Bridging the Cultural Gap in the Global Workplace

Abstract

A key challenge for success in global workplace learning is defining the nature of what should be learned. Researchers and practitioners alike pose questions such as: What are some key features of workplace or organizational culture that can be challenging in a global context? What cultural variations can have impact on workplace learning? How does learning in practice differ from advance training, and how can it be most successful? Identifying and adapting to workplace culture (situated within ethnic or national culture) and understanding learning in practice are both fundamental focal points within sociocultural theory In this chapter, we argue that sociocultural theory can provide helpful tools for those who study, create and manage global workplace learning. We identify some existing challenges in global workplace learning, offer a definition of organizational/workplace culture informed by sociocultural theory, and review some basic assertions of sociocultural theory. Then we identify three features of workplace culture from a sociocultural perspective—training versus learning, artifacts of practice, and technology-facilitated communication—and draw from existing published case studies across diverse contexts to illustrate each of these features.

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 — 1 citations exist upstream.

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