Nowadays, companies face many difficulties due to the much competitive environment they have to evolve in. Therefore, multinational ones, particularly dealing with customers and employees, as well as competitors worldwide, have to take all the tools available into consideration to be able to stay afloat, or, at best, to be successful. Culture can be one of those efficient tools that can be used to make sure that the company will gain competitive advantages on the long run. However, the development of a strategy based on cultural aspects is not that easy as culture is a very complex and hardly understandable phenomenon – no matter if it is national culture, or, as here in this thesis, corporate. Thus, as this thesis focus on the employee’s side, it is obvious to imagine that the more numerous the countries, in which IKEA as the focused company wants to be present, are, the harder it will be to deal with cultural aspects and then to be successful thanks to a correct understanding on every side. How does a multinational company deal with culture within the company and across borders? This above research question is the base of our research process. It seems indeed to be interesting to focus on a company implemented all over the world to wonder then whether this company manages to deal with cultural differences when crossing borders IKEA as a multinational company is then an example that can be used to write such a thesis. On the one hand, it is a company which deeply plays with its image and culture and broadcast a particular corporate culture based on Swedish roots. On the other hand, IKEA, since the 1970’s, has successfully tried to cross borders first in Europe and then in Asia facing then unexpected problems among the employees, for instance. As culture is not a notion that implies easily calculation and numbers, it seems natural to use meetings and interviews to lead the research. To feel the culture and to understand its process, a direct access into the Swedish company has to be part of the method used for this thesis. Otherwise, the thesis would be only based on secondary data which should be avoided in order to ensure reliability and validity. The theoretical framework for this thesis will contain the ideas and theories of researchers like E.H.Schein and R.Daft with the main focus on organizations, culture building and leadership as well as Jackson&Carter with their view on semiotics. Furthermore, regarding the transmission of cultural aspects, the ideas of “The Three Faces of Leadership” from Hatch and Kostera will also be taken into consideration. Furthermore many researchers in the past noticed that culture is more a source of conflict and complex outcome and situations rather than a mean to gather employees, people in general. The results of this thesis are that IKEA, in spite of its so called unique global culture is not totally successful in dealing with this complex notion of culture especially among employees across borders. Indeed, IKEA’s managers tend to forget to take the many particularities of national and regional cultures into consideration, they deal with everywhere in the world. Although it came out that in many countries which are culturally close to Sweden the leader and managers efficiently transmit the core beliefs and values to the employees.

<p>Nowadays, companies face many difficulties due to the much competitive environment they have to evolve in. Therefore, multinational ones, particularly dealing with customers</p><p>and employees, as well as competitors worldwide, have to take all the tools available into consideration to be able to stay afloat, or, at best, to be successful. Culture can be one of those efficient tools that can be used to make sure that the company will gain competitive</p><p>advantages on the long run.</p><p>However, the development of a strategy based on cultural aspects is not that easy as culture is a very complex and hardly understandable phenomenon – no matter if it is national culture, or, as here in this thesis, corporate. Thus, as this thesis focus on the employee’s side, it is obvious to imagine that the more numerous the countries, in which IKEA as the focused company wants to be present, are, the harder it will be to deal with cultural aspects and then to be successful thanks to a correct understanding on every side.</p><p>How does a multinational company deal with culture within</p><p>the company and across borders?</p><p>This above research question is the base of our research process. It seems indeed to be interesting to focus on a company implemented all over the world to wonder then whether this company manages to deal with cultural differences when crossing borders IKEA as a multinational company is then an example that can be used to write such a thesis. On the one hand, it is a company which deeply plays with its image and culture and broadcast a particular corporate culture based on Swedish roots. On the other hand, IKEA, since the 1970’s, has successfully tried to cross borders first in Europe and then in Asia facing then unexpected problems among the employees, for instance.</p><p>As culture is not a notion that implies easily calculation and numbers, it seems natural to use meetings and interviews to lead the research. To feel the culture and to understand its process, a direct access into the Swedish company has to be part of the method used for</p><p>this thesis. Otherwise, the thesis would be only based on secondary data which should be avoided in order to ensure reliability and validity.</p><p>The theoretical framework for this thesis will contain the ideas and theories of researchers like E.H.Schein and R.Daft with the main focus on organizations, culture building and leadership as well as Jackson&Carter with their view on semiotics. Furthermore, regarding the transmission of cultural aspects, the ideas of “The Three Faces of Leadership” from Hatch and Kostera will also be taken into consideration.</p><p>Furthermore many researchers in the past noticed that culture is more a source of conflict and complex outcome and situations rather than a mean to gather employees, people in general.</p><p>The results of this thesis are that IKEA, in spite of its so called unique global culture is not totally successful in dealing with this complex notion of culture especially among employees across borders. Indeed, IKEA’s managers tend to forget to take the many particularities of national and regional cultures into consideration, they deal with everywhere in the world. Although it came out that in many countries which are culturally close to Sweden the leader and managers efficiently transmit the core beliefs and values to the employees.</p>

In January, 2009, I joined Bikes Across Borders, a local grassroots organization, on their yearly bike caravan to Mexico. The group works to promote bicycles, both here and in Mexico, as an environmentally and financially sound alternative to motorized transportation. Each winter, members ride bicycles they build out of salvaged parts to border cities in Mexico. They give these bicycles to maquiladora workers who would otherwise spend a large portion of their income on transportation. These workers make a fraction of what they would in the U.S. and live in shacks amid the pollution from the factories they work in. This is the story of one group’s attempt at making a difference in the lives of these workers. / text

