»interview«

Altogether, my interview partner summarizes, are German companies appreciated for their accuracy and precision in planning and construction. They often believe that only a German company will put the project through in the limited time given. He claimed that in some towns even some streets are named after his company. This appraisal keeps them from delegating expatriates among subsidiaries. A client assigns a German company because he expects German experts.

At the same time Germans are seen to be smart asses that know everything better and know how to do everything better. They live on their procedures and check-lists and they cannot talk about anything else than business. They are the small talk losers because after two minutes they get serious and talk business again.



And of course you are invited to comment on other things typical for Germans, especially regarding the work aspect...

Nowadays, German is still spoken in the higher management level at Volkswagen as well as at Panopa. In the second level both companies mostly employ Polish people who also speak German.

In general Panopa is sending fewer expatriates to Poland every year. In the beginning jobs in the strategic division were filled project-specific with German expatriates. Nowadays the job is done by two fixed employees and help is only sent in emergencies. Instead Panopa makes sure to grant their employees qualification trainings to build up competencies on site.
This redundantizes the business with expatriates which is comparably expensive and takes a lot of energy from the company as well as from the employees concerned: motivating employees to leave Germany and to stay abroad for weeks and months at a time for single projects, permanent shuttling, ... Dr. Hucht resumes that it is simply easier and less expensive to establish methods of qualification at the respective location. ("Wenn ich in Deutschland jemanden motiviere da rüber zu gehen, dann redet der erstmal über mehr Geld." Dr.Hucht, 13.45 min.)

My interview partner's company does not especially prepare their expatriates for their mission. Since they preferably hire people coming from a multi-ethnic background or having lived in another culture, they accept them to cope well in any cross-cultural setting. Prior to their employee's departure they conduct a so-called exit-interview. In this they simulate the employee's financial situation before and after his expatriate-mission, they talk about social insurance, the company car, .... and hard facts like that. My interview partner was actually disappointed that I did not show any interest in these facts, while they make up 90% of the future expatriate's concerns. Only by the time that they are on their second or third mission, they will start asking about the soft facts concerning the foreign culture and foreign attitudes.
In the host country a start up team which is assigned by the division manager is renting housing and helps organizing the required documents. If no facilities are available and the projects are planned to take longer, the company puts up its own camp.
The expatriates themselves are expected to learn the apparent cultural gestures of their host country and as said before they are expected to cultivate networks. The company understands itself as guest in the foreign country and it wants to keep that status/reputation. ("Wir sind Gäste in dem Land. Wir wollen auch in fünf Jahren noch willkommen geheißen werden.")

Additionally, it has to be mentioned that working for a big constructing company expatriates are not going to a "Polish" construction site - big construction sites are international by matter of investors and experts joining in. On 80% of their sites English is spoken as common language.
It also has to be remembered that expatriates are not coming to an unknown setting - they have worked on that project already for at least four years and know the relevant people on the other side, plus the colleagues they met in common workshops or trainings before. In addition construction sites offer a huge pool of diverse people thus it should be possible for everyone to find somebody he gets along with well. And, too, my interview partner says that it is still business and not about finding buddies.

They have hardly any problems with the acceptance of expatriates in the host country: On the one hand the expatriates are committed to excellence in their job, they want to show their best talents and thus are dedicated to absolute professionalism. ("Ich hab hier eine Aufgabe und ich zeige euch, dass ich das auch kann.") On the other hand their higher payments are usually accepted by host country nationals if they prove to be experts. ("Nach dem Motto 'ah-ha, der kann was', dann wird das auch akzeptiert.")

Nevertheless, expatriates especially in Eastern Europe hardly ever have problems with socializing. This is due to what my interview partner called "double binding". While it is simply their mentality to be more cordial than Germans, they are also aware that these are high-ranked people who are sent to them and they meet them as welcomed guests. Apparently, the biggest problem for expatriates is how to return this affection. Most of them can easily go along but then experience frustration and disappointment as part of a reversed culture-shock coming back to Germany. Others though perceive the call for socializing as an obligation and have a hard time to escape from it without appearing solitary.

