The International Business Interaction Series
Work life has become global, and the knowledge worker has become international. Many people work in organizations where they communicate with colleagues and business partners across geography, culture, language, space, and time.
This globalization has, among other things, the consequence that employees participate in teams with international colleagues, and they collaborate on projects with colleagues in many different situations. Their contribution involves interaction, and therefore we have in this book series executed an interactive approach to the issues that follow in the wake of internationalization, whether it's culture or leadership, change communication or teamwork, video meetings or face-to-face meetings.
Both written and oral communication take place on new terms. Teamwork, management, day-to-day coordination, and project development cannot be understood and performed in the same way in international organizations as in national or local organizations. Therefore, a new understanding is needed of the structures, conditions, and circumstances that characterize daily interaction in international companies. This book series thus contains knowledge regarding the context in which daily communication takes place.
In this series of 24 'mini-books', we have placed special focus on the interaction of the individual manager and the employee in their daily work life. In scientific literature as well as in organizations, there is insufficient focus on the value created in a company through the communication of the individual employees. Therefore, we hope that the topics of this book series will not only be integrated into the work assignments of communication departments worldwide, but that it will also become more common to think of communication as something that takes place in all corners of all businesses among all types of employees. In order to emphasize this focus on daily communication, we have chosen not to let the book series cover advertising campaigns, press releases, external branding, marketing, and corporate communication. This work is typically done through communication departments and external consultancy agencies. Conversely, we offer an in-depth insight into how internal daily practical communication takes place, and each book is summarized with a number of key lessons for best practices.
The book series not only provides a concentrate of decades of research; it also delivers brand new knowledge based on comprehensive data collection and analysis. Thus, most of the books in the series not only include the dissemination of relevant knowledge but also new, unique, research results.
Books in the series
Book 1: New Interactive Realities for International Companies
Book 2: Culture
Book 3: Place and Space
Book 4: Employees Communication and Daily Interaction
Book 5: Informal and Formal Interaction
Book 6: Meetings
Book 7: Meetings Via Video, Web or Phone
Book 8: Written Interaction
Book 9: Supply Chain Management as Interactional Practice
Book 10: The Physical Office
Book 11: The Virtual Employee's Communication
Book 12: The Stable Organization – Routines in Organizations
Book 13: Socialization in Organizations
Book 14: Communication in Change Processes
Book 15: Trust in Relationships
Book 16: Global Leadership
Book 17: Teams in International Companies
Book 18: Knowledge in Networks
Book 19: Innovation and Idea Development
Book 20: Management Consulting and Internal Branding
Book 21: Interactional Communication Advice
Book 22: Training in Cultural Awareness
Book 23: The Educational Perspective
Book 24: Research Methods
Book 1: New Interactive Realities for International Companies
By Brian L. Due, Birte Asmuss and Mie Femø Nielsen.
Nations and organizations have interacted with each other across borders for many years. However, the frequency, speed, and intensity of these interactions have increased over the last couple of decades, and the number of companies that have branches spread across several nations has risen. Based on this book's large amount of multifaceted data from many parts of the world, we can see that, in line with increased globalization and internationalization, there is a need for more and better communication and cultural understanding. This need is addressed analytically, practically, and with research within this book.
In this book, we introduce the book series' vision of basic notions and concepts such as globalization, organization, and communication. We touch on several of the international company's core issues, and we provide an overview of different approaches to organizations. We will continually refer to the related books in the series and conclude this introductory book with a reading guide for further study.
Book 3: Place and Space
By
Globalization has created new flexibility, new career opportunities for the individual and, as a result, new challenges for the national labor market over recent decades. This development is expressed in a number of different ways: companies deal with other companies and subcontractors around the world, outsource projects and tasks to other parts of the world, and therefore they also have a large flow of employees with different nationalities, languages and cultural backgrounds. It means, above all, a breaking-up and re-thinking of the importance of place and space. International business communication will always take place in time and in space or in places, but the importance of these things changes as employees and companies are no longer solely linked to a specific and clearly geographically defined place.
