Cross-Cultural Management

A Transactional Approach

Taran Patel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134576265
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: International Business
• Index: Business

The internationalization of business via the process of globalization has brought issues of culture to the forefront of management thinking. Although culture is by no means a new area of study in business schools, it remains frustratingly elusive and misunderstood.

This textbook gives business students - or future managers - an understanding of the multitude of frameworks available to them to make sense of the cultural contexts they will encounter in their managerial careers. Starting from a general introduction to 'culture' and its role in businesses, Taran Patel encourages readers to shed a critical eye on the commonly accepted frameworks. She compels readers to ask three questions:

• Can I only make sense of the variety of cultures around me by categorizing people into static categories based on their geo-ethnic identities?
• Is it valid to make sense of people's behaviours by categorizing them as 'French', 'Indian', 'German' or 'American'?
• What other ways are there to make sense of people and their behaviours?

Students studying from this textbook will benefit from a variety of conceptual tools that can be used to navigate the world of culture and its intersection with business and management. Taran Patel's unique textbook will be core reading for students of cross-cultural management / intercultural communication and essential reading for all those studying or researching international business and management.

Part I

Overview: Culture and its impact on business

1	Culture: A complex construct of many layers

‘And take upon the mystery of things, as if we were God’s spies.’

Shakespeare, King Lear (i.i.6)

What you will learn in this chapter:

• the varied definitions of culture;
• the ongoing debates with regards to culture and its nature;
• the various alternatives to the term ‘culture’;
• the varied epistemological stances towards the understanding of culture.

Introduction

Although cultural understanding has become crucial in this age of globalization, culture is by no means a new topic of interest for practitioners and scholars alike. In fact, accounts of cultural differences in the workplace have been traced to the writings of early Greek scholars such as Herodotus (Gelfand, Erez and Aycan 2007) who noted differences in work behaviour in the Persian Empire (Herodotus et al. 2003). Literature describing trading practices along the Silk Road, which stretched from Rome to Syria in the West, to China in the East, and to Egypt and Iran in the Middle East dating from the second century BC (Elisseeff 2000), also describes disparate habits. Therefore, references to culture and culturally different work practices are not new. However, in recent times, the ease and scope of cross-cultural interactions have led to an exponential increase in the interest in cross-cultural studies. While we acknowledge that significant advances have been made towards better understanding of culture and its impact on businesses in past decades, we also believe that we are no closer to a conceptual consensus regarding culture than our predecessors. Despite being the focus of numerous studies in recent decades, both in business studies and in anthropology, culture remains both an elusive and a grossly misunderstood term. Therefore, this chapter begins by reviewing the many definitions of culture that one finds in the literature of both business and anthropology.

Varied definitions of culture and the resulting intellectual debate

Culture is a term that business literature defines in diverse ways. In this section, we cite a few definitions that we find most relevant for subsequent discussions in this book. Louis (1981: 246) defined culture as ‘a shared system of values, norms and symbols. The term culture conveys an entire image, an integrated set of dimensions/characteristics and the whole beyond the parts’. Gelfand et al. (2007) explained that culture has been defined as the human-made part of the environment (Herskovits 1955), including both objective and subjective elements (Triandis 1972); as a set of reinforcements (Skinner 1981); as a shared meaning system (Shweder and LeVine 1984); and as unstated standard operating procedures or ways of doing things (Triandis 1994). For Hall and Hall (1990: 3), culture ‘can be likened to a giant extraordinarily complex, subtle computer. … its programs guide the actions and responses of human beings in every walk of life’. For Hofstede (1980), culture is ‘the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the member of one human group from another’ (Hofstede 1980: 25). This definition implies that members of a social group, say a company or a nation, have similar ‘programming’ governing their minds; hence, they may be expected to behave in similar ways. There is, therefore, an assumption of cultural homogeneity within and cultural heterogeneity between social groups as well as the assumption that culture represents a stable core. The past view was that culture was a ‘weight of habits and beliefs that is passed on unchanged from generation to generation’ (Schwarz and Thompson 1990: 2). Much before Hofstede (1980), Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1952) identified no fewer than 156 definitions of culture. One of these, suggested by Adler and Doktor (1986: 181) was that:

Culture consist of patterns, explicit and implicit of and for behaviour acquired and transmitted by symbols constituting the distinctive achievement of human groups, including their embodiment in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional (i.e. historically derived and selected) ideas and especially their attached values; culture systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of action, on the other, as conditioning elements of further action.

Scholars have taken issue with one or more elements of this definition. The discussion in the following subsection addresses some of these points of contention

Contention 1: Is culture shared?

