Cultural identity and management control: An ethnography in a multicultural organisation

The broad topic of this thesis is how culture shapes management control. The researcher conducted a four-month ethnography study in a multicultural organisation, focusing on how organisational members culturally identify themselves, and how this cultural identification shapes the design of, and employees’ reactions to, the management practices. The findings show that in multicultural organisations, culture influences management practices not only through organisational members’ own cultural affiliation but also through how they perceive other’s cultural affiliation. The thesis shows that the impact of culture on management controls is not static and uniform, which challenges the assumptions of prior research and thus provides practical insights to multicultural organisations.