This minibook examines the central importance of place and space in globalization and how it can provide a new perspective on international business communication. We review the historical and philosophical development of these concepts and focus on the consequences of globalization in relation to people's connection to place. In internationally oriented companies, there is a constant need to consider the political and economic differences of nations and regions, as well as the increasing diversity of employees with various social and cultural backgrounds. Communication is never independent of where it occurs or who is communicating. Therefore, based on the mobile labor market and modern communication technology, we describe the new relevance of place and space.
Book 5: Informal and Formal Interaction
By
All over the world, many people possess a very professional approach to networking, and informal talk plays a crucial role in this. In many contexts, the initial informal talk is regarded as crucial for the next thing that must be done, namely more targeted communication about common tasks. In some organizations, however, managers and employees look down on informal interaction. To show their disdain, they refer to it as 'small talk' and regard it as wasted time, something that distracts from the 'real' work and therefore should not be done on company time. Instead, they think they should focus on so-called 'big talk', relevant talk about important and work-related issues.
This book will show you how formal and informal talk each perform important tasks in international business interaction, and how casual conversation is a ramp to more goal oriented talk.
Book 7: Meetings Via Video, Web or Phone
By
Virtual meetings are mediated via ICT, which stands for information and communications technology. ICT meetings are meetings that do not take place face to face between people in the same room but in which the interaction is conducted using some form of technology. This type of meeting is the rule rather than the exception for many employees of international companies every single day all over the world. Therefore, it is crucial to know what opportunities this type of meeting offers and what challenges it brings as well as how employees can contribute to fruitful and well-functioning interaction.
In this book, we have chosen to focus on two types of ICT meetings, namely the telephone conference (TC) and the video conference (VC), which are the most commonly used "non-physical" meeting forms. Non-verbal meetings in the form of, for example, live chat are dealt with in Books 8 and 11 in this series. We do not distinguish between video meetings conducted via video link from a telephone or satellite and video meetings conducted via the Internet, because our focus is on the interactive aspects and not the technical ones. We have worked extensively with ICT meetings in a number of research projects based on data from global companies, and we draw on our interviewees' reports of what they find difficult.
In this book, we will examine the advantages and disadvantages of ICT-mediated meetings. We show how the technical framework of the meetings changes some of the most basic conditions for the interaction and how the technology can work as both friend and foe. In conclusion, the book presents advice that can be used in the effort to create valuable interaction in ICT-mediated meetings.
Book 9: Supply Chain Management as Interactional Practice
By
Supply Chain Management (SCM) is considered a business discipline that has helped many businesses to become much more efficient in meeting customer needs. However, the economic perspective is not sufficient to describe and understand the complex interaction processes that are included in SCM. Since the relationship between the various links in the supply chain is highly dependent on competent communication, with this book we focus on how increased focus on communication can optimize collaboration between suppliers, producers and distributors across countries, continents and cultures.
We start with new understandings of Supply Chain interaction, where one focuses on the relationships across the supply chain and establishes an integrated view of SCM, also called Integrated Supply Chain Management (ISCM, Christopher and Jüttner 2000; Jüttner et al. 2010). It is an approach that implies that one looks at the supply chain as a cooperating whole, whose common goal is to clarify and fulfill the consumer's needs in the most efficient way via real cooperation. This stands in contrast to the more classic approach to SCM, where one alone perceives the others in the supply chain as suppliers, which must be pressed for price and simply deliver the requested quantity of goods in the right quality at the right time.
