“The Most Public Secret”: Concealing and Silencing Ethnocentrism in the MNC

In this paper, we focus on ethnocentrism as a practice that persists among top managers at MNC headquarters and steers their efforts in orchestrating the global network of subsidiaries. While the extant literature has viewed ethnocentrism as a detrimental attitude that top management seek to remedy, we offer a different reading. On the basis of our fieldwork in Danish MNCs, we argue that top management may deliberately cling to ethnocentrism. At the same time, however, they silence ethnocentrism and conceal it from view. In turn, people in subsidiaries engage in self-silencing. We argue that this sustained yet concealed and silenced ethnocentrism has important implications for orchestration of the global MNC network.