Cross-cultural Management — A Transactional Approach

The internationalization of business via the process of globalization has brought issues of culture to the forefront of management thinking. The resulting study of "cross-cultural management" has had the effect of treating culture as a proxy for nationality and an assumption that culture within a nation, society or company is homogenous. This assumption however falls short when one tries to make sense of the new breed of international managers who have travelled and worked in cultures other than their own, acquired new cultures and adapted to the continuous structural changes in their organizations. The dynamic context within which business is carried out today demands a new way of looking at cultural preferences and resulting behaviours.

This textbook begins by providing an overview of the existing conventional culture paradigms which focus on the national, societal and/ or corporate levels of culture in the context of business (both domestic and international). It also challenges some of the limitations of these paradigms. Further, it exposes the criteria that any cultural approach would need to meet if it were to claim being a credible theory/approach to culture and a possible alternative to the conventional culture paradigms.

Students studying from this textbook will benefit from a variety of conceptual tools that can be used to make sense in a variety of business contexts. Features such as "critical incident scenarios" will bring compelling real-world stories to life in the context of the theories presented in the book. As such, this text will be core reading for students of cross-cultural management and essential reading for all those studying or researching international business.

Taran Patel is Associate Professor in People, Organization, and Society at Grenoble Ecole de Management, France.