ABSTRACT
The FIFA World Cup in Brazil, as any sport’s mega-event, showed the paradox of transnational culture contacts. Transcultural challenges in an organization, on the one side, come along with national stereotypes and nationalist tendencies, on the other. A highly complex and fluid knowledge management is required in this “adhocracy” (as a process-related and specific task-oriented enterprise with knowledge as its main capital, see Mintzberg 1980, 336-8). Within only a few years, such an organization has to build up an event with a budget of billions of US Dollars and hundreds of stakeholders across cultural and national borders. Moreover, the organizing committee grows from a few to several thousand staff members who definitely need transcultural competencies to handle the project (Milena Parent et al. 2014, 4). Metaphors and models as presented in Chapter 2 of this book (for example, the rhizome/mangrove or the Moebius strip) can be of some help to illustrate the processes.