While most scholars have agreed that culture is shared, is adaptive, has been adaptive at some point in the past and is transmitted across time and generations (Triandis 1994), others remind us that culture is not always ‘shared’. Joanne Martin has offered a particularly eloquent and convincing argument on this point. She has explained that ‘No matter how you “slice it” culture still cannot be defined only as that which is shared. The idea that culture is that which is shared is a Lazarus of a theory: It just will not die’ (Martin 2002: 155). She countered this viewpoint by arguing that culture can also be defined as an incompletely shared system. Martin (2002) offered Meyerson’s (1991) conceptualization of culture to support her argument:

Members do not agree upon clear boundaries, cannot identify shared solutions, and do not reconcile contradictory beliefs and multiple identities. Yet these members contend they belong to a culture. They share a common orientation and overarching purpose, face similar problems, and have comparable experiences. However, these shared orientations and purposes accommodate different beliefs and incommensurable technologies, these problems imply different solutions, and these experiences have multiple meanings … Thus, for at least some cultures, to dismiss the ambiguities in favor of strictly what is clear and shared is to exclude some of the most central aspects of members’ cultural experience and to ignore the essence of their cultural community.

(Meyerson 1991: 131–32)

In the same way, Tsui et al. (2007) have argued that, while culture is commonly acknowledged as a group level construct, a group construct can be global, shared or configural. Citing the earlier work of Klein and Kozlowski (2000), Tsui et al. (2007) have explained that a global property is one that is objective, easily observable and independent of the perception of individual group members, such as the GDP or the population of a country. A shared property, on the other hand, originates in the common experiences, perceptions or behaviours of the members of a group, and it represents a consensual aspect of culture. Finally, a configural property resides in the variations in individual characteristics within a group; these configural properties emerge from characteristics of individual group members, but they are not expected to be consensual, as in the differences among the individual value systems within the same country. Tsui et al. (2007) have reminded culture scholars that, although culture has often been explored as a global and consensual property of a group, its configural nature has often been neglected. While culture might involve some shared and global characteristics, the members of the cultural group might not necessarily share several aspects of it.

Contention 2: Is culture unique and homogenous within a geographic entity?

While some scholars question the ‘shared’ nature of culture, others object to the idea of culture within a geographic entity being homogenous and unique. Again, Joanne Martin has led the argument, saying,

Cultural members may believe their organization’s culture is unique, but often what is believed to be unique to a particular context is found elsewhere as well (Martin 1992a: 111), a contradiction labeled the ‘uniqueness paradox’ (Martin et al. 1983). For example, when people tell stories that illustrate ‘what makes this place special,’ these anecdotes share the characteristics of seven common story types found in most organizations.

(Martin 2002: 63)

Rosalie Tung has also offered similar arguments challenging the uniqueness and homogeneity of culture within social entities. Tung (2008) offered a variety of arguments challenging the idea of cultural homogeneity within a country. In particular, she used the example of Canada, with its two official languages, to point out the cultural diversity that exists between the French-speaking and English-speaking parts of the country. These Canadian Anglophone and Francophone populations are further believed to be distinct from the ‘Allophones’ who speak languages other than English or French. Tung (2008) has pointed out that, in countries such as Canada, intra-national differences can be far more significant and influential than cross-national differences. In other words, there might be more similarities between Anglophones in Canada and their American neighbours than between Anglophone and Francophone Canadians. Tung (2008) has offered the following explanations behind increasing diversity within nations such as Canada: (1) reduced immigration and emigration barriers for people (Johnston 1991) and (2) the increasingly boundary-less nature of the workforce (Tung 1998, Stahl, Miller and Tung 2002). Jean-Claude Usunier has also offered similar arguments. Usunier (1998) noted a variety of reasons why assuming cultural homogeneity within a nation would be misleading:

• some countries are deeply multicultural, such as India with its highly diversified ethnic, religious and linguistic groups;
• some nation-states are explicitly multicultural. Switzerland, for example, places a strong emphasis on the defence of local particularism in the political system;
• colonization and decolonization have resulted in borders that are sometimes straight lines on a map with little respect for cultural realities; for African countries, ‘ethnic culture’ matters, whereas ‘national culture’ is in many cases meaningless.

Contention 3: Is culture stable or is it dynamic?

As seen so far, many scholars have objected to the commonly accepted conceptualization of culture as a shared property of a group. Other scholars have challenged the assumption of cultural homogeneity and uniqueness within cultural entities (whether these are organizations or nations). Yet others object to the idea that culture represents a stable traditional ‘essential core’ or that it represents some kind of ‘distinctive achievement’. Supporting the stable conceptualization of culture, Hoecklin (1993) has defined culture as a set of values with which an individual grows up. She has added that it is a combination of the personal values and morals as well as the society’s influence on individuals in their growing years. Hence, it is the shared way groups of people understand and interpret the world. She concluded that culture influences the ways in which a person perceives and reacts to certain situations. In such definitions (see also Schein 1985), there is the underlying assumption that culture is static. However, several scholars (Levitt 1983, Ohmae 1985, O’Reilly 1991) have questioned this ‘permanent nature’ of culture.

