Partnering for Organizational Performance: Collaboration and Culture in the Global Workplace

(Paperback)

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The increasing practice of working 24x7 does not only refer to providing customer service day and night. It also describes how work now gets handed off from one time zone to the next, making business hours effectively all-day and world-wide. Microsoft, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, General Motors, and the Ford Motor Company all have embraced the advent of an increasingly global work environment. The result is that business today necessarily spans cultures, languages, and continents.

In Partnering for Organizational Performance, applied anthropologists Briody and Trotter bring together an array of key practitioners and academics whose work demystifies the dynamics and life-cycles of partnerships. Each contributor explores the concepts and practices associated with the new, global reach of professional collaborative efforts by looking at cases that involve an array of partners. Students and practitioners will benefit from the in-depth analyses of cases that illustrate the possibilities of collaborative arrangements, whether in business and management, academic, or non-profit organizations.

Reviews

Assembling and working with diverse teams is an important challenge in every workplace. This collection of careful studies, with its special attention to culture, helps us to understand what works in cross-national industrial partnerships, and why. This is a work of great significance for managers and social scientists alike. Partnering for Organizational Performance decants the very nature of our global society. -- Teresa A. Sullivan, University of Virginia
Partnering for Organizational Performance is a very valuable and much-needed addition to the literature on partnerships in a globalizing world where partnerships are not only desirable, but necessary. The authors perceptively describe and analyze eight in-depth case studies using anthropological and business-focused concepts, as well as providing interdisciplinary insights. This is a highly readable text that employs imaginative frames of reference for each case study and concludes with a very useful section on 'lessons learned.' -- Martin J. Gannon, professor of strategy and international management at California State University, San Marcos, and author of Understanding Globa

Author Bio

Elizabeth K. Briody is cultural anthropologist and Technical Fellow at General Motors R&D in Warren, Michigan. Robert T. Trotter II is a Regent's Professor of Anthropology at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, AZ and the co-author of Ethnographer's Toolkit, Volume 4.