Exposure to other cultures is common through extensive travel, living in ethnically diverse environments, attending universities abroad, or having work assignments in other countries. In places like the US, more and more people cannot fit themselves into certain ethnic categories, thinking of themselves as being “mixed” (Goldstein & Morning, 2000) or bicultural. This phenomenon has been recognized and researched increasingly in recent years. One aspect is the question on how different societies deal with bicultural people. In this chapter, the authors investigate individuals with a bicultural family background and investigate how this biculturality reflects on their role in business. The survey presented in this paper investigates the relevance of bicultural skills and consequently the roles that bicultural managers play in multinational corporations. To investigate this issue the survey was conducted among managers who had one Japanese and a Non-Japanese parent and worked in a multinational corporation in Japan. Japan was chosen, because it is a more controversial issue in Japan than in other industrialized countries.
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Exposure to other cultures is common through extensive travel, living in ethnically diverse environments, attending universities abroad, or having work assignments in other countries. Even people who have not traveled abroad are exposed to other cultures through TV, movies and class work. Some places in the world are highly multicultural, due to either historic mixture of cultures (e.g., Hong Kong or Singapore), or high levels of migration (e.g., New York). Moreover, cultural “diversity” has moved from just being a process of including different people from different countries to a team or a school classroom to being a process that occurs within an individual (Bunderson & Sutcliffe, 2002; LaFramboise, Coleman, & Gerton, 1993). In countries such as the USA, increasingly more people cannot fit themselves into certain ethnic categories, instead thinking of themselves as being “mixed” (Goldstein & Morning, 2000) or bicultural.
This phenomenon has been recognized and increasingly researched in recent years (e.g., Hong, Morris, Chiu, & Benet-Martinez, 2000). The development of a new “global” culture with people who are distinctly international is being discussed by some scholars (e.g., Anthias, 2001). Early research on biculturals suggests that individuals must surrender their identity with one culture to identify with a new one (LaFramboise, 1993). Today, it is the prevailing opinion that individuals can internalize more than one culture without losing their original cultural identity. In other words, they can maintain multiple cultural systems within themselves. Bicultural individuals can identify with two distinct cultures and their values, attitudes, beliefs and behavioral assumptions. So they can easily operate within and between those cultures (Hong, 2000, LaFramboise, 1993, Phinney & Devich-Navarro, 1997). Hence, biculturals not only bring the knowledge of their dominant culture, but also the hidden abilities to understand and bridge between other cultures (Brannen, 2009).