In the United States, the past twenty years has witnessed a growing academic interest in understanding ‘globalization,’ i.e., a series of interconnected social, cultural, and political processes occurring under integrated economies. Management scholars have tried to understand globalization in terms of its potential consequences for companies conducting business in various countries and regions. However, globalization involves more than this, for as new relationships between people and places occur, new ideas about who they/us are in those relationships also emerge. How can international management scholars thus understand these complex relationships occurring under globalization? How can they theorize and study such relationships? Although there are multiple ways to address these questions, the approach to globalization within U.S.-based international business and management research has been insufficient. First, meta-theoretical assumptions supporting U.S.-based management theories and practices have seldom been questioned in regards to their deployment in non-Western contexts. Second, the emphasis of this research on “cultural differences” implies “separation” and may conceal social and cultural formations established through global relationships. Thus, alternative approaches to understanding business practices in the context of globalization are needed. To this effect, I first develop the notion of identity formation , based on poststructuralist and postcolonial theories, as a conceptual framework, in contrast with the modernist views of identity informing the extant international management literature. I suggest this notion as an appropriate focus of analysis for understanding contemporary relationships between people in the world. To demonstrate these arguments, I conduct fieldwork focused on the international entrepreneur, specifically the Turkish entrepreneur. Relying on an extended case study design and a multi-method approach, I examine how Turkish entrepreneurs in high-technology sectors in the U.S. and in Turkey engage in identity formation processes. The identity formation framework allows me to demonstrate how globalization processes occur relationally through embedded discourses of hybridity, gender, subalternity, and nation articulated by international entrepreneurs. I further address how postcolonial lenses allow for conceptualizing encounters between West and non-West occurring under globalization as a series of interdependent events at the locus of identity formation. As such, my dissertation offers a theoretically distinct conceptualization for globalization research in international management.

This dissertation addresses the problem of culture in international management scholarship. It presents an alternative approach for doing cultural research based on the interdisciplinary field of Cultural Studies, and illustrates this approach through fieldwork conducted in a maquiladora and maquiladora-related institutions in Mexico. The dissertation offers three different but related contributions to international management theorizing and research. First, it develops a genealogical framework to analyze the emergence of the problem of culture and the attempts made over forty years to solve it. The framework identifies a pre-paradigmatic and a paradigmatic phase informed by notions of cultural values, and highlights the recurrence of “culture” as a problem throughout these phases. It suggests the development of a post-paradigmatic phase based on Cultural Studies scholarship and a different ontological positioning towards “culture” as a possibility for resolving this problem. Second, the dissertation illustrates the concrete implications for international management research of conducting cultural analysis based on Cultural Studies. It develops the conceptual and analytical notion of maquiladorization to focus participant observation and interviews performed in maquiladora contexts in Tijuana, Mexico. Processes of maquiladorization are analyzed through Cultural Studies' theoretical frameworks, including Articulation Theory and The Circuit of Culture, to show the strategic functioning of discourses and practices that join around the idea of “maquiladora.” Third, the dissertation forwards an approach for reflexive cultural research, recognizing researchers as inextricably located within the systems of meaning used to conduct research. It explicitly acknowledges that researchers are not just describing processes by which people create culture or discovering cultural structures but, through their research, also continuously changing the very understanding of the concept of culture. Therefore, “culture” is never complete but always emergent alongside the reality under study. The dissertation re-directs the problem of culture to a different ontological space through arguments that engage with the continuous genealogy of “culture,” problematizing taken-for-granted beliefs in its existence. In terms of research, it demonstrates a type of inquiry that employs culture as a heuristic device useful to explain specific human realities but that also reflects on its own implication in creating regimes of cultural knowledge and social organization.