Globalisation is increasing and influences the families that emigrate as well as those that stay behind. In South Africa the left behind aged parents of adult children who emigrated experience a sense of helplessness as they feel that they have raised children who abandoned them when they relocated to other parts of the world due to push and pull factors. They also feel that they are missing the experiences of being part of their grandchildren’s lives. Emigration of adult children disrupts the normal functioning of the family for the emigrants as well as those left behind. The reciprocal caring becomes difficult and complicated. The aim of the study was to explore and describe reciprocal transnational caring as it was experienced by aged parents in a selected retirement village in South Africa and their emigrated children. Descriptive phenomenological research was done where scheduled interviews were used with informed consent to obtain data from the 23 selected participants in a retirement village and their emigrated children abroad. Interviews were carefully recorded and transcribed where after the gathered data was used to identify the essence and supporting constituents of the phenomenon. The essence and constituents were thoroughly described and a literature study was done of existing material to integrate the findings of the phenomenon. The findings revealed the essence as “We do love and care, but we can’t touch and hug”, and the supporting constituents: “We are as involved as we can”, “We live a dual life”, “The grandchildren outgrow the grandparents”, “Technology makes it much easier”, “They have a future as ‘world citizens’” and “Financially we are independent” were identified. / Dissertation (MCur)--University of Pretoria, 2018. / Nursing Science / MCur / Unrestricted

How do people construct shared views of what the organization is all about in the international, complex; company? Within a cultural perspective, organizational identity can be tmderstood as organizational members' shared views and definitions of the organization. As people make sense of actions, events, decisions, etc., shared meanings develop which provide organizational members with a sense of organization. Through an ethnographic study in the corporate setting of lKEA I have tried to create an understanding of the processes tluough which organizational identities become constructed across borders. In the study it is shown how organizational members through the processes of sense-making construct collective self-views. By drawing borders against the outside world, mirroring themselves and talking to the self, organizational members come to create definitions of what the organization is all about. In the international, complex organization, these processes take place in different national contexts and in various local spheres of meaning. In order to offset divergent views and differentiation of meanings, managers try to create a global supra-identity through the fabrication of culture. At the same time, however, there is a heterogenization of meanings as predefined meanings from the top are constantly interpreted, rejected, recreated or adopted in the local spheres. Thus, in the complex organization, there are many collective selfviews and multiple identities. The organization, then, is to be Wlderstood as an arbitrary boundary around a set of spheres of meaning that overlap and interact.Index

Taking as its subject the Russo-Ottoman borderland during the period between the Treaty of Berlin (1878) and the start of the First World War (1914), and making extensive use of Ottoman archival documents covering this period, this thesis focuses on the ways in which the Ottoman state attempted to establish two types of boundary in order to ensure sovereignty over its territory. Firstly, there was a new geo-political border, the line dividing the Russian and Ottoman Empires at the juncture of north-eastern Anatolia and the southern Caucasus, created by the Treaty of Berlin. Secondly, there was what can be called a citizenship boundary, shaped by various laws and regulations defining the Ottoman citizenry. The main issues examined in respect of the first boundary are various types of human movement across this border and their control by the Ottoman state. Primary concerns regarding the second boundary revolve around the inclusion in and exclusion from the Ottoman citizenship of ethno-religious groups as a result of the Ottoman state's enforcement of the border. Our approach to studying how the citizenship boundary was established is two-fold, reflecting both local and state perspectives. The local perspective shows the actions of the inhabitants and travellers passing through this border region as shaped by their own day-to-day needs, livelihood patterns and pre-existing socio-economic relations; these resisted limitation by the logic of the sovereign state. The state perspective reflects the Ottoman view of Russia as the main threat to its border territories; this view led the Ottoman central authorities to perceive the entanglements and overlapping positions of its subjects in and with Russia as the cause of their ambiguous loyalties to the Ottoman state. In focusing on the specific policies and practices that the Ottoman state applied in order to deal with this ambiguity, two groups of people, Muslims and Armenians, are singled out. Notwithstanding the all-embracing state laws and discourse of legal equality, Ottoman border policy in respect of its Muslim subjects is shown to have differed greatly from that designed for its Armenian subjects. Therefore, the thesis offers a nuanced framework with which to understand Ottoman citizenship in the Russo-Ottoman border context, by revealing the normative and practical measures the Ottoman state employed to classify its Muslim and Armenian populations, thereby differentiating their status as subjects. This thesis - the first English-language work on the Russo-Ottoman border region during the late nineteenth century and pre-WWI period- offers a range of original insights into this borderland in particular and related issues more generally. It unfolds the details of everyday life and represents the local people as active agents - active, moreover, in relation both to the changing nature and effectiveness of the state's assertion of territorial authority and also to the differences between the two empires' policies and practices. Overall, the thesis focuses on the end-of-empire border politics and the issue of Ottoman citizenship not only from the perspective of macro-level political developments and central state power but also in terms of the peripheral specificities of administration and the movements and subjecthood choices of villagers. Thus, this thesis presents a new type of multi-faceted account of borderland development in which ethno-religious considerations came to inform a somewhat messy production of sovereignty in the context of the modernizing transition between empire and nation-state.