ethnographies, I
was able to illuminate how transferred offerings go through a preliminary
round of recipient cultural sensemaking in which they are assimilated into
pre-existing meanings, then, as they are implemented, acted on, and inter-
acted with, they continue to undergo recontextualization. As depicted in
Figure 8.2, I was further able to capture the important observation that
recontextualization can have both negative and positive effects on a firm’s
internationalization, thus turning on its head, as it were, the notion of
‘liability of foreignness’ (LOF) in international business. Successful recon-
textualization, if the process is properly understood, can become a source
of organizational learning and, in turn, become a competitive advantage.
Unsuccessful recontextualization, on the other hand, in line with and
extending what we know of LOF, will result in lost opportunities for
site-specific learning and strategic realignment, and may seriously hinder
transfer efforts in the most severe cases.
Yet, the comparative ethnography also revealed that planning for and
monitoring recontextualization are not simple matters. In most cases man-
agers are initially unaware of all but the most obvious aspects of recon-
textualization, such as differences in company language, organizational
structure, shop-floor layout, and industrial and supplier relations. Much
of recontextualization happens in situ and in real time; as such, it cannot
be planned for. At best, managers become aware of recontextualization as
they are confronted with organizational barriers to implementing technol-
ogy transfer. What they are aware of is only a small part of what is. So,
how might my work help reduce some of the uncertainty around recon-
textualization and offer guidance to individuals in multinational organiza-
tions on how to monitor and manage this inevitable process?
The Multiple Case Study Triangulation
In terms of theory building, even though recontextualization was an inte-
gral part of the internationalization story for a highly people-dependent
industry like theme parks, it was unclear whether the construct would
be critical in harder industries such as automobiles or paper, or in high-
technology industries such as semiconductors and the like. In order to find
out whether the construct was generalizable outside of people-dependent
industries, I designed a between-method triangulation research agenda
conducting multiple case studies guided by structured interview schedules

developed from focal ethnographies to deductively test and extend the
construct of recontextualization. Although I have subsequently extended
the domain of theory building around the construct of recontextualization
to other industries, including high-technology industries, for illustrative
purposes in this chapter, I have chosen to highlight the multiple case study
triangulation in the manufacture of ball-bearings because it is one of the
most dissimilar industries to theme parks, in that it involves hard technol-
ogy that is significantly less people dependent.
Generalizability of Recontextualization to a Contrasting Industry
NSK, Nippon Seiko Kooji, is the world’s second largest manufacturer of
ball-bearings after AB SKF of Sweden, with a 14 per cent share in the global
market. Following the general research design described in Figure 8.1, the
study commenced with a focal ethnography at NSK’s main parent plant in
Ishibe, Japan followed by a series of five comparative case studies in the US,
the UK, China and Brazil. These plants, seven in all – three in the US, two in
the UK, and one each in China and Brazil – were differentiated by context,
both geographically as well as by history and organizational structure:
some were unionized, some were greenfields and others were acquisitions.
The research team for the focal ethnographies in the US and Japan
comprised three members: a professor of engineering and specialist in
total quality control, a Japanese business historian fluent in Japanese,
and myself (also bilingual). The subsequent case study triangulations were
performed by myself – the lead ethnographer of the study. Data were
collected predominantly in English and Japanese, using interpreters in
China and Brazil, and were mostly qualitative in nature, relying heavily
on observation, semi-structured interviews, organizational documents and
other secondary data. We utilized a structured interview schedule because
the intent was to deductively test by means of the case studies whether or
not the construct of recontextualization was applicable to hard technol-
ogy industries (the polar opposite of entertainment) and if so, whether
further theory could be elaborated with regard to what kinds of firm offer-
ings are more or less vulnerable to recontextualization by comparing and
contrasting the findings from the two industries. The interview schedule
was greatly facilitated by the fact that due to its long history of interna-
tionalization, NSK had a clearly articulated strategy that included explicit
notions of what they wanted to transfer intact to their various subsidiaries.
Fitting with its lead position in the industry, NSK has many excellent
manufacturing practices characteristic of top Japanese manufacturers.
NSK’s plants, both in Japan and abroad, proudly display awards granted
by industry such as the ISO/QS 9000 certification, and customers such as

