Cross-Cultural Management

Culture and Management across the World

Jean-François Chanlat, Eduardo Davel, Jean-Pierre Dupuis, Jean-François Chanlat, Eduardo Davel, Jean-Pierre Dupuis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135076450
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

All cultures appear to share the belief that they do things 'correctly', while others, until proven otherwise, are assumed to be ignorant or barbaric. When people from different cultures work together and cannot take shared meanings for granted, managers face serious challenges. An individual's parsing of an experience and its meaning may vary according to several cultural scales – national, professional, industrial and local. Awareness of cultural differences and the willingness to view them as a positive are therefore crucial assets.

This edited textbook sets itself apart from existing cross-cultural management texts by highlighting to the reader the need to avoid both ethnocentrism and the belief in the universality of his or her own values and ways of thinking: the success of international negotiations and intercultural management depends on such openness and acceptance of real differences. It encourages the development of 'nomadic intelligence' and the creative use of a culture's resources, according to a symbolic anthropology perspective. Through the essays and case studies in the chapters, readers will become aware of the intercultural dimension of business activities and better understand how they affect work.

Cross-Cultural Management will help interested parties – students of business management, international relations and other disciplines, and business managers and other professionals – develop their ability to interact, take action and give direction in an intercultural context.

Part I

Approaches

1

Intercultural analysis and the social sciences

Jean-François Chanlat

Translated from the French by Suzan Nolan and Leila Whittemore

Introduction

Cultural differences have emerged as a popular subject in the world of business management during the past two decades or so. Companies and nations have been strongly affected by a combination of expanded international trade and increased economic regionalization – witness NAFTA, the Southern Common Market, Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, the European Union, communist countries’ transition to capitalism after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and China’s and India’s rise in power. Foreign direct investment has increased, and national and international mergers and acquisitions have multiplied in many sectors, including pharmaceuticals, financial services, automobile manufacture and steel production. Strategic alliances have also expanded, such as those between automobile companies (e.g. Renault–Nissan) and the airline networks, while privatization of large publicly-owned enterprises has created giant international corporations.

In tandem with these economic movements, massive migrations have transformed national demographics almost globally, especially in North America and Europe. These movements have deeply affected the West’s social and economic fabric (Martin et al. 2003), instigating new social configurations and stresses in intercultural relations. Varied attitudes to ‘otherness’ affect how people behave and interact with one another, influencing intercultural relations.

During the last two decades, a number of researchers, teachers and management consultants have worked to improve understanding of the relationship between management and culture, particularly ‘national’ culture (Desjeux and Taponier 1994; Hofstede 2002; Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner 2004; Dupriez and Simons 2002; Iribarne 1998, 2003; Kamdem 2002; Pesqueux 2004; Management International 2004). These efforts have inspired a new managerial field: intercultural management (Schneider and Barsoux 2003; Chevrier 2003). However, these works have not addressed many aspects of intercultural comparison and confrontation.

In this chapter, we will review a few of the key elements of relations with ‘the other’ – the fears, attractions, prejudices, misunderstandings, conflicts and racist behaviors they provoke – and the role of history in understanding confrontations seen today. We will attempt to answer three main questions: what happens when two people from different cultures encounter one another? What are the main types of intercultural misunderstanding? How can the history of relations between different peoples illuminate the attitudes and behaviors we observe today?

Inevitably, such analyses must be colored by the cultural assumptions of the writer – a fact worth acknowledging in a work initially written for a French-speaking audience and now addressed to an international anglophone one. As the discussion here will suggest, this is in itself no insignificant cultural divide; there is always a risk that the very cultural differences this chapter examines may also interfere with its reception among English-speaking readers. But this, too, opens a space for the kind of dialogue that this volume aims to provide. There is no true Archimedean point from which to analyze these phenomena, still less our inquiry into their origins and effects. While the research discussed here is international in authorship and scope, the present writer’s perspective remains unavoidably – and unapologetically – a French one.

