Manageable inequalities (theoretical landscaping of cross-cultural studies)

European Journal of International Management

Volumn 1, Issue 1-2, 2007, Pages 56-68

  Magala, Sławomir ^a  

^a ERASMUS UNIVERSITY   (Netherlands)

Author keywords

cross cultural research; cultural patterns; management of meaning

Indexed keywords

EID: 84969447075     PISSN: 17516757     EISSN: 17516765     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1504/ejim.2007.012917     Document Type: Article

References (42)

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2. Anderson, B. (2005) Under Three Flags, Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination, Verso Books, London.
3. Boltanski, L. and Thevenot, L. (2006) On Justification, Economies of Worth, Princeton University Press, Princeton.
4. Boyacigiller, N.A., Goodman, R.A. and Phillips, M. (2003) Crossing Cultures, Insights from Master Teachers, Routledge, London.
5. Burawoy, M. (2005) ‘Forging public sociologies on national, regional and global terrains’, an unpublished address to the Conference of the Council of National Associations of the International Sociological Association, Miami, August 9–10.
6. Dallal, J.A. (2005) ‘Hizballah’s virtual civil society’, in Abbas, A. and Erni, J.N. (Eds.): Internationalising Cultural Studies, An Anthology, Blackwel, Oxford, pp.232–236.
7. Elliott, A. and Lemert, C. (2006) The New Individualism, The Emotional Costs of Globalisation, London, Routledge.
8. Freeman, C. (2002) The Closing of the Western Mind, The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason, Pimlico, London.
9. Fuller, S. (2005) The Intellectual, Icon Books, Cambridge.
10. Geertz, C. (2000) Available Light, Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.
11. Hardy, C. and Clegg, S. (2006) ‘Some dare to call it power’, in Clegg, S., Hardy, C., Lawrence, T. and Nord, W. (Eds.): The Sage Handbook of Organisation Studies, Sage, London, pp.754–775.
12. Holden, N. (2002) Cross-Cultural Management, A Knowledge Management Perspective, Harlow, Prentice Hall.
13. Holden, N. and Fink, G. (2006–2007) ‘Russia’s path to the market economy: its language in slow pursuit’, in Hoffman, E. (Ed.): Festschrift in Honor of Professor Renate Rathmayr, Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration, Vienna (forthcoming).
14. Hopfl, H. (2006) ‘Democratic deficits and participative remedies’, an unpublished paper for the sc’MOI (Standing Conference on Management and Organisational Inquiry), Washington, April 5–7.
15. House, R., Hanges, P., Javidian, M., Dorfman, P. and Gupta, V. (Eds.) (2004) Culture, Leadership, and Organisations, The Globe Study of 62 Societies, Sage, Thousand Oaks.
16. Jackson, T. (1999) ‘Managing change in South Africa: developing people and organisations’, International Journal of Human Resource Management, Vol. 10, No. 2, pp.306–326.
17. Jackson, T. (2002) International HRM: A Cross-Cultural Approach, Sage, London.
18. Jackson, T. (2004) Management and Change in Africa, A Cross-Cultural Perspective, Routledge, London.
19. Jackson, T. (Ed.) (1995) Cross-Cultural Management, Butterworth Heinemann, Oxford.
20. Jackson, T. and Bak, M. (1998) ‘Foreign companies and Chinese workers: employee motivation in the People’s Republic of China’, Journal of Organisational Change Management, Vol. 11, No. 4, pp.282–300.
21. Kermani, N. and Lepenies, W. (2006) ‘Verkannte Brüder’, Süddeutsche Zeitung, June 11, 2003, reprinted in Beck, U., The Cosmopolitan Vision, Polity Press, Cambridge.
22. Latour, B. (2005) Reassembling the Social, An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
23. McSweeney, B. (2002) ‘Hofstede’s model of national cultural differences and consequences: a triump of faith – a failure of analysis’, Human Relations, Vol. 55, No. 1, pp.89–118.
24. Obeyesekere, G. (2005) Cannibal Talk, The Man-Eating Myth and Human Sacrifice in the South Seas, The University of California Press, Berkeley.
25. Sahlins, M. (2000) ‘Cosmologies of capitalism: the trans-Pacific sector of the ‘World System’’, in Culture and Practice. Selected Essays, Zone Books, New York.
26. Starbuck, W. (2006) The Production of Knowledge, The Challenge of Social Science Research, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
27. Tayeb, M. (1996) The Management of a Multicultural Workforce, Wiley, Chichester.
28. Taylor, H. (2002) ‘Insights into participation from critical management and labor process perspectives’, in Cooke, B. and Kothari, U. (Eds.): Participation: The New Tyranny?, Zed Books, London, pp.122–138.
29. Wierzbicka, A. (1977) Anna, Understanding Cultures Through Their Key Words, Oxford University Press, English, Russian, Polish, German, and Japanese, Oxford.
30. Wikipedia (2006) Available: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Benedict_XVI_Islam_controversy, September 18.
31. CMS stands for Critical Management Studies, often associated with Mats Alvesson and Hugh Willmott as ‘founding fathers’ and as a sub-network of researchers in the sciences of management.
32. In case of Winston Churchil’s famous promise of “blood, sweat and tears” the paradox was intended and consciously pursued for rhetoric effect. Condemnation of jihad in the quote from 1391 included by Pope Benedict 16th in his Regensburg speech, although bracketed by the speaker, was used by eager political activists using Muslims as an emotionally loaded ‘imagined community’ in order not to stimulate peaceful dialogue, but to mobilise crowds for angry confrontation (of which more anon).
