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

Product Description

The increasing practice of working 24×7 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.

Review

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, provost and executive vice president for academic affairs and professor of sociology at University of Michigan

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

About the Author

Amy Goldmacher is a research professional who finds opportunities for innovation through ethnographic and qualitative methods. By carefully observing and questioning how people engage with the world, she creates ideas that connect customers to products. With over 15 years of applied research experience, Amy has provided research for new product and service design across industries, including automotive, consumer products, consumer websites, healthcare, industrial products and residential and nonresidential construction. Amy uses well-established ethnographic techniques as well as creative approaches to get the rich and detailed information about peoples’ motivations, needs and challenges, around which new products, services and experiences can be designed. She has worked with Fortune 500 to 1000 companies, recently completing ethnographic luxury design research for an automotive manufacturer, focus groups and ethnographic research in China for a global consumer healthcare company, user research for the website of a baseball academy and contextual observational interviews to support product innovation for a global industrial manufacturing company. Amy has authored and co-authored articles in Anthropology journals, a chapter in an organizational business text and a career workbook, among other publications. Amy holds a B.A. in Anthropology with Honors from Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa and a M.A. and Ph.D. in Anthropology from Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan.