Are engineers religious? An interpretative approach to cross-cultural conflict and collective identities

Abstract

This article views culture as collective identities from an interpretative, sense-making perspective. It analyses religion-based cross-cultural conflict through the example of two ethnographic studies of multicultural high-tech organizations undergoing change. Specifically, it looks at professional identity and the practice of religion among a diverse group of highly qualified technical employees. The aim is to show when and how difference in religious practice creates cross-cultural conflict. The examples given will be from various nationalities (German, Indian, Iranian) and from various religious practices (Christian, Hindu, Muslim). Based on these findings, a model of how to assess cross-cultural conflict from an interpretative perspective is developed. This article makes two contributions to cross-cultural conflict management. First, it gives an account of how transnational professional identities, external and organizational culture, religious practice and conflict are linked in two specific high-tech work environments. Second, it proposes a model of how to assess cross-cultural conflict in cultural complexity from an emic perspective.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 26 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.