Paper short abstract:

This paper addresses excesses of cross-cultural complexity as they are narrated across foreign subsidiaries of Japanese multinational corporations. It examines the collapsing together of non-Japanese persons in these spaces as a process generating control and closure.

Paper long abstract:

Complexities of modernity are concentrated in formal organizations. At 'foreign' subsidiaries of multinational corporations, meanwhile, competitions common to day-to-day organizational life are exaggerated: differences between members' basic understandings of social life are in high tension. While panoplies of cultures suggest opportunities for knowledge and learning, excesses of choice require containment.

This paper addresses problems of cross-cultural complexity as they unfold at Japanese multinational corporations, based in extensive ethnographic research in foreign subsidiaries, and their affected local communities, across the globe. While the mass production taking place in these spaces creates abundant materiality, here I discuss excesses of cultures and, specifically, how Japanese managers and engineers parse and compartmentalize the overflows surrounding their work with others. The paper queries their binding of individual and community agency through its narrations across time and space, and the moral formations engaged in denying, through collapsing together, different sorts of persons. It is argued that while reproducing sought-after original forms in such complex organizational spaces is impossible, processes of (over)simplification nonetheless generate order, control and, so, closure.