Management in Interface: Glocal Displacement

Abstract

In this chapter, three cases of interface situation are presented: an interface in the field of development of an indigenous community in Oceania, an interface of a food culture at the beginning of the modern era in Japan, and an interface involved in the deployment of McDonald’s in the post-war Japan. In all of three cases, the common phenomenon is abstracted of a displacement in translation of the meanings of an external culture, which arrives at and encompasses the traditional culture. Seen from a transcendental point of view, not from a transcendent point of view, entrepreneurs not only act as middlemen in the border domain of plural cultural systems but also act internally to transform the meanings of external systems and appropriate it in favour of the internal system—the process of translative adaptation.

The field of development requires management. At first, the aspect of a traditional society is shown where business management of production is closely tied up with the management of consumption, where economic value is transformed and translated to social and political values. The whole process is assumed to be executed as a ie-like system of Japan.

Then, the process of an “invention” of a new Japanese-Western food at the beginning of Meiji era in Japan is presented from the viewpoint of cultural interface (Maegawa K (ed) (2012) Karuchuraru Intāfeisu no Jinruigaku (Anthropology of cultural interface) (in Japanese). Shinyōsha, Tokyo; Wong HW, Maegawa K (eds) (2014) Revisiting colonial and post-colonial: anthropological studies of the cultural interface. Bridge21Publications, Los Angeles). This process is still relatively simple though, while contemporary cultural interface is complex and multilayered. As in the case of McDonald’s, entrepreneurs as actors often play main roles of dynamics in cultural interface. They are required to grasp multiplicity of cultural interface reflexively and manage to coordinate interactions in it.