Case Study: Soccer As A Space Of Social Interaction

• Soccer As A Space of Social Interaction – I received a unanimous answer in terms of soccer being the most significant and one of the very few spaces where the Indians bonds with the Germans and vice versa. My field work overlapped with the soccer World Cup 2014, that gave me an opportunity to witness this myself. While they would not hang around after work otherwise, the Germans and Indians would be enthusiastic in grabbing a beer over the soccer games. In Munich, this sentiment, as a matter of fact, runs through the year as Indians, especially from West Bengal, Goa and Kerala try to identify with FC Bayern as ‘their’ team in Germany. Colleagues who would only exchange basic greetings at work would otherwise meet at biergartens for the matches …show more content…
their German counterparts at the work space. The social environment at the work space is constituted of both Indian guest workers and their German colleagues and bosses. Therefore, how the Germans perceive the Indians and how that facilitates their mutual interaction need to be …show more content…
Structure - Cultural difference at the work place is not only a factor affecting the Indian guest-workers in Germany; German employees also are subject to minimum level of training and sensitization and have to adjust themselves with their Indian colleagues in a team. Both German colleagues of the Indian employees and the bosses opined that they were subject to the multiculturalism at the work place and gradually learnt to deal with that. However, cultural difference is also often used against both Indian and German employees cutting across the ranks in the company to cover up the structural shortcomings of corporate work system underscored by exploitation of cheap labour from Asian countries, long working hours for them that is often camouflaged as their inability to finish work on time. In that light, cultural difference between the Indian guest workers and their German counterparts work as a shield to keep the structural crisis of the capitalist work system under wraps. Standard notions of national difference (Indian or German) feed into corporate discourses about work and underwrite the development of strategies to manage Indian software workers. While negotiating with their cultural differences, the Indian guest workers and their Germans counterparts are actually following standard ‘cross-cultural management theory’, which tends to attribute all problems and conflicts in ‘multicultural’ work situations to cultural difference. Communication gaps or the