ABSTRACT
One of the characteristics of modern business environments is the collaboration across national borders for an increasing number of companies. Large and small enterprises have set up headquarters, established subsidiaries, or expanded their business activities far beyond the limits of one national country over the last few decades. This increased mobility, however, does not only concern businesses, but also large numbers of people who migrate or work across borders. Globalization scholars (see, e.g., Friedman 2006; Christopherson, Garretsen, and Martin 2008) distinguish between different “globalization waves,” where the emphasis has shifted from countries to the individual (Charles 2009; see also Hay and Marsh 2000). Even though there is an ongoing debate in relation to the stages of globalization and its sociopolitical significance, what is relevant for this chapter is that the concepts of global and local have been reconfigured especially in the context of multinational workplaces, which is the focus of this chapter, and have become inextricably linked (as the term “glocal” suggests; Robertson 1994). In this context the employees need to be able to operate “successfully” in environments that are multilingual and multinational.