Toyota, Nissan, Chrysler and Ford have given NSK awards for excellence
in delivery, performance and quality. Mr Ueno, the plant manager of NSK’s
Ishibe plant – the designated parent plant to each of the overseas facilities in
the multiple case study – explained that these practices are integral parts of
NSK’s ‘bearing culture’ that must be transferred to make high-quality prod-
ucts efficiently. ‘Bearing culture’ is the way things are done within NSK to
make high-quality bearings, he intoned; ‘bearing culture’, he explained, ‘can
be transferred and used universally throughout NSK’s global enterprise’.
These sentiments were echoed by the vice president of corporate plan-
ning as well as engineers and managers in the overseas project division
both at Ishibe and at the Tokyo headquarters. NSK believes very strongly
in its engineering standards as essential to high-quality operations. High
precision is what drives bearing culture. Tolerances of plus or minus three
microns are common. At this level of precision even a speck of dirt can
throw off a bearing’s functioning. Follow-up interviews with Mr Ueno
and members of the internationalization division at headquarters sug-
gested that the formal standardized processes, techniques and procedures
that have evolved within NSK over decades is what they meant by ‘culture’
– in keeping with what Schein refers to as the artefact and norm levels of
culture (Schein 1985). This was what they wanted to transfer one to one.
Having such a clearly articulated transfer strategy around tangible arte-
facts greatly helped the research agenda, in that it was quite clear what to
look for and ask about in the pursuit of recontextualization at the subsidiary
plants. However, what NSK meant as ‘culture’ and what an anthropologist
generally includes in the scope of the term is quite distinct. Most notably,
missing from NSK’s view are the assumption-level aspects of culture that are
implicit and harder to surface and track. Indeed, there were certainly human
resource requirements that the successful transfer of NSK’s ‘ball-bearing
culture’ were predicated upon that NSK did not take into consideration. For
example, machine operators need to be flexible, oriented towards problem-
solving, and capable of maintaining the discipline needed to produce high-
quality bearings with a minimum of waste. This, in turn, assumes a shared
work culture among employees. However, NSK’s teams that were sent
overseas were not charged with transferring their work culture. Rather, in
essence, their job was to set up production equipment and machinery and to
teach standard operating procedures (SOPs) to supervisors and operators.
The ‘hard side’ of NSK’s production system (what NSK calls ‘hard-
ware’) – the equipment, technical process flow (such as heat treat and
machining), automation, and flexible assembly – generally is transferred
intact from Japan to its various country subsidiaries. NSK’s general
approach to overseas transfer of production technology is to design and
build equipment in Japan, set it up and debug it in a Japanese parent

facility, bring representatives of the overseas operation to Japan for train-
ing on the equipment, and then disassemble and ship it to the overseas
facility. It arrives with a complement of Japanese production engineers
who help with the local installation and debugging. The ‘soft side’ of NSK’s
production system (what NSK calls the ‘software’) has many common fea-
tures associated with Japanese manufacturing: a strong system of quality
assurance, now known as total quality management, a clean and orderly
workplace, very well-maintained equipment with thorough preventive
maintenance programmes, continuous flow production wherever possible,
flexible lines to reduce set-up times, and extensive inventory control.
Results: Evidence of Recontextualization
Initially, the research team was fearful that recontextualization would be all
but nil at the overseas subsidiaries due to how NSK understood their ‘ball-
bearing culture’ as predominantly ‘hard’ technological systems. However,
early on in the comparative case study process, preliminary interviews
with the plant manager and his Japanese assistant plant manager in one
of the US plants in Ann Arbor, Michigan uncovered significant disparities
in what they wanted to transfer and in what was actually transferred with
regard to the set of core practices and technologies included in their defi-
nition of a ‘ball-bearing culture’. Whereas many of NSK’s standards and
technical processes were transferred relatively unaltered, other processes
differed significantly between the plants, especially those that were people
dependent and therefore predicated on the existence of complementary
human systems in the subsidiary locales that were taken for granted and
therefore overlooked by the Japanese parent plant managers.
For example, although NSK’s Ann Arbor plant has turned out to be
something of a success story, success has by no means been realized in
a linear fashion, as the story of quality improvement in Ann Arbor will
attest. Over a one-year period from 1984 to 1985, Ann Arbor cut scrap
from 5 to 2.5 per cent. This was remarkable but it should be said that
quality had not improved in the 30 years prior to this time. With further
efforts, the scrap rate was reduced by a factor of five – to just under 0.5 per
cent. In other words, the scrap rate moved from 1 out of 20 parts to 1 out
of 200 parts during a 10-year period. Compared to NSK’s plants in Japan,
which run at 0.09 per cent scrap, Ann Arbor is still generating over five
times the scrap rate of its Japanese counterparts.
Preliminary interviews with local plant managers and their Japanese
counterparts at the parent plant in Ishibe, coupled with ongoing obser-
vation by the team of researchers on the shop-floor, uncovered numer-
ous disparities with regard to how core practices and technologies were

