As they see US: the Americanization of a Japanese multinational in the USA

Examines the culturally‐conditioned localization process of a Japanese multinational in the United States. Analyses the case of a dialogical relationship between Americanism and Japanism as perceived and executed by organizational sub‐groups that paralleled the functional degradation process of a Japanese‐English technical translation task. While different organizational sub‐groups used different cultural markers such as “insider/outsider”, “woman”, and “Asian” as “legitimate” categories of people in the firm, their contending rhetoric against the others became remarkably similar in purpose and binary opposition. Advocates more sensitivity to multiple processes of intra‐ and inter‐subjective dialogues and schema creation, and to the ingenuity of social agents who attempt to push for their vested interest versus those of the others in the global, capitalistic, post‐colonial world order. Multiple interpretations of Asian businesses in the United States are part of this new “structuation” process.