How does a sociologist decide to study multinational corporations?
I am very interested in cultural tools as the basis for understanding people’s work experience. My research examined how racial and ethnic stereotypes, self-perceptions, and assumptions affect people’s work lives, and how context shapes our understanding of others’ behaviors as well as our own. I decided that multinational corporations would be a rich environment in which the complex issues around ethnicity, gender, and identity could be observed. By studying the features that are unique to these corporations, I hoped to understand the ways in which inequality is reproduced in the context of a workplace and the role that cultural interpretations play in constructing” differences.” Can you tell us a bit about the background and structure of your study? Using a snowball-sampling technique, I conducted 57 in-depth interviews with managers and workers in the U.S. headquarters of Korean multinational companies, located mainly in New York, New Jersey, and California. These corporations were
