Sensemaking of managing cultural differences in a Finnish-Polish project

Recent decade has witnessed the increase of interpretive cross-cultural studies. This paper adds to these studies by examining sensemaking of managing cultural differences from a critical discourse analytic perspective. Focusing on a Finnish-Polish setting, this study specifies four discourses used in such sensemaking: 'cross-cultural learning', 'emotional dependency, 'rational managing', and 'situation-bound'. These findings add to the existing interpretive cross-cultural studies, firstly, by broadening the theoretical understanding on discursive practices used in cultural construction. Secondly, these discourses are shown to provide the managers a way to construct subjectivities and national power relations, which, under right circumstances, may lead to significant organizational outcomes. This highlights the need to understand sensemaking of managing cultural differences as an important discursive resource.