Intercultural encounters and otherness

Everyone shapes themself in relation to others. As the British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott so adroitly put it, ‘It is a joy to be hidden but a disaster not to be found’ (Winnicott 1965). This is because awareness of oneself is inseparable from awareness of the other. This relation to the other constitutes the basis of individual identity at a personal level (Tap 1986a, 1986b; Dubar 2000), and of social identity at the collective one (Tap 1986a, 1986b; Dubar 2000). As Freud reminds us, the other is at one and the same time a model, an object of investment, a support, an adversary, and even a scapegoat.

The other’s presence also plays a role in the genesis of social and cultural identity; each group of humans differentiates itself upon contact with another. This double relation – individual and collective – to otherness penetrates all levels of social life. Individuals and communities see their relation to themselves and others modified when international relations intensify, when global upheavals result in major migrations, when Western societies see their social fabric diversify, as is happening today. Newspapers daily remind us of discrimination in hiring, xenophobic attacks, inter-ethnic fighting, racist slogans at football games and racially-motivated crimes.

Ethnic-based conflict, xenophobia and violence – especially arising from demographic shifts, such as when a newly-arrived minority clashes with the dominant culture – have marked not only conflicts in developing countries but, increasingly, in the West. Such conflicts have a long history. Since its beginning, the United States has known racism against Native Americans and African-Americans, and has experienced strains within its communities following each wave of immigration. In Canada – the country of multiculturalism, if there is one – discrimination occurs daily. In Europe, Great Britain has seen inter-ethnic clashes and has questioned some of its discriminatory policing practices. Bombing attacks in London in July 2005, conducted by some young British Muslims, have been answered with firebombs by some non-Muslims; these violent outbursts have shocked the country. The Netherlands, long thought to be a haven of tolerance, has also discovered racial tension among some of its Dutch and Arab and/or Muslim immigrants. Italians see racist slurs and gestures on the rise in football stadiums across their country. France must deal with riots brought on by discrimination-related problems that immigrants of North African origin experience daily. Spaniards see similar tensions increasing in the southern part of their country. Germans note a rise in anti-Turkish racism in recent years. Elsewhere in the world, similar behaviors occur: some Hindus and some Muslims in India have poor relations, Russians treat Africans badly, Asians show racism toward non-Asians.

What makes individuals and groups react in such ways? We can explain it in terms of insights provided by psychology (specifically psychoanalysis) and the analysis of social and historical contexts.

The individual discovers otherness

According to psychoanalysts, at the beginning of its life a baby lives in fusion with its mother in a state of non-differentiation. At 8 months, it begins to discern its mother’s environment. Her absence becomes a source of anguish; the young child tends to project its angry impulses onto strangers. Over time, it learns to tolerate differences between its mother and the stranger. As the Franco-Belgian psychoanalyst Lydia Flem (1985) notes:

Human development seems to never end completely and can always revert or remain infiltrated by ancient mechanisms. A natural process – a feeling of torment – can occur throughout one’s lifetime, every time worrisome circumstances – internal or external – exceed one’s capacity to react to problems, inciting an intense intolerance for frustration and the destructive feelings it awakens.

(pp. 22–23)

In other words, a human being begins as one self, and over time discovers a copy of itself – the other. In the same way, ‘the relation with otherness is born. It causes outrage, and sets up a disaster: the presence of someone different to oneself constitutes a threat – a threat to one’s integrity, to one’s identity’ (Vincent 1990, p. 385). As we can see, psychology places the fear of the other, and all that follows from it, at the foundation of an individual’s developmental history. This suggests that the psyche is – practically by definition – all too apt to assign negative associations to individuals and groups. That sums up the psychological point of view; however, the relation to others also has a historically-situated social connection.

The group discovers otherness

Cultural differences have occupied thought for as long as there have been books, if not before, particularly in the West. The Ancient Greeks established a line separating themselves from others, whom they called ‘barbarians’, meaning ‘people who speak Greek poorly’. In subsequent Western civilizations, images of ‘savages’ and ‘primitives’ colored views of people encountered through imperialist, colonialist and mercantilist processes in various geographic locales.