33. The technology of print had already been known in ancient China; but social, political and cultural factors did not form a cluster, whose controlled explosion would increase dramatically the rate of civilisation’s transformations. Writing could not be split into small number of repeatable, simple components, competing counter-elites were too easily co-opted into the ranks of the mandarin caste, decentralisation did not breed democratic dissent.
34. On a lighter note, let us notice that translations in the media, particularly in TV, are often based on choices, which reflect the translator’s pattern of meaning, not necessarily of the author. For instance, the name of the popular BBC culinary program presented by Nigela Lawson is ‘Nigela Bites’, which can be translated both as ‘Nigela Crunches’ or ‘Nigela Cracks’ (where ‘bites’ is taken as a verb) or as Nigela’s ‘bits’ of food, which can be swallowed in a single ‘bite’ (where ‘bites’ is taken as a noun). The Polish TV translator went for the first possibility, ignoring the wordplay of ‘bites’ as both ‘bits of food’ and ‘units of information’, which would probably come closer to the intention of the authors of this BBC show.
35. The fact that Christianity eventually arrived at this truce with rationality, paving the way for forthcoming scientific revolution, was not yet quite obvious in 1391. Latin Renaissance, in which Arab academic elites and Byzantine scholars played a major part, was underway. But for most Christians, formal and institutional apostolic succession mattered more than rational attempts (for instance by St. Thomas Aquinas) to legitimise faith by reason (cf. Freeman, 2002).
36. Sahlins goes on to claim that although “the capacity to reduce social properties to market values is exactly what allows capitalism to master the cultural order”, nevertheless “the same capacity makes the world capitalism the slave to local concepts of status, means of labor control, and preferences in goods which it has no will to obliterate, inasmuch as it would not be profitable.” (Freeman, 2002, p.420) Critical and self-reflective? Not self-critical enough. Let us not forget that Sahlin’s explanation of the meaning of the death of capitan James Cook during his second visit to the previously friendly natives had been criticised by Gananath Obeyesekere as too restricted by the ‘Eurocentric’ conceptual distortion of native voices (cf. Obeyesekere, 2005). Obeyesekere may be wrong on this particular count, but his general argument merits attention.
37. Imagine Muslim women from the Netherlands voting for Ayyan Hirshi Ali and refusing to follow an imam or an ayatollah – a possibility, which the latter must have nightmares about.
38. Thus the Iranian Guardian Council issued a statement linking the Pope to “a series of Western conspiracies against Islam”, while the Organisation of the Islamic Conference spoke of a “character assassination of the Prophet Mohammed”.
39. “Individual membership of ISA (2003 figures) is, not surprisingly, somewhat less skewed: Western Europe – 32%, North America – 23%, farmer Soviet Union and East and Central Europe – 12%, Asia, Middle East and Latin America – 33%” (Burawoy, 2005, p.11).
40. “Participatory discourse and practices are part of a wider attempt to obscure the relations of power and influence between elite interests and less powerful groups such as ⁢ employees of organisations ⁢ giving the ‘sense’ and warm emotional pull of participation without its substance, and are thus an attempt to placate those without power and obscure the real levers of power inherent in the social relations of global capitalism.” (Taylor, 2002, pp.122-125)
41. Benedict Anderson’s reconstruction of the anarchist anti-colonial Filipino intellectuals, Sizal and Izabelo de los Reyes is a case in point: a sociopolitical historian reconstructs the global processes of decolonisation of Spanish-held third world, a counter-elite formation under the tolerant flag of anarchism rather than dogmatic wings of Marxism and a managerial response of a future superpower moving into the vaccum left by Spanish retreat: “Natives of the last important remnants of the fabled Spanish empire, Cubans (as well as Puerto Ricans and Dominicans) and Filipinos did not merely read about each other, but had crucial personal connections and, up to a point, coordinated their actions – for the first time in world history that such global coordination became possible. Both were eventually crushed, within a few years of each other, by the same brutish would-be world hegemon. But the coordination did not take place directly between the broken hill-country of Oriente and Cavite, but was mediated through ‘representatives’ above all in Paris, and secondarily in Hong Kong, London and New York. Newspaper reading Chinese nationalists eagerly followed events in Cuba and the Philippines – as well as the Boer struggle against Ukanian imperialism, which Filipinos also studied – to learn how to ‘do’ revolution, anticolonialism, and anti-imperialism.” (Anderson, 2005, p.2) For an interesting discussion of a more ‘peaceful’ transfer of management practices and policies (which vary with respect to their culturepspecificity), see Tayeb (1996).
42. Latour’s “Reassembling the Social” and Boltanski’s and Thevenot’s “On Justification. Economies of Worth” are cases in point (Latour, 2005, Boltanski and Thevenot, 2006).