In all cases it is up to the expatriate's personality if he succeeds in diminishing power structures or not. My interview partner argues that they never had any problems. "We are not putting anyone in a role, he couldn't play."
Every now and then they might have to send somebody who does not necessarily suit the expatriate profile but is an expert in a certain technique. In these cases it might happen that expatriate and host country nationals do not find a way to work together at all. But since the company cannot abandon the expert, they send a second expatriate to pour oil on troubled water by involving people in personal conversations, outlining the problem and showing empathy for the difficult situation. ("Ein Mensch kann nicht alle Fähigkeiten haben - in bestimmten Fällen muss man Abstriche machen. Da schickt man dann notfalls einen Gutelaune-Clown hinterher.")

Panopa is a logistics company employing more than 1500 people. As a former daughter of Krupp they look back on quite some history and nowadays belong to Imperial, a huge company based in South Africa and via their subsidiaries operating world wide.

I had the opportunity to talk to Mr. Karl Vieth, project manager for logistics at Panopa who has spend several years in Poland, and Dr. Andreas Hucht, division manager planning and consulting who is also responsible for quality management.

Panopa first came to Poland participating in a tender Volkswagen had called for. Volkswagen had decided to put up a factory in Poznań. Consequently they were looking for a service provider who was doing the logistics and was able to jump into the chain of processes. Panopa won the tender and thus went to Poland. Dr. Hucht that this is quite characteristic for contract logistics: they do not put up a network of stations but install different locations for exclusive clients, so-called single-user stations.
Two years ago Panopa revised their entrepreneurial orientation. Based on their first successful expansion into Poland other locations were constructed. They figured this to make sense because they already had a focus on the automotive industry and their clients were moving eastward. Thus Eastern Europe in general has become one of their target markets and Panopa nowadays resides in Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary. The new concept also includes becoming active in the distributional field: besides the client-tailored programs for Volkswagen in Poznań, they also run a station exclusively for Opel in Gliwice. And a trans-shipment centre in Kattowice.
These stations are not connected in their own network. The people in the lead positions certainly know each other and meet every now and then but they are not institutionally interlinked. This is mostly due to the different tasks each of the stations performs

How do I want to use the interviews?

For sure not as full-length interviews. I would rather want to use bits and pieces and assemble them new.

The most obvious would be to group various answers to one question. This could be done by either putting them together in a film or by to allow the user to click onto the various answers.

When I was younger I had a adventure book. At the end of each page you had to decide what the protagonist was gonna do. Accordingly you had to read further on page xy or on page yz. And at the end of each page you again had to decide between two options. I always tried to read all possible strings of the story at the same time but that of course didn't work.

The narrative concept's of storytelling try to catch up on this idea. Basically it's the whole idea of internet as Chrizi said today. Clicking and thus making a choice. There is no way to always know all the options but still it's the user who actively decides on which content he or she wants to get, to learn, ...

I mean this is not the new enlightment but the question is how to use it. In the moment I follow the results of a project where the user is seeing his/her very own documentation: Florian Thalhofer and Kolja Mensing interviewed the inhabitants of a huge immeuble (1600 people live there) for a project called "13.Stock" (unfortunately the English version is down so there is only a Polish translation). With every piece of interview you watch you get three other pieces to choose next.

I don't like their design that's for sure. But actually in the moment I'm not even sure if I like the idea and what I get out of that. I remember to have seen other projects with the same concepts so I still need to check that out. And hopefully come up with an opinion.

For the moment there is still what Chrizi came up with: take pieces of an interview and stop them at a certain point. The respective pieces would tell a typical story about working in Poland, some special cross-cultural encounter, or something like that. Just before the "strange" behavior the film would be stopped and the usere would have to guess what happens next. Thus to become aware of his/her own behaviorly patterns and expectancies.

This would be quite analogous to the method of culture assimilators and the story telling of critical incidents. Therefore it would also be necessary to find an appropriate Polish explanation for certain behaviors.

and then I call it a day.