operationalized in situ at the transfer locations. We immediately noted
incongruence in what NSK intended to transfer and in what was actually
transferred. Most notably, the structure and meaning of workteams and
teamwork differed significantly between plants, particularly in the case
of NSK’s Ann Arbor plant, which was fully unionized and a brownfield
acquisition.
In interviews with the NSK’s Japanese transfer managers, they explained
that while they felt that it is necessary to provide technical assistance,
particularly in the early stages of overseas operations, to get equipment
running in accordance with NSK’s SOPs, it was not their business to
interfere in overseas personnel management issues, or what they called the
‘people side’ of management. It was as if technical standards and SOPs
were independent of the more social and cultural aspects of their system.
However, technology is always coupled with social and cultural
systems and if these linkages are left unmanaged, unexpected outcomes
occur, frustrating successful transfer. Japanese managers may say they do
not wish to change personnel management practices in America, yet there
is a great deal of cultural information being communicated to American
plants through Japanese expatriates and by regular visits of American plant
members to Japan, as the following quote shows: ‘We tell our American
managers that who is at fault is not important. If you criticize workers they
may feel embarrassed’ (Assistant to Plant Manager, Ann Arbor plant, 14
June 1995). While this statement is consistent with Japanese norms with
regard to work responsibility and social sanctions, an emphasis on ‘face-
saving’ is not the rule in the United States where blaming individuals is
more common.
In order to better understand why some aspects of NSK’s produc-
tion system were transferred fairly intact, while others met significant
barriers to implementation, we found it useful to sort the technologies.
We first sorted processes by whether they were ‘hard’ or ‘soft’ technolo-
gies. The sorting was motivated by NSK’s own custom of distinguishing
between ‘hardware’ and ‘software’ when referring to transferred proc-
esses. However, in line with the constant comparative method (Glaser and
Strauss 1967), we found that this distinction was supported by theory in
research on technology transfer that distinguishes between physical and
social technologies (Tornatzky and Fleischer 1990). Our informants at
NSK did not really elaborate what they meant by either term, but it was
clear that they were using ‘software’ as a shorthand for technologies that
were heavily people dependent. In analysing ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ technologies
and processes, the distinction is clearly based on the extent to which tech-
nologies and processes rely on accompanying organizational contexts. We
therefore named this dimension ‘contextual embeddedness’ and defined it