This book initially gives a brief introduction to the research within the SCM field, as well as the latest developments and the various approaches in the communication paradigms (see Book 4 on communication and daily interaction of employees). Next, we address the fundamental problem that ISCM faces in practice, namely the actual cooperation within the supply chain. Subsequently, we discuss why the CCO-based view of Supply Chain interaction is necessary if ISCM is to be a real advantage to international companies. We do this on the basis of a number of examples of Supply Chain interaction from two different cases, focusing on which communication patterns at the micro level contribute to, respectively, inhibiting and promoting collaboration and thus the possibility of practicing ISCM. In the final part of the book, we look more closely at the limitation of organizational discourses on the discursive space in which Supply Chain interaction takes place. Finally, we present a number of recommendations – based on best practice – that can support practitioners in their work of applying an interaction-based approach for communication within the supply chain.
Book 12: The Stable Organization – Routines in Organizations
By
When employees in international companies daily perform their tasks and collaborate with their colleagues in their respective departments or teams, in many cases this is a routine practice where the same recognizable patterns of action and interaction are continually repeated. Employees do not start their workday from scratch every time they enter the office or turn on their computer, but they act on some pre-established roles, relationships, and processes. It is often through employees' routines that companies and organizations achieve their goals, and without coordinated routines, workflows risk being characterized by unpredictability and lack of action.
Routines can be seen as something that is expressed through a repeated number of actions and phenomena that have some standardized format over them, such as routine ways of holding meetings, carrying out work tasks, having breaks, collaborating, making decisions, etc.
In this book, we focus in particular on how the smallest components of the routines, the interactive micro-routines, are expressed in the everyday life of international companies as different interpretations of the overall goal of tasks and processes. An organization-specific knowledge of the internal dynamics of routines can help international companies to better organize their tasks in terms of stability and continuity so that individual employee differences can be utilized as a resource, rather than leading to misunderstandings and inefficiencies.
Book 14: Communication in Change Processes
By
International companies must be able to plan, structure and execute changes with many stages in the process and sometimes across large distances. Therefore, in this book, we will look at how change communication is a constant necessity, and one that can be practiced in many different ways. We will also look at some of the needs that companies, managers, and employees experience when involved in changes.
Changes in organizations can involve everything; physical surroundings, human behavior, tasks, etc., but this book only focuses on how communication is done in and around change. This means that the book is about what the research literature calls communication and organizational change (OC) and change management (CM).
Change is always a process of creation that involves many actors in a dialectical process between the company and its external and internal stakeholders and between management and employees. In this book, however, we take as a starting point how changes that are initiated top down may be managed. This is a focus on change communication.
Book 16: Global Leadership
By
Leadership is complex, and leadership in a global business is no less complex. To a great extent, the challenge in leadership is to look at what requirements the specific management task poses, and what opportunities it creates, and to be aware of what expectations and ideas are present, for example in the form of cultural values within a given organization. Greater complexity and variation in approaches, work in multiple geographical locations and new and changing demands on the work make it necessary to be able to orientate yourself in what leadership can be and how leadership can be perceived differently, to find a constructive and creative way to perform various leadership tasks. In this book, we present some of the leadership theories and approaches that have dominated research and literature on leadership over the past 50 years.
We look at different understandings of leadership to draw a map of both leadership as a field of knowledge and leadership as practice. We place special emphasis on research and knowledge of culture and leadership because these aspects are particularly central in an international context. Although much of the research is based on questionnaires, we try to link concepts and theories to specific examples of interaction you meet in various organizations, thereby also showing how leadership practices can be made more visible and better understood using the concepts of leadership research. Initially, different definitions are presented on how the concept of leadership can be understood, and we present our understanding of the concept. Next, we explain how research in leadership has evolved, and we describe how different cultures emphasize different things when talking about 'good leadership'. Finally, we focus on how cultural differences affect how to act appropriately as a leader.
Book 18: Knowledge in Networks
By
Employees in companies and organizations daily share knowledge with each other. Without knowledge sharing, no organization can evolve and follow new trends. This point is crucial because it enables a company to cope with competition in the market. However, many companies face challenges with knowledge sharing. International companies and organizations are especially challenged in this area because they navigate in a changing and globalized daily life, where factors such as physical and mental distance, time zone shifts, and different (organization) cultures further complicate the knowledge-sharing process.
