Cross-Cultural Competence

Slawomir Magala

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134271771
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Cross-cultural management is a crucial challenge for the successful development of international business, yet it is often badly understood and poorly implemented. Misunderstandings arise as culture affects both individuals and organizations, yet attempts to understand, explain and interpret these differences have often been hidden between a welter of conflicting theories and paradigms.

This book is a much-needed guide to the theory and practice of cross-cultural management. It focuses on four key areas:

• the language connection
• the global connection
• the management connection
• the multimedia connection.

Using an innovative approach combining theory, tool-kits and applications, it takes a fresh look at this complex topic, investigating the recognition of cross-cultural differences, accounting for them in managerial communications, and bridging them in a variety of negotiations, interactions and collaborative projects.

Chapter 1: The ends, means and meanings of culture: The language connection

1 Ends of cultural software

What is a culture, if not a consensus?

(Clifford Geertz)

What is a culture? The way we do things around here? Core values plus norms plus behaviour (about which there is some consensus) and artefacts? Subjective mental software copied from an objective tradition? Rituals that train us into socially approved habits? The web of meanings spun around us so that we can go on understanding and interpreting the world and ourselves? Practices, representations, languages, and customs? There are notoriously many, often incompatible definitions, but differences between them do not seem to bother us too much in our daily lives.

A general consensus could possibly develop around three basic meanings of the concept of culture. In the first, culture would be associated with ‘cultivation’ – originally of land, subsequently of mind and finally of a complex human civilization in general. In the second, culture would be a ‘black box’ of meanings, values, norms, and ‘ways’ (patterns of behaviour, artefacts) regularly demonstrated and applied by real individuals and their groups. In the third, culture would be the totality of sense-making practices pursued by individuals, groups and societies (the culture of the Renaissance in Italy, the cultural project of the Enlightenment in France, the neoliberal doctrine of management and governance in the US) and the totality of search engines individuals use to find them. In view of the many conflicting definitions, a more pragmatic approach usually prevails and we agree to live by a conventional, popular metaphor and a persuasive, convincing interpretation rather than by a precise definition. It is not uncommon to find social scientists settling for the following definition: ‘culture is a way of summarizing the ways in which groups distinguish themselves from other groups’ (Wallerstein, 2000, 265).

What is a culture for? For getting to ‘yes’ or for breeding dissent? For guiding our actions or for reflecting on what we had done? For helping us make sense of the environment and ourselves? To help us survive? With ‘us’ here being individuals, groups, organizations, companies, institutions, societies, or even civilizations? An evolutionary mode of thinking at the turn of the 20th and the 21st centuries linked culture to increasingly complex co-operation between individuals and to the increasingly uncertain survival of complex societies. Co-operation between increasingly different and distant individuals, organizations and societies, and the survival of increasingly complex societies came to be defined as problems, the solution of which required cultural engineering and re-engineering. This link became a tacit axiom of educated common sense. Culture is tacitly assumed to be a survival kit carried as a backpack by members of our species going about their business.

What is culture, then? What is inside this backpack? A bank of data, a bunch of methods and resources, some stores of knowledge, some toolkits of skills and preferences? Most scientists and scholars reflecting on culture agree that there is a ‘core’ of values, beliefs and norms, accessible through socialization, education and upbringing. Individuals can borrow ideas from one another as easily as they borrow books from a library. They profit from their implementation, as they profit from pooling resources and getting a credit from a bank to invest in their business venture. Not for nothing do we speak of data banks, knowledge assets or think tanks. Each of us can understand our environment, explain behaviour, deal with some problems and avoid others, survive. Each of us can do so much more quickly and efficiently because of access to the thoughts and feelings, explanations and interpretations of many other individuals in other places and from other times. Each of us, in turn, has a chance of contributing to human culture. We take loans from our cultural banks, but we pay them back, sometimes with interest. From the library of Alexandria to the world wide-web we gather knowledge, store it, access it, distribute it, register it; we provide feedback, contribute, preserve memories, perform rituals, cultivate traditions. Culturally speaking, we are all ‘big spenders’.

No reader can claim that he or she has read all books in the great library of Alexandria. Usually, we do not really know what the ‘whole’ culture is like. One does not have to read all the books in a library to be able to spot and borrow relevant ones. Not everybody wants to explain the nature of the universe or apply the laws of motion and energy. Everybody, however, wants to explain the behaviour of ourselves and others. Everybody would like to know the most desirable ends and the most fitting means to reach them, first because everybody wants to find their way in his or her social world, and second because common sense provides insufficient resources for doing so. Surprises, hurdles, conflicts, and improvisations defy routines. Scenarios get modified, dialogues rewritten, timing reset, routes re-charted. Social scientists, experts, specialists have to be consulted. Our backpacks guarantee access to human culture, but we need guides to navigate huge knowledge domains that increase every day, and we need skilled coaches to learn how to apply cultural knowledge in situations we have never faced before.

