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INTRODUCTION
Operating in multiple meaning systems across cultural borders is increasingly common in everyday life. Understanding how to deal with cultural multiplicity is particularly important for multinational corporations (MNCs), as it affects their ability to conduct critical tasks such as global integration of dispersed operations, cross-border transfer of management practices, and learning across different environments (e.g., Brannen, 2004; Fiss & Zajac, 2004; Kostova & Roth, 2002; Strang & Soule, 1998). Such tasks require significant cultural interpretive work and meaning construction, which can be handled only with an adequate understanding of multiple cultural systems (e.g., Brannen, 2004). A number of approaches have been suggested to deal effectively with these challenges, including the use of cross-cultural teams and cross-border structural units. In this paper, we focus on another mechanism that can play a critical role in such integration tasks - multicultural individuals. Multiculturals are individuals who have an understanding of more than one societal culture, which allows them to make informed cultural interpretations in multiple contexts. Our objective in this paper is to develop a cognition-based explanation of multiculturalism, its various patterns, and the related implications in the context of MNCs, based on recent conceptualizations of culture.
We draw from contemporary cognitive work on culture (Oyserman & Sorensen, 2009; Strauss & Quinn, 1997), which provides a sophisticated explanation of how a culture can be cognitively represented in an individual. This allows a more explicit focus on the individual than is typical for culture research in the management literature. From a cognitive perspective, culture is understood as internalized mental representations fundamental to everyday interpretation, understanding, communication, and overall functioning in society. Individuals differ in how they internally organize different cultural views, ideas, and perspectives (Strauss, 2005). In particular, we take a connectionism perspective, which conceptualizes cognition in terms of interrelated, distributed cognitive elements, explaining how these emerge, how they are accessed, and how they shape understanding and sense-making in a dynamic and flexible way (Dawson, 2004; Garson, 2012; Houghton, 2005; Shanks, 2005; Smith, 1996; Strauss & Quinn, 1997). The connectionist approach helps us understand both individuals' cultural cognitions - the content, or what they know - and the links between the different cognitive elements - the structure, or how they access or use cultures when making sense of...