In this book we present the most important research in knowledge sharing and establish how knowledge is shared in networks (i.e., the organization seen as a network of different actors). Next, we look at what knowledge is, how it is created, and we ask what role it plays in an organizational context. Subsequently, we deal with the development of knowledge sharing (based on the three paradigms that were introduced in Book 4, dealing with communication and the employees' daily interaction). This leads to a description of how knowledge sharing takes place in practice via a combination of these paradigms and how knowledge sharing in networks can best be supported by management. Finally, this book concludes with a number of recommendations for best practice.
Book 20: Management Consulting and Internal Branding
By
Globalization has a number of consequences for businesses and employees. If business leaders do not deal with the consequences of globalization and do not work strategically with reorientation and branding, external and internal changes can push the company in uncontrolled directions and create confusion.
This book is about the internal branding process of international companies, ie, management's attempt to create a coherent, meaningful, and directional shared internal identity that also makes sense in the outside world. We show how this process can take place in practice based on a Danish-owned international company.
The aim of the book is to provide understanding and tools to work with a typical organizational challenge, namely to make the organization think and act as one organism. The creation of a common internal identity is a continuous organizational task because there is always change in a global and international market. We begin the book by describing branding theory in relation to the three paradigms presented in Book 4 and how we position ourselves in the research field.
Then we focus on the relationship between culture, identity, and branding and present the discussion between chaos and the desire for strategic direction. Finally, we present the case, which is an example of the internal branding process of an international company, and goes through the stages associated with the development of an organizational identity and what we call a brand platform.
Book 22: Training in Cultural Awareness
By
Employees in companies that work across borders see cultural understanding as the alpha and omega for successful cross-cultural collaboration. Because it is so important to allow training to take place appropriately to ensure its goals are reached, in this book we will deal with cultural training as a competence development in companies.
The purpose of this book is to contribute knowledge to the content and form of culture training programs to create real competence development that will prove useful to the employees. We start by showing what is demanded – and subsequently delivered – on these courses. We then discuss the dominant cultural awareness in the cultural training provided in Denmark, and how it relates to recent humanistic basic research in intercultural communication, cultural anthropology, and international interaction.
Based on the interactional angle of this book series, recent theory in the field is compared to the actual practices found in companies. The practical experiences included in this book are primarily based on the part of our data collected in connection with years of practical cultural training in Danish and international companies and our knowledge suppliers in the Danish market.
Book 24: Research Methods
By
This book series deals with a wide range of phenomena that are important for international companies, such as change, organizational culture, knowledge sharing, relationships, office decor, leadership, socialization, teamwork, innovation, etc.
When a student or professional practitioner wants to know more about and examine one of these areas in an international company, they can choose from a variety of different methods and approaches depending on the specific focus. There are a number of useful method books that describe in detail how to work with different methods – and the advantages and disadvantages associated with each method (eg, Due 2015b; Brinkmann and Tanggaard 2015; Hopmann and Skovsgaard 2014)
In this book, we focus on providing an overview of the methods that are particularly relevant for examining the topics we have introduced in the book, and we refer regularly to articles and books where you can read more about the different methods. We show how students and professional practitioners can investigate communication and culture in international companies for themselves. To begin with, we outline the most important preliminary considerations that should be made before starting the research. Then we focus on the respective data collection methods and how these methods are suitable for different purposes. Following the general description, we explain how, in practice, we can investigate the various phenomena we have discussed in the entire mini-book series, and finally, we briefly outline how to practically tackle the fieldwork.
Book 2: Culture
By
Different people with different cultures need to cooperate in international business contexts.
Asians, South Africans, Russians, Americans, Brazilians, Danes, and all others cooperate and trade with each other. Sometimes the interaction does not go so well, and so often it comes down to communication and culture. You encounter statements like "Indians never say no, so we do not know when we have an agreement" or "Danes are rude and do not respect the feelings of other people."
