Cultural Spaces In International Business

Culture studies in international business are passing through difficult times of scrutiny and critique. This is due to the fact that the paradigms, approaches, and methods used so far to study culture have been limited in their scope. For several decades now, approaches that consider national cultures and geo-ethnic origins of interacting individuals have dominated management literature. This book distinguishes itself from other books on Culture in International Business (CIB) studies in two important ways. First, it illustrates how Mary Douglas’s Cultural Theory framework (referred to commonly as DCF) can be used to explore different aspects of international business. This sets the stage for future scholars to consider DCF as an alternative tool of cultural sense-making as opposed to limiting themselves to categorical frameworks grounded in static notions of national and/or corporate culture. The second unique feature is that it focuses on the complexities of the applied side of culture (i.e., it takes a culture-in-practice perspective), while simultaneously emphasizing the dynamicity and diversity of culture. The book concludes by offering suggestions for the future of CIB studies. This domain, it predicts, may witness significant changes in the way culture is seen as influencing workplace relations. It also identifies other areas on which CIB scholars may need to focus attention in the future: culture in an increasingly digitalized world, culture and the organization as a system, and culture and the intelligent/knowledgeable organization. It will be of interest to researchers, academics, and students in the fields of cross-cultural management, international business, human resource management.

Management strategies to help you profit in the international realm! What is the most effective way to help an expatriate employee learn to function in the host country? How well do we understand the formation and performance of multinational alliances? Should you threaten to sue your Chinese distributor, or is friendliness a better tactic? These questions are among the issues tackled in Culture and International Business, a practical look at a complex topic. Increasingly, corporations and businesses are transnational or multinational in scope and culture in a way that was unimaginable a generation ago. Employees may be assigned to work overseas or deal with customers, suppliers, distributors, or factories across the globe. Even in domestic offices, employees from several different countries may work side by side. If you want your business to prosper in this new global economy, you must understand the effects of cultural differences on business practices or else risk making costly, potentially disastrous errors. Culture and International Business offers practical ideas and tested research on such vital topics of concern as: defining the moral, ethical, and legal implications of multicultural management attracting and retaining key personnel persuading employees in the host country to mentor an expatriate overcoming divisive cultural differences working within the guanxi relationship networks of China creating sustainable development strategies becoming aware of different attitudes toward change, gender, and risk-taking A genuinely multinational effort, the seven chapters of Culture and International Business were written by authors representing five nations on three continents. This important book is designed to help you understand a wide range of issues from several geographic areas that affect everyone doing business in the new global economy.

This comprehensive yet accessible textbook provides readers with an advanced and applied approach to traditional international business that integrates key cross-cultural management topics. Its ten chapters give profound insights into analysing, selecting and entering international markets, strategic partnerships, strategic positioning, global value chains, organizational designs, intercultural interaction, leadership and motivation and international human resources management. For each of these topics, advanced and contemporary theoretical and analytical frameworks are discussed and translated into toolsets that will assist readers in solving practical challenges.

Short Course books are written from an international perspective for an international audience.

Written by a business practitioner and a cultural anthropologist, this book offers unique perspectives of both business administration and cultural anthropology as they relate to international business.

The main objective of this textbook is to show cultural aspects and their influence of conducting business internationally. The authors aimed at providing information which can be useful in the process of making business decisions by taking into consideration the existing cultural diversification. This is why the theoretical discourse is accompanied by numerous examples, bringing to the book also a practical dimension. The book is addressed to a wide circle of readers – those interested in the phenomena occurring in the world economy and the dimensions of contemporary culture, as well as students of international business relations. It may also interest entrepreneurs, both those already present in international markets, and those who are at the planning stage of such future activities.

The text demonstrates how the theory, methods, and insights of cultural anthropology can influence, in a positive way, the conduct of international business operations, be they negotiating, managing, or marketing.KEY TOPICS: It explores (1) such general concepts as culture, ethnocentrism, and culture change; (2) the nature of the communication process, both linguistic and nonverbal communication; (3) a typology of value contrasts that can be applied anywhere in the world to help diagnose potential breakdowns in business communication; (4) a number of ways of collecting relevant culture-specific data on any of the hundreds of different national cultures of the world; and (5) a set of valuable skills and competencies that are vital for becoming a world class business person.MARKET: For cross-cultural trainers and human resources personnel.

Why do different groups of people behave in different ways when dealing with the common challenges of human life? The answer often lies in their cultural attitudes, values, and consequent behaviours. The study of human culture has been deemed a key contribution to understanding human life for many centuries. Explanations and descriptions of cultural characteristics abound, but in the field of business, none have been more influential and warmly embraced than those developed by Geert Hofstede and the GLOBE group. These models of national culture, which characterise Japanese, Americans, French, and may other nationalities in terms of common characteristics such as collectivism, masculinity, and power distance, are most widely cited and applied in business research, teaching, and recommendations for practice. But this seminal work needs a careful reality check. The authors of this book point out a range of problems associated with the Hofstede and GLOBE national culture measures which bring into question their accuracy and usefulness in meeting the expectations of management culture researchers and students. This book explains in detail why the measures developed by Hofstede and GLOBE are of dubious validity and why they should be viewed with caution by those looking for answers to the complex questions of culture.