Applying Production Concepts over Borders: Good Intentions and the Limits of Foreign Culture Understanding

Successful production concepts are a challenge for every production company. Such concepts are typically seen as free of individual or normative implications. According to common opinion, they follow a strict formal logic in analogy to mathematical algorithms. Optimizing production processes is, at the end of the day, the quest for the perfect non-judgemental formula. The following case shows that this opinion is not applicable. Organizational production structures, even if they follow a strict formal logic, have always to be applied in a certain context. This context is not value free but brings its own understandings, visions, interpretations, and so on. To explain this, the case shows the effort made to transfer a working production concept of a German company to a subsidiary in India. The ...