ABSTRACT
The world of international business is inhabited by people. And it is people with their diverse cultural backgrounds who, under specific circumstances, make decisions, act, hesitate, struggle, regret, win, and lose in international business organizations. By focusing on the multinational corporation, the central object of study in international management, the author argues that it would be both beneficial and necessary to include human agency and the role of context into cross-cultural management scholarship. He discusses – in keeping with the classification of Dorrenbacher and Geppert – three different views on cross-cultural interactions in multinationals. They are depicted namely in terms of the micro-political struggles around the resources, interests, and identities that can elucidate the agency of the actors and the power aspects pertinent to these interactions. The author illustrates these using the setting of Finland-based multinationals operating in Russia.
