Fremdheit und Unterschied als Hürde und Chance

This paper is based on the personal experience of persons who have been strangers themselves and discusses the effect of (actual and attributed) strangeness on a person’s identity within a group, the subjective perception people have of others who are different, and also the way groups handle this strangeness. The attempts to explain these experiences and the observed social phenomena within groups serve to introduce the issue of what role ‘difference’ plays in organizational development. Difference is perceived both as barrier and opportunity, a window to self-knowledge, learning and further development.