Teaching With American Factory: Illustrating Management Concepts in a Multinational Enterprise With a Documentary Film

摘要

This article reviews the documentary film American Factory as a resource forundergraduate management courses, especially those with a global emphasis. Thefilm illustrates several themes, including overcoming cross-cultural challenges withcultural intelligence; international labor relations; employee health, safety, and wellbeing;stereotypes; and power distance and collectivism. This article also detailsclips from the film that illustrate these themes and suggests instructors show themalongside class lectures (in person, online synchronous, and online asynchronous) asnonfictional demonstrations of the concepts covered in class. In addition, this articleprovides discussion questions and sample answers so that these clips can be used asspringboards for further class analysis, application, and extension. In sum, AmericanFactory is a tool that can increase engagement and multimodality teaching in themanagement curriculum.