1 Engaging cultural boundaries: Intercultural collaboration at Mirai Corporation Greetje Corporaal and Sierk Ybema VU University Amsterdam Contact: g.f.corporaal@gmail.com ; sb.ybema@fsw.vu.nl Paper written for the IX th IACCM Annual Conference at the University of Central Lancashire (UCLAN), Preston, UK June 22-25, 2010 Abstract In this paper we pay attention to the dynamic and complex ways in which organizational actors at Mirai Corporation make sense of their intercultural work experiences, ten years after Mirai has acquired its Dutch counterpart. We explore how organizational actors discursively construct their own and others’ cultural identities, as expressed in their self-other identity talk. It is suggested that cultural identities do not carry a pre-given meaning that people passively enact, as is sometimes assumed, but rather as social constructs, talked into existence by organizational actors within particular social contexts. We will illustrate the relevance of this constructivist, contextual, and power-sensitive approach to culture research for the CCM field by showing how organizational actors at Mirai Corporation alternately set and transcend cultural boundaries in their identity talk, depending on the situationally defined ‘success’ and ‘failure’ of intercultural collaborations. Keywords: culture, discourse, identity, inter-cultural collaboration, power Introduction An emerging tradition of interpretive researchers in the field of cross-cultural management (CCM) is sensitive to organizational actors’ situated sensemaking practices, asking the question: how do members of transnational networks and organizations attribute meaning to intercultural encounters (e.g. Søderberg & Holden, 2002, Ailon-Souday & Kunda, 2003; Clausen, 2007). Investigating the role of culture in organizations from a constructivist approach involves treating cultural identities not as ‘mental software of the mind’ which is passively enacted (e.g. Hofstede, 1991), but instead as social constructs talked into existence by organizational actors within particular social contexts. Recently, a variety of CCM scholars have argued for critically re-thinking the theoretical, conceptual, and