Is it necessary to present interviews as films? Do I need to see a moving face the whole time? What's the alternative? Film stills (or photos)? A form of visualizing the content of the things said?

I mean I still need to figure out how to visualize all the other things but the interviews are at least something very specific...

An official consultation today revealed the following....

Another possible layer of structure could be categorized into business life with two sub-categories - issues within and issues outside the company -, and a second main category concerned with the individual (private) living situation.

I, too, need to think about user rights. My teacher drew my attention to information that is enterprise-sensitive - thus information they do not want to share with their competitors. On the other hand, employees might not want to share problems they encounter in their private lives with their superiors nor with their subordinates.

I agree that I will at least need to think about it theoretically. This leads to the general question of the level of participation of users: do I want them to put in their own content? While I love things to be interactive I'm very afraid that this web application is growing too big. I don't have the time to put every possible feature into one website. Nevertheless I definitely need to include possible features in my thinking.

While talking about corparate-sensitive content he also suggested to create an extra area that companies can "buy" and design according to their own guidelines, including their logo and stuff like that.


Discussing the interviews coming up he also pointed out that I need to be a bit neutral about the topics I want to talk about. This means that I will have to be open to see which topics are actually relevant for expatriates. Thus even though I anticipate the historical impact on German-Polish relationships to be relevant I should not push people into that direction. He said that for example the rebellion in the Ghetto of Warsaw might come up in one interview again and again but that could be simply due to the location of the company in Warsaw.

My head is so full of things that still need to grow into ideas that I have a hard time to put anything down into words.

The first good news is that I'll have several interview partners. I got hooked up with two companies who have their headquarters in Germany in subsidiaries in Poland.

The first is a constructing company started cooperating with a Polish company right away in 1990. They then started to buy shares and in 2000 eventually merged the two companies into one. The Polish part of the company works independently but already looking on the names listed as members of the board, you can see some German names.

The other company is a doing logistics in Poland at four places. It used to be completeyl run by German expatriates. Nowadays they have more than 700 employees in Poland.

And as you see, I still need to gather muchmuchmore information :)

A series of "Minutes in Russia" (MIR). "Mir" means "peace" and "earth" in Russian.

After the 4 hours flying from Moscow to Krasnoyarsk, where is the next airport to Kansk, with time delay, wodka and whiskey in veins we were invited for an interview in a branch of radio station Echo of Moscow in Krasnoyarsk. It has the same frequency as our radio station in Weimar so I felt homelike there. The interview took one hour and most of the time I was sitting there just beeing the guest from germany. But I was totally fine with that part. They had deep and interessting discussions about commercial cinema and about what they call parallel cinema. I was asking myself where in germany is that much time to talk(!) about film art? I think not in radio and neither in TV. On the other side I was surprised about the critical ond open speech of everybody. For me it felt as free as in Germany (that says nothing about the freedom of speach in Germany).

In that minute they talk about Pavlyuk Konovalchik from Belarus, who made the film "Goodbye, Batska!" inspired by the german film "Goodbye, Lenin!". His short film is a political satire about the belarus propaganda. Now he is arrested. His film was not only shown at the Kansk Video Festival to a broad audience, they also dedicated the festival to him.

Die Plakatwerbung eines Stromanbieters im U-Bahnhof Mehringdamm in Berlin-Kreuzberg. Die Plakate sind mit dem Kommentar eines Sprayers versehen. Während Fahrgäste auf ihre U-Bahn warten, haben wir sie gefragt, was Werbung und Graffiti in ihnen auslösen.

Produziert am 18.05.2006

Fragen: Wenke Wegner
Kamera/Schnitt: Mirko Kubein

Teil I: Was hat denn Jesus damit zu tun, dass man was günstiger kriegen will?


Teil II: Würde 'n Kind nie so sagen!




Teil III: Somebody 's got a job doin' graphics.




Teil IV: Einmal rauf schauen hilft, glaub ich, da nicht.




Teil V: Ich muss jetzt los!