A social scientist in general, and a representative of the organizational and managerial sciences in particular, wants to understand what people (managers, employees, leaders, functionaries, operatives) are doing, when they do what they set out to do. It seems simple but is not, because in order to arrive at an explanation and use it to design a plan of action, a business plan, we have to rely on experts. Experts usually rely on researchers, or conduct research themselves. Managers and their gurus often simply cut out common-sense explanations along with scientific ones from available sources and paste them without questioning their origins (unexamined common sense) or explaining the intellectual price tags (ambiguous research traditions, long-standing controversies among experts). Most researchers in the social sciences would, for instance, agree that a common-sense view of a man as a biological ‘machine’ with a spiritual ‘ghost’ inside is – roughly – correct. They usually assume that a man is made of material hardware with a mental programme (sometimes compared to ‘software’) inside, but they realize that this is an oversimplification of the ‘real’ composition of the universe of the human. Some of them realize that they are following Descartes in splitting human individuals into physiological clockworks or automata, on the one hand, and sophisticated ghosts (souls, personalities, minds, mental programmes, cultural software) on the other. Some say that automata can be studied by the natural and engineering sciences. They are, after all, mechanisms, homeostatic feedback systems. Ghosts (souls, personalities, minds, cultural software) should be studied by the social sciences – psychology, social psychology, sociology, cultural anthropology, economics, linguistics, sociolinguistics, history, in short, the behavioural, social and humanist disciplines (if we want to know and understand), and the organizational and managerial sciences (if we want to act and implement).

However, if we agree to look for ghosts in the machines, we have already turned a deaf ear to a whole alternative school of thought, which claims that this distinction is wrong. Reality is not neatly divided into mechanical bodies and spiritual minds. Bodies get spirited, minds matter, processes in both can have material consequences. Events exist and flow through space and time. Reality is composed of flows and processes, fluctuations follow capricious dynamic patterns, organizing is reversible and influences evolutionary change. Synapses connect into unrepeatable patterns of individual, flexible neural networks; organizations ally themselves, fall apart, break alliances and forge new ones. The world is not an empty stage filled with objects or bodies waiting to be copied by minds and registered by a scientific bureaucracy. It is a multidimensional stream of events twisting space and time as they flow by. Words and names do not simply reflect this flow, they can also influence it by focusing, urging, defining, co-creating realities. Human minds evolve along with their bodies, and viewing them separately and independently from their environments, both natural and social, distorts our understanding of both of them. Thus having set out to simplify our description of reality in order to explain it better, we end up misrepresenting it and offering inferior explanations. Distortions usually result from an attempt to squeeze dynamic reality into the rigid, bureaucratic categories of institutional science. The representatives of organizational sciences, for instance, usually assume that organizations are like Russian dolls. First, they have sub-organizations inside. Second, human individuals hide in these sub-parts of the organization. Third, within each individual, a mind with a mental programme can be found, and, finally, this mental programme can be separated from its carrier – an individual mind.

This common-sense vision of societies and organizations as Russian dolls and as ghosts in machines is contradicted by the results of research conducted at the level of each assumed Russian doll hiding in another. Societies are not passive containers for organizations. They unroll red carpets for some, facilitating their growth, and constraining others from flourishing or even emerging. Organizations are not mechanical storage facilities for individuals. They attract and develop some personality types, and reject and destroy the others. Individual minds are not impassive holders of symbolic culture. All individuals give their personal twist to the knowledge they acquire. Symbolic culture is not an immutable set of abstract entities independent of the rest of the environment. It is a dynamic, fluctuating ‘cloud’ of interrelated elements, which responds to changes in their environment. Individual minds do not grow and change independently of the bodies, cultures and organizations surrounding them. They co-evolve together. Nevertheless, this common-sense, middle-of-the-road, ‘instinctive’, mechanical ‘Cartesianism’ persists, because it meets a profound need. We would all like to feel certain that there is an objective world ‘out there’, different from the subjective world ‘in here’, and that the two are synchronized, that they work together. This is a tacit, commonly assumed, ‘realist’ philosophy of culture and society, automatically acceptable to researchers, managers and the broader public, disseminated through teaching and training programmes, designed and executed by large bureaucracies, sanctified by common sense. Is it safe to assume that since so many people think so, it must be true? Does safety reside in numbers? Is truth determined by polls?

Perhaps. But look who is polling whom. Polling a narrow club of experts rather than the broad public does not change the principle, only the scale. However, this safety has been paid for with insoluble contradictions. The complexity of a single human individual perplexes artists and scientists alike. One person’s life-world of daily experience challenges even the most sophisticated research programmes. The intricacies of emotional bonds escape descriptive efforts and defeat explanatory schemes. The complexities of even the smallest organizations of interacting individuals challenge mechanistic and organic images (of companies and institutions, of networks and constellations) researchers work with. And complexities of evolving societies clashing or co-operating with one another challenge our attempts to understand and predict future developments. Moreover, complexities of the objects of study are matched by complexities of the methods that are being employed.

