Title: Analysing gender and diversity management issues across cultures from multiple perspectives: a Thai-German case

Authors: Marie-Thérèse Claes; Edeltraud Hanappi-Egger

Addresses: Louvain School of Management, Place des Doyens 1, 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium ' Department Management, Welthandelsplatz 1/D2, 1020 Vienna, Austria

Abstract: One repercussion of the globalisation of the world's markets is that managers are increasingly forced to deal with cross-cultural processes also including issues of gender and diversity. In an international context, the regulation and determination of organisational practice flows both ways, that is to say from headquarters to the local business units and vice versa, creating a so-called 'paradoxical' tension of competing forces. Multinationals are the 'receivers' as well as the 'promoters' of these paradoxical movements of convergence and divergence in management practice. Staff at headquarters are under pressure to take into consideration the norms and rules of their specific cultural context. The example of the Thai subsidiary of a German engineering company is used as a case study to illustrate the paradoxical tensions and dilemmas which arise when gender and diversity issues are managed in two very different cultural contexts.

Keywords: Thailand; Germany; Kathoey; gender management; diversity management; organisational culture; transgenderism; cross-cultural processes; case study; multinationals; multinational subsidiaries; multinational enterprises; MNEs; globalisation; convergence; divergence.

DOI: 10.1504/EJCCM.2014.065167

European Journal of Cross-Cultural Competence and Management, 2014 Vol.3 No.2, pp.106 - 117

Received: 12 Feb 2013
Accepted: 14 Jan 2014

Published online: 24 Oct 2014 *

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