as the degree to which technologies and processes were more or less tightly
integrated with other technical and social contexts.
Tornatzky and Fleischer (p. 10) defined technology as ‘tools or tool
systems by which we transform parts of our environment, derived from
human knowledge, to be used for human purposes’. Using this broad
definition, a second categorical dimension became evident – the knowl-
edge base associated with the technology. By knowledge base we mean
something akin to what Kogut and Zander (1993) call ‘know-how’ associ-
ated with implementing and operating technology. ‘Know-how’ was well
articulated and codifiable in some cases, but not in others.
This led us to think about technologies in terms of the distinction
between their explicit and tacit knowledge base (Polanyi 1966; Nonaka
and Takeuchi 1995; Doz et. al 1996). Whereas the former type of knowl-
edge is relatively easy to articulate and document, the latter is not. Rather,
tacit knowledge is the taken-for-granted understandings associated with
techniques and processes that are learned over time through socialization
(interacting within an organization and with society at large). Tacit knowl-
edge is deeply embedded in a member’s consciousness and is therefore
difficult to access. These dimensions, induced by case data and supported
by theory, gave way to a recontextualization framework (Figure 8.3) for
understanding the vulnerability of firm offerings (both hard and soft) to
recontextualization in new user environments.
After identifying the two salient dimensions for categorization, we
mapped transferred technologies and processes on a grid with the x-axis
as the degree of contextual embeddedness (context free versus context
bound) and the y-axis as the degree of implicit or explicit knowledge base
(see Figure 8.3). This mapping indicated that some technologies and proc-
esses were recontextualized to a greater extent than others. Processes with
high embeddedness and a large tacit knowledge base were recontextual-
ized to a greater extent than those with low contextual embeddedness and
high explicit knowledge. We therefore introduced a third axis (the z-axis)
to represent the degree of recontextualization as a function of contextual
embeddedness and implicit versus explicit knowledge. This grid can also
be helpful to a managerial audience both for diagnosing where recon-
textualizations are more or less likely to be expected, and for planning
appropriate transfer strategies.
CONCLUSION
In order to extract general theory from empirical ethnographic observa-
tions, some type of comparative analysis must be utilized. Doing so calls

for a comparative approach between extant theory and practice where
the researcher looks for repeating categories, thinks about relationships
among them and then begins to ask why such relationships exist. This
involves a new orientation to ethnographic and also qualitative research
in general because it implies a shift from the ‘ideographic’, in which the
researcher strives to offer a thick description of the research site, to the
‘nomothetic’, where the researcher searches for constants and regularities
in the data (Burrell and Morgan 1979).
In the example of theory building around the construct of recontextu-
alization, the multi-case study triangulation of the ethnographic findings
served both as deductive tests of the recontextualization construct as well
as an ongoing inductive theory-building opportunity. Further, the multiple
case studies served not only to test the construct in a disparate industry
but also to extend it by means of further induction. To point, we were
able to induce a framework for understanding what types of firm offerings
are more or less affected by recontextualization in cross-national trans-
fer. Although the direction and amount of recontextualization cannot be
gauged in advance, our framework can help managers anticipate initial
H
i
g
h
R
e
c
o
n
t
e
x
t
u
a
l
i
z
a
t
i
o
n
L
o
w
R
e
c
o
n
t
e
x
t
u
a
l
i
z
a
t
i
o
n
Implicit
Knowledge
Base
Explicit
Knowledge
Base
Context
Bound
Context
Free
Physical Equipment
Machining
SOPs & Skill Sets
Workplace Organization
Management Norms
Visual Controls
Social Processes
Kaizen
Shop-ﬂoor Discipline
Workteams
Quality Control Circles
Flexible Assembly
MRP System
Product Charts
Heat Treat
Grinding
Automated Material
Handling
Engineering Expertise
Machine Operation Expertise
Maintenance Procedures
Quality Procedures
Labour Relations
Figure 8.3 Framework for understanding NSK’s recontextualizations of
firm offerings

misalignments, monitor ongoing adjustments, and take advantage of posi-
tive recontextualizations as sustainable firm advantages in the future. In
such a way, the multi-case study triangulation enabled us to refine, extend
and ultimately to generalize our findings from the focal ethnographies
into a framework that can be used in multiple and diverse organizational
contexts.
NOTE
1. Here I am not using ‘external validity’ in the quantitatively established sense of generaliz-
ability to a larger population. Rather, it refers to the fact that although ethnographies are
decidedly idiosyncratic as co-created outcomes between researcher and researched, the
theoretical inductions resulting from the studies can indeed be generalizable understand-
ings (for further discussion, see Golafshani 2003).
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