MiASU Seminar: Saranzaya Manalsuren

Interdisciplinary Interpretation of ‘Heritage-Locality’ among Business Practitioners in Contemporary Mongolia

The ‘heritage-locality’, or the concept of ‘nutag’ has been theorised as a focal point to understand the identities of Mongols in the literature of cultural anthropology. However, previous studies focused on contextualising identity construction, political activities and pasture management with rich empirical narratives.

This paper examines the concept of ‘nutag’ from the perspective of indigenous management theories and provides an interdisciplinary approach to unravel the shared-meaning of locality among managing practitioners in contemporary Mongolia.

This research examines local managers’ understanding of being a manager and managing effectively, by investigating the nature of Mongolian managers’ roles and their actual experience of handling public and private entities under the great economic and political changes since the country’s transition from a socialist to a democratic regime from 1990 until 2016. Specifically, it examines the common attributes of the ‘heritage-locality’ in their day-to- day management practices and explains the shared-meaning of the concept of ‘nutag’ among local business practitioners. Furthermore, this research proposes that ‘nutag’ can be identified as one of the indigenous management tools utilised to manage effectively in contemporary Mongolia.

This paper is based on my PhD project, using a qualitative method of shadowing 3 managers and interviewing 30 local and international managers in Mongolia (summer 2014 and 2015).