Culture is habits, culture is roots, culture is attitudes, values, and languages. Culture is practice, and culture is theory. Culture is a very well-known and used but also a diffuse and complex concept. Throughout time, there have been many ideas proposed regarding what culture is and what role culture plays in communication between people. Culture is thus a very central concept in communication with international companies. This book covers very different aspects of the concept: from the close local culture of teams, groups and departments across more general organizational cultures – to ethnic, national, and continental cultures. Culture is highlighted by practitioners both with pride and as a source of trouble. And theorists as well as practitioners see culture as both something unchangeable and as something one can work actively to change. In a book on communication in international companies, culture is therefore relevant at many levels and in many contexts. Therefore, in this book we present the series' view of culture and briefly explain it in relation to other perspectives.
Book 4: Employees Communication and Daily Interaction
By
Communication is a key concept in this series of books. We understand communication on the one hand as written and oral communication from a company to its stakeholders. Stakeholders can, for example, be internal employees of the company or external partners, customers, opinion makers and organizations outside the company, which one tries to target with strategic communication solutions via eg, campaigns, speeches, strategy papers and the like. On the other hand, we also understand communication as the daily interactions between people in teams, at meetings and in departments that often do not have a strategic framework, but are merely natural everyday interactions of varying formal and informal character. Here in Book 4 we primarily address the importance of everyday interaction inside the international organization.
Interviews and observations from our extensive data corpus clearly indicate that employees themselves – whether they work with production, economy, HR, technology or the like – emphasize the importance of 'good' communication and the desire to avoid misunderstandings as a result of miscommunication. "Good" is here set out in quotation marks, since it is seldom possible to give clear and objective definitions of what good communication is across time, place, cultures and circumstances. The context is crucial. However, it will often be the case that employees themselves know what works and what does not work in the situation. Therefore, in this book we will not describe what can be called “good” or “bad” communication, but rather describe the theoretical viewpoint in this book series.
Book 6: Meetings
By
Meetings can be fantastic as well as frustrating, productive but also a waste of time. There is much to gain by making meetings more effective and satisfactory. It can save a lot of time and money, while at the same time making it easier to achieve larger objectives.
In this book, we examine meetings in their generic form, ie, face to face. First, we briefly introduce the meeting as a communication form, then we deal with intercultural differences in chairing a meeting, subsequently in relation to the procedures to obtain mutual understanding, and finally we provide some practical advice. As with all the other themes in this book series, that of meetings could also fill an entire book in itself. We have therefore selected issues that, as revealed in our data, are causing the most problems.
We will consider both general best practices concerning the conducting of meetings and the special intercultural aspect; however, many of the issues we deal with in this book are appropriate for all types of meetings.
Book 8: Written Interaction
By
Businesses and organizations are increasingly demanding that all knowledge workers must be able to communicate in writing, both externally and internally, as it has become one of the most used forms of communication in daily life. Some employees therefore have a professional toolbox that they can utilize to write appropriately in specific contexts, while others do not have such a toolbox. The digitization of communication has led to an additional competence requirement that knowledge workers should possess good technological skills that they can implement as part of their written communication. To communicate in writing in an international company, more communicative and social competencies are required from more employees than ever before, and today it is the rule rather than the exception that all employees write emails, text messages, use instant messaging, etc., as part of the company's external as well as internal communication.
We begin the book by framing out how written interaction can be viewed from the three communication paradigms that we mentioned in Book 4. It leads us to briefly describe how the genre of written business communication arose and has evolved into what is being practiced in businesses today. Our point of departure is that communication should be seen as social interaction, and in the following sections we describe how to incorporate an interactional perspective on written communication. It is followed by a brief overview of language use and the aspect of formalities within the genre, after which we review the characteristics of the two most used forms of written interaction in companies, emails and instant messaging, just as we look at examples of email interaction in practice. And to round off the book, we describe best practices in written interaction in international companies and organizations.
