Open AccessStrategic ethnography and reinvigorating Tesco Plc: Leveraging inside/ out bicultural bridging in multicultural teams
Author(s) -
Brannen Mary Yoko,
Moore Fiona,
Mughan Terry
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
ethnographic praxis in industry conference proceedings
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1559-8918
pISSN - 1559-890X
DOI - 10.1111/j.1559-8918.2013.00024.x
Subject(s) - ethnography , subsidiary , multinational corporation , business , multiculturalism , bridging (networking) , competition (biology) , public relations , sociology , political science , pedagogy , biology , computer network , ecology , finance , anthropology , computer science
This paper focuses on a study of Tesco Plc conducted in 2011, in which we trained a multicultural team of nine Asian managers to become in‐house ethnographers of Tesco UK for a 3‐month period studying 52 stores in the UK with dual objectives of helping Tesco (1) to understand and evaluate the core practices that comprised the essence of Tesco's home country advantage, and (2) to identify sources of learning from Tesco's foreign subsidiaries to aid in reinvigorating its core in light of increasing competition in its home market. We believe that the strategic and training dimensions of this project constitute a new contribution to the field of organisational ethnography, particularly with regard to the use of a multinational ethnographic team of non‐native speakers of English.