We recall the famous Las Casas–Sepúlveda controversy (1550–51), where a Spanish friar, Bartolomé Las Casas, shocked by his Dominican brothers’ abuses of power in Spanish America, Mexico and the Antilles, argued the humanity of New World natives with Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, a prominent humanist and Greek scholar, in a theological debate at Valladolid, Spain. Following this public discussion, the Spaniards allowed that the natives had a soul and thus belonged to the same species as the Spanish and Christians generally. However, this recognition was not given to blacks. It was not until the nineteenth century that all Western countries would abolish black slavery. The dialectic of ‘the same’ and ‘the other’ arises in the context of each period’s social views.

Even though we can easily situate Western discourse about ‘otherness’, we must remember that anthropological works have shown that the concept appears among non-Westerners as well. All peoples, even the smallest groups, create representations of the other, of any group different from themselves. According to Claude Lévi-Strauss (1961), people also have a tendency to define humanity according to their own selves, drawing its frontier at their own tribe’s border. Thus, in Inuktitut the word ‘Inuit’ signifies ‘man’ while many other Inuktitut words define all other human groups (Lévi-Strauss 1961). Lévi-Strauss postulates that such acts constitute a human characteristic we all share; in our very attempt to establish ways of discriminating between cultures and customs, we identify with those whose existence we are trying to deny. By rejecting the humanity of people who appear more ‘savage’ or ‘barbarian’ than ourselves, we simply borrow one of their typical attitudes: ‘The barbarian is, first and foremost, a man who believes in barbarism’ (Lévi-Strauss 1961, p. 5).

Thus, these categories of defining the other demonstrate how each culture tends to see itself as the center of the world, and to see those outside its social circle as different beings. This allows the group in question to constitute an identity; it is by differentiating ourselves from others that we define ourselves – Westerner vs. Asian, African vs. European, American vs. Canadian, Canadian vs. Quebecer, Mexican vs. American, Brazilian vs. Argentinean, Dutch vs. Belgian, British vs. French, Chinese vs. Japanese, and so forth. Nevertheless, since intercultural relations can also enrich – as history constantly reminds us – we may investigate the human compulsion to find others threatening.

Theories on the origins of racism and xenophobia abound and vary considerably according to discipline and method. Some authors explain that natural human cruelty causes this sense of threat (Memmi 1982; Delacampagne 1983; Langaney 1981). As a species, humans developed into predators; to survive, they had to fight other species and rival groups. Apparently humans have no innate mechanism to inhibit aggressive behaviors, unlike other species (Eibl-Eibesfeldt 2002). Only culture and morality serve this function; when one’s space feels threatened, one human may destroy another without much restraint.

Other authors research the fears, stereotypes and prejudices that can lead to racism. Such studies abound in the social sciences, helping us understand what is at work in intercultural relations. Albert Memmi (1982), who spent his entire life trying to understand attitudes to differences in various contexts (and to shed light on racism in particular), started with the first observable reaction when two people meet. The meeting may have a negative cast, known as heterophobia, from the Greek phobos (fear) and heteros (different), characterized by a fear of differences and of foreigners. Or it may have a positive cast, known as xenophilia, from the Greek philia (love) and xenos (stranger), and characterized by an attraction to differences and all that is foreign (Memmi 1982). A community may encourage one or the other type of reaction depending on the moment in its social history, with consequences for everyday intercultural relations, as history has shown. Western history alone abounds with the rhetoric of these differences – witness speeches about foreigners invading ‘us’, immigrants who take ‘our’ jobs, the ‘Arab terrorist’, the ‘Jewish plot’, the ‘Yellow peril’.

Human evolutionary history explains a first level of behavior, the fearful reaction; Langaney (1981) describes it as altruism, as in the case of an animal that makes a warning cry, exposing itself by revealing its location to a predator, but benefitting others of its kind. This level of behavior draws on a primal racism that is rela...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of boxes
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Approaches
• Part II Issues
• Part III Practices
• Index