Book 10: The Physical Office
By
In the course of a working day, employees interact with their colleagues at all possible locations throughout the workplace. They share small talk in the elevator, discuss yesterday's football results in the canteen, spar with the colleague at the nearest desk, deliver presentations in the project room, exchange experiences in the printer room, and make weekend plans at the coffee machine.
Such examples of formal, informal, planned and spontaneous interaction activities form a central part of the internal organizational life of international companies, where the interaction is highly dependent on the physical environment. The design and layout of the office can thus both support and complicate the interaction. In international organizational environments, the office helps to frame the common organizational culture where different individuals become a collaborative entity.
In this book, we look at how the physical framework of the offices of international companies and organizations helps to create internal communication and interaction.
Book 11: The Virtual Employee's Communication
By
Since the 1990s, increasingly versatile and dynamic communication technology has given rise to collaboration that previously required face-to-face interaction, but it is being replaced by virtual collaboration that can be done across time and place (Lund et al., 2012). It is normal for the employee in most global organizations to have their work take place entirely or in part in a virtual office, which one can access from a home, a café, an airplane, or anywhere in the world the employee finds themselves. And the lockdowns during the pandemic in 2020-2022 has in many companies made it the 'new normal'. This book is about the virtual employee and their communication, seeing that in the globalized world, the organizations that perform best in the international arena will often be those that manage to give their virtual employees the best possible working conditions, opportunities for development, and support. For a closer look at the work of the virtual team, we refer to Book 17 on teams in international companies.
We will initially provide a few examples of who the virtual employee could be and, then, briefly define the term “virtual office.” We will look at why the number of virtual offices and employees has exploded, in addition to what advantages and disadvantages this development has brought. Based on our data, we will present different types of virtual employees and briefly discuss their working conditions and needs. We will discuss the considerations that skilled and experienced professionals make when choosing communication channels across time and place. Finally, we set out several requirements that must be met for virtual employees to work optimally. We will, thus, make concrete recommendations on how companies and colleagues can support the employee. Finally, we will conclude with advice for best practice.
Book 13: Socialization in Organizations
By
Within academic research, being a newcomer in an organization has been generally regarded as a crucial change in which it is particularly interesting to study socialization because socialization in these situations is most intense and perhaps even more imperative (Ashford 1986; Van Maanen and Schein 1979; Wanberg 2012a; Klein and Polin 2012). Therefore, much of the research on socialization in organizations focuses on how newcomers are socialized. We continue this point of departure in this book, where we specifically focus on new employees who come to an organization for the first time.
Insights into and focus on the inclusion of new employees into international organizations can be decisive as to whether these employees become part of the organization quickly and effectively.
This book is organized as follows: We start by describing what socialization is and how research on socialization in organizations can be related to the three paradigms presented in Books 1 and 4. Next, we focus on socialization in international companies and organizations – and also explain the different phases of the socialization process. This leads to a description of socialization agents and different types of socialization mechanisms, where we include a number of examples of how socialization takes place in practice within the organization. The book concludes with a description of best practice.
Book 15: Trust in Relationships
By
Every task and every cooperation is accomplished by means of a network of relationships with other actors and tasks where it is necessary to be able to trust the most important actors (members) in the network in order to be able to act optimally. This applies to all organizations. Each communication either creates and maintains relationships or breaks them, and it can help to increase or decrease trust between the parties.
Trust is one of the key factors in achieving greater efficiency. This applies to all types of actors, individuals and groups, as well as across organizational levels and boundaries. Correspondingly, distrust is costly and cumbersome because it leads to lost opportunities or requires control.
This book deals with trust in relationships because working with and through relationships plays such a big part in everyday life in all types of organizations. There are particular challenges associated with forming relationships in international companies because collaborators can have a very different background, location and working conditions. First, we introduce a number of theoretical approaches to study trust in relationships between people, then we put this work into a context of relationships and interpersonal networks, and finally, we discuss a number of techniques that we have identified in our data that can be used to actively create trust. We provide a number of examples of actions that create trust or distrust in the professional network of relationships. As in the other books in this series, we are building in part on research in the field and in part on our own international data.