To understand individual and group behaviour, researchers can try to formulate abstract generalizations that explain broad classes of actions and predict possible outcomes of some situations. Predictions based on reliable and approved methodologies are important for employees of bureaucratic organizations. Their work requires legitimate and reliable knowledge. Reliable knowledge is professionally produced knowledge. It can be used legitimately, because it had been produced by professionals and approved by their community (by ‘peers’ defined within professional bureaucracies). It can be applied in planning, controlling, motivating, and guiding others according to formal criteria. The problem is that what passes for reliable and legitimate knowledge is often presented as ‘objective’, ‘impartial’, ‘nonideological’, and ‘value-free’. Scientists are not supposed to tell us where to go, only how to get there. Nevertheless, when they advise us how to get somewhere, they implicitly suggest that some ends can be reached and some cannot. If ends cannot be reached, then perhaps we should not waste time trying. A hint, a suggestion, an assumption, a stereotype – these are easily born. Most social scientists would agree that knowledge generated within social sciences is not, cannot be, value-free and ‘objective’. Most of them, however, would also admit that scientific expertise looks much more convincing when presented as objective knowledge, when packaged as ‘value-free’, ‘universally valid’, produced without paradigmatic bias and ideological prejudice. One of the most popular ways of presenting it this way is to model it after natural sciences and to pretend that both natural and social sciences ‘speak’ the same language when describing and interpreting the world.

The temptation to imitate the natural sciences has always been very strong. Researchers wanted to discover the ‘iron laws’ regulating human behaviour – preferably to be isolated in a laboratory and then ‘confirmed’ in the course of empirical inquiry into human behaviour outside of it. They wanted to describe the ‘mechanisms’ of some aspect of behaviour. Managers wanted to hear instructions on how to make use of these mechanisms. Most of them were trained as engineers, not social scientists. They expected the expert advice to be couched in the same terms as instructions in mechanical engineering. Researchers, reading the expectations of managers and trying to imitate natural sciences, duly obliged. For instance, they studied decisionmaking in heterogeneous teams and generalized their results to explain decision-making in large organizations. They sought to explain the ‘evolution’ of organizational forms as if these were biological ‘species’ evolving due to the pressures of a changing environment. For instance, they sought to find out what organizational characteristics help small high-tech firms to survive, and see if these characteristics are present in the thousands of companies that actually do manage to survive. They asked what human resource policies were dominant in companies that survived, and what policies prevailed in companies that went bankrupt in the same area of business and in the same period. It was easy to assume that establishing organizations was like spawning a new generation of living organisms, say, a school of fish, and that closing them down was like the extinction of a natural species.

Most such attempts have been inconclusive and unsuccessful on their own terms. No grand theory of human or organizational behaviour, comparable to the theory of Newton or Darwin, or even Marx, Weber or Freud, has emerged so far. However, biology and theory of evolution did play a role in changing a common-sense approach to the social sciences. First, philosophers, politicians, managers, and sponsors of science sought to overcome the Cartesian dualism that separates a ghost (mind) from a machine (body). They have tried to get rid of the mind–matter, culture–nature dualistic problem. Some of them looked for a third world, one of objective culture, objective knowledge, where bodies and minds interact freely and dynamic fluctuations result in windows of opportunity for those who are able to seize them. They did so in order to demonstrate that there is no unbridgeable gap between two worlds of Descartes. Look, they said, we do not have to be imprisoned in a mind–body, ghost–machine, hardware–software stereotype. The third world of objective knowledge (populated, for instance, with scientific theories and works of art) can be accessed because human individuals have ‘ghosts’ (are able to reproduce pieces of objective knowledge in their consciousness) in their biological ‘machines’ (which are equipped with senses to access pieces of recorded objective knowledge). In other words, they have minds, and they can experience streams of consciousness linking their bodily impressions to intellectual operations in a seamless web. The third world of objective knowledge is thus open to the world of ‘ghosts’.

