Georg Simmel's notion of intersecting group affiliations is used to analyze the situation of European R&D personnel employed by Japanese and American corporations. The fact that foreign R&D personnel belong to multiple research communities poses strategic challenges for global firms. One notable finding concerns the issue of 'competitive advantage in the basic research lab'. The traditional 'ethnocentricity' of firms, while facilitating intra-firm tacit knowledge flows, may create obstacles in the ability to access and capture critical knowledge embedded in foreign innovation systems outside firm boundaries.
There are many ways of understanding the claim that the self is a social product; for example, an orthodox behaviorist could argue that selective reinforcement from others helps shape our developing selves. Charles Horton Cooley (184), however, argued that the social process shaping the self revolved around intersubjectivity, seeing ourselves as we imagine others see us. "In imagination we perceive in another's mind some thought of our appearance, manners, aims, deeds, characters, friends, and so on, and are variously affected by it."
Writing in the early 20th century, Simmel saw the growing social differentiation in modem society as enabling individuals to belong to a myriad of different, 'intersecting' social groups (Simmel 1955). Indeed, modem individuality itself meant the freedom of individuals to belong to a unique combination of overlapping social groups as opposed to having one's identity determined, as in medieval times, by mutually reinforcing social groups defined along rigidly segregated regional, class, and occupational lines. From the individual's point of view, the need to manage one's multiple group memberships can be both a source of tension and a means of self-development (Simmel 1955: 142).
But G. H. Mead (1934), taking this basic insight further, stressed that the internalization of the perspective of others forms only one part of our personality, the self that is........
