Multicultural Teamwork—Unification of Differences in Digitalized Work Contexts?

Abstract

The following article addresses the phenomenon of increasingly multicultural, organizational teams in digitalized work contexts. It deals with the cooperation amongst and in such teams as well as the resulting formation of relationship networks—called figurations. The research focuses on blue-collar workers. A situational individual case study from the field of storage and distribution work analyzes the relationship networks between team leaders and team members and the extent to which culture influences cooperation. A figurative-analytical perspective—mainly based on the study “The Established and the Outsiders” by Elias and Scotson (1994)— is applied to shed light on the above-mentioned phenomena and to reveal interrelations. Within the framework of a qualitative research design, guided by the grounded theory methodology, eleven interviews and six days of participatory observation were conducted in order to derive a theory of a permeable unified storage culture based on elaborated core categories, which leads to a unification of differences in digitalized work contexts. Furthermore, the findings show that the increasing digitalized structures in the observed company supports this. Simultaneously, this storage culture impacts the exposed established outsider figuration, but is influenced by it in an analogous manner.