On the other hand, once I write my theory down or e-mail it to my fellow scientists or colleagues in the media, it starts leading its own life. If I finish composing my symphony and give it to a conductor, this symphony, previously cradled and nursed only in my individual mind, becomes independent of my personal consciousness. Theories and symphonies are recorded, virtually preserved in some material medium (such as a printed book, musical score, digitally recorded compact disc). Moreover, they can acquire material reality. A mass of sounds (imagined in my mind once before and recorded as the notes of the score) can be produced by an orchestra, and so mark these sounds’ presence in the first, material world. Likewise, if my scientific theory results in constructing a mobile phone or a nuclear power plant, the ‘object’ from the third world of objective knowledge will be embodied in a ‘material’ artefact, which belongs to the first world. It will also be embodied in the neural wiring of the experts who managed to learn the relevant theory and apply it in practice to produce the nuclear power plant. The third world of objective knowledge is thus firmly embedded (or at least potentially ‘embeddable’) in the world of ‘machines’ and in the world of ‘ghosts’. It will survive temporary loss of either of the two. Even if I shut out my mind, stop thinking about this theory or stop listening to this symphony, they will continue to exist, will still be open to any other individual mind whose owner is able to read, listen, think, and experience. On the other hand, even if all nuclear power plants evaporate and there is no material object one might label in this way, the existence of a third world’s blueprint for such a plant and the accessibility of this blueprint to learning individuals with functioning brains will allow us to reconstruct one fairly quickly.

This is how one of the most intriguing philosophers of science of the 20th century, Karl R. Popper, thought he had managed to avoid dilemmas of a split of reality into a ghost versus a machine. An open, democratic society honestly pursuing knowledge should build and maintain a bridge and a balance between ‘ghosts’ and ‘machines’, and learn how to manage traffic on such bridges. Citizens of this open society would speak the same universal language of united science, patterned after the natural sciences but sensitive to the humanities, and they would argue according to the logic of scientific discovery.

Popper’s ideas reflect the widespread influence of an evolutionary mode of thinking about culture and society in the second half of the 20th century. Due to this influence, most of us came to see culture as an evolutionary ‘bridge’ between ghosts and machines. Culture arose as a result of the evolution of human brains and societies, and it has become mankind’s most important evolutionary resource. It suffered many crises of growth, but did not crumble. It is still there and it still works. Not the Tower of Babel, but a bridge of Babel. Culture is a bridge of Babel constructed by many different builders speaking different ‘languages’–the languages of science, art, religion, morality, everyday life. This cultural bridge is materially constructed, hence objectively preserved (recorded), and psychologically accessible, hence subjectively relevant. Within culture, there is an ongoing struggle between various building technologies, different designers, competing construction crews. Each of them claims that it provides the single most important component, which merits special attention because without it the whole bridge would collapse. The most successful promotional campaign is presently being waged by suppliers of ‘scientific’ elements of the bridge. They claim that scientists contribute much more than priests, managers or artists to the maintenance of this bridge of Babel. They also claim to be responsible for reshaping, developing and accessing culture in general, not just their own scientific lane.

There is some truth to their claims. Without archaeologists and conservationists we would have lost most of our records, buildings and other artefacts of symbolic culture, and without historians we would not have understood them. Without psychologists and sociologists we would be unable to continue understanding them. Scientists allow humans to manipulate both ghosts and machines much more effectively, efficiently and thoroughly than ever before. However, it is not their voices that we hear when noticing warning signs. It is not their voices we hear when we face sudden challenges, changes, transformations. We hear other, non-scientific voices, which warn us against collective seduction by an ideal of perfect knowledge and total control, presumably awaiting us round the next corner. Other cultural heroes try to persuade scientists and all users of culture that we should not remain imprisoned in metaphors we lived by for years, perhaps even centuries. Scientific communities are not seats of moral authority, and their seduction by the powers that be has often been recorded. The educated public has some access to ‘the kitchen’ of scientific communities, but this tends to be limited. Moreover, no matter how serious the warnings get, governments and managers listen to scientists rather than the educated public (‘representatives of civil society’, ‘corporate citizens’), artists or moral authorities. Artists are seen as promoting their creations, moral and religious authorities as advertising their faith. Scientists are supposed to promote selfless knowledge and are thus considered more reliable. Are they always making responsible use of this favourable bias? There are reasons to suspect that at least in some cases the answer might be negative (cf. Mirowski, Sent, 2002).

Scientists have developed a number of techniques for building the trust of the general educated public. They often claim that their thinking is more rigorous and more accessible to an average member of society, for an ‘everyman’ (with a university diploma) than the thinking of artists or priests. One way of phrasing it is to say that scientists try to follow the logic of scientific discovery, accepted by all members of their research community and the authors of textbooks for schoolchildren. Scientists are also required to systematically check and legitimize their findings in an ongoing discussion, in which everybody tries to falsify his or her own hypotheses as honestly as possible. In this way, scientists claim that they have introduced a much more thorough total quality control of everything that is being produced in the evolving house of science. If this is so, then it is only just that they should be given preferential treatment when individu...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Cross-Cultural Competence
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Introduction: The shadow of the Tower of Babel
• Chapter 1: The ends, means and meanings of culture: The language connection
• Chapter 2: Clashing civilizations: The global connection
• Chapter 3: Networking organizations: The management connection
• Chapter 4: Creative communication: The multimedia connection
• Conclusion: Managing cross-cultural competence
• Notes
• References