Prominent among researchers who have opposed the static conceptualization of culture are transactional culture scholars (see Kapferer 1976) who have considered culture as emerging through the process of interaction. They have believed that cultural rules have a dynamic quality, capable of producing transformations in meaning and changing or redirecting behaviour along new paths (see Chapter 7 for detailed discussions). Similarly, proponents of the Douglasian Cultural Framework (e.g. Douglas 1978, 1982, 1996, Gross and Rayner 1985, Wildavsky 1987, Thompson 1992, 1996) not only have questioned the ‘permanent nature’ of culture, but they also have demonstrated that members of one cultural group can easily become members of another (see Chapter 8 for detailed discussions). In fact, people could be members of many different cultural groups depending on the situation in which they find themselves (Rayner 1995).

Mary Douglas, the creator of the Douglasian Cultural Framework, defined cultures as the frameworks of accountability. Culture, argued Douglas (1996), is the way people live together. Raising the issue of culture means addressing questions of solidarity; securing solidarity (that is living together in an organized way) implies the use of force and ‘heavy tactics of persuasion’. According to Thompson and Wildavsky (1986), who are proponents of the Douglasian Cultural Framework, a culture sustains a particular arrangement of social relationships, and the conjunction stimulates and is stimulated by other contradictory conjunctions. This means that cultures constantly evolve and are generated from, and supported by, differences from other cultures. Thompson and Wildavsky (1986) believed that cultures are not countries nor customs nor myths nor races nor ethnicities. Cultures are ways of life. The dimensions of social life build them, and they are continually put to the acid test of social viability. This viewpoint indicates that cultures evolve and are not ‘permanent’ after all.

Similarly, Gross and Rayner (1985: 3) have contended that culture ‘is the common way that a community of persons makes sense of the world’. Cultures are ‘general regulatory mechanisms of human behaviour’: they represent ‘a set of plans, instructions and rules or less purposively, a means of social accounting’. Cultures control the behaviour of individuals by recourse to shared values and ideas. However, culture also has a cognitive dimension in that it creates meaning. Schwarz and Thompson (1990) have gone as far as to maintain that ‘knowing … presupposes culture’. Scholars adhering to this school of thought suggest that culture does not necessarily have to coincide with the (socially constructed) fault lines drawn by ethnicity or nationality. Rather, culture is a structural phenomenon; it describes those ideational and institutional structures that enable social cooperation.

Other scholars have tendered other ways of looking at culture. Marvin Harris (1968: 16) proposed that ‘culture comes down to behaviour patterns associated with particular groups of people, that is, to “customs” or to a people’s “way of life”’. Spradley (1979) believed that behaviour patterns, customs and a people’s way of life could all be defined, interpreted and described from more than one perspective. Culture, as defined by Spradley (1979), refers to the acquired knowledge that people use to interpret experience and generate social behaviour, and he suggested that we may see this interpretive aspect more clearly if we think of culture as a cognitive map. He explained that, in the recurrent activities that make up everyday life, we refer to this map, which serves as a guide for our behaviour in a specific context and for interpreting our experience, but it does not compel us to follow a particular course. Although our cultures may not include a detailed map for all occasions, they do provide principles for interpreting and responding to them (Spradley 1979). A few years before Spradley provided us with this metaphor for culture, Frake (1977) had provided another metaphor for culture by likening it to map-making. In comparison to Spradley’s (1979) somewhat ‘static’ metaphor of maps, Frake found that culture is more ‘dynamic’ and is not simply a cognitive map that people acquire, in whole or in part, and then learn to read. People are not just map readers; they are mapmakers. They are cast out into the imperfectly charted, continually shifting seas of everyday life. Mapping these seas out is a constant process, resulting not in an individual cognitive map but in a whole chart case of rough, improvised and continually revised sketch maps. Culture does not provide a cognitive map; instead, it provides a set of principles for map-making and navigation. Although Frake (1977) has suggested different cultures are like different schools of navigation designed to cope with different terrains and seas, he does not explain how these schools of navigation come about or how they are re-created over time.

The aforementioned scholars have proposed a dynamic perspective to culture; they subscribe to the idea that culture is refreshed each morning and concerned primarily with everyday experiences rather than some kind of historically distinctive achievement (Douglas 1970, Thompson and Wildavsky 1986, Wildavsky 1987, Thompson 1996, Thompson 2008). On the extreme end of this dynamic conceptualization of culture are scholars such as Baudrillard (1988), for whom culture represented a ‘network of floating signifiers that offers momentary seduction rather than the ability to store and transmit meaning’ (Poster 1988: 3). Many scholars supporting the dynamic conceptualization of culture have adopted a critical approach to culture and have suggested that one should drop the use of the term ‘culture’ altogether (due to its underlying implication of a shared, stable and homogenous set of characteristics) and adopt alternative terms that allow for a more dynamic conceptualization of culture. For instance, Mats Alvesson (1987: 13) has recommended using terms like ‘ideologies’ or ‘organizational frames of reference’ in lieu of the term ‘culture’. The following section offe...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• About the author
• Part I Overview Culture and its impact on business
• Part II Introducing and critiquing conventional frameworks of culture
• Part III Alternative cultural paradigms and their comparison to conventional cultural paradigms
• Part iv Applications of the Douglasian Cultural Framework to resolve a variety of business problems and conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index