Book 17: Teams in International Companies
By
Employees are increasingly expected to work in groups and teams—both in groups that meet face to face and in groups that primarily meet digitally. A wide variety of requirements for actions and communication relate to modern team-organized work in international companies, where employees are expected to be able to solve complex tasks across time and space. This new way of organizing teams and work also requires new skills in relation to, for example, cooperation, leadership, and idea development.
We begin this book by introducing the different perspectives of the research into teams, and then we describe how teamwork is a natural consequence of globalization conditions and new ways of organizing work. Then we explain the difference between groups and teams, focusing especially on the characteristics of international, virtual teams and their challenges. We then turn to describe and give examples of different types of teams, both local and virtual teams, and finally, we discuss management of teams. This book deals generally with teams, but more specifically with virtual teams and their management. The book will also focus on what leaders can do to create good teams, but we also make it clear that employees need to do their part to create a good working environment. The book concludes with advice on how both employees and managers can help create well-functioning teams.
Book 19: Innovation and Idea Development
By
There is an increasing demand for employees in international companies to be able to think creatively and develop new ideas that can lead to innovation. However, in an international context, this may be associated with challenges due to the sometimes asynchronous interaction between employees who may not only have different cultural backgrounds and native languages, but also often find themselves physically far apart. This book is about how to understand and work with innovation by focusing on idea-developing actions that create the opportunity for innovation in international contexts.
The book will demonstrate how innovation consists of a number of concrete idea-developing activities between employees in international companies, and how awareness of the social and dynamic factors in these processes can help to achieve better idea development. Innovations usually start with ideas that are generated through creative processes of interacting employees in groups or teams. Therefore, the social idea-development process is the real focal point of this book on innovation.
The book begins with a brief research position, which describes the fundamental differences in the field of innovation research. Then I discuss the two key concepts of innovation and creativity, and provide a brief historical theoretical overview of three different types of innovation paradigms. Subsequently, I present the different formats that appear during team-based idea development. The book then focuses on a single case from a South African start-up company. Finally, I provide some good advice on how to create appropriate idea-development processes in international companies.
Book 21: Interactional Communication Advice
By
The insights and good advice presented in this series of books are relevant to the person who works as an adviser in or in relation to international companies or wants to do so in the future.
In this book, we describe the principles and provide the tools for how the knowledge from this series can be implemented in practice and translated into advice, as we zoom in on the adviser's role and way of working.
We deal specifically with how the internal or external adviser can analyze practices in the organization and then facilitate the incorporation of important points and new realizations. The book thus focuses on two of the elements of the counseling work that have been prominent in this book series, namely the analysis phase, where we argue for the importance of the counselor generally advising on the basis of the collection and analysis of qualitative data in the organization, and the advisory phase, where we describe how data collection and analysis can form the basis of the communication advice itself – and describe a specific method for this.
Book 23: The Educational Perspective
By
The International Business Interaction Series is a textbook series of books that have been written to be used as a reference for professional practitioners, and so you can read each book on its own. But first and foremost, it is written to be used in teaching, so future generations can become skilled at communicating in an international work context. It is easier said than done, and we attempt here to provide inspiration on how the book series can be used and how an educator can organize their teaching so that students get the full benefit of the book's material.
In this book, we will focus on how teachers can use the book and how to develop their teaching in different ways to prepare their students to act as reflexive practitioners in global companies. We first outline the requirements for the internationally oriented employee and then draw the consequences for the teaching that must prepare the students to function as such an employee. We put the requirements into a historical context and outline the barriers and challenges one can meet as a teacher. Finally, we come up with several concrete suggestions on how the book series can be used in an educational context. One can, for example, use the complete series as a traditional textbook, or one can opt for a number of supplementary e-resources as well as external consultancy assistance.