Culture

Summary

Returning to our travel metaphor introduced at the beginning of the book, we can now say that in the face of cultural and other forms of diversity, it is by no means inevitable that people at work will position themselves at loggerheads. Changing and variable work contexts are capable of priming, arousing and reinforcing a wealth of different social identities. These identities can be positioned and re-positioned, however, within a finite number of socially constructed compass points. Those metaphorical points of reference range for example from individualistic to collectivistic, power distant to egalitarian, and global to local (also, Taylor & Yavalanavanua, 1997). To the extent that points of reference are socially shared, people at work and scholars of work can, in principle, navigate each other’s cultural landscape, and could do so, in practice, in a way that is far more generative than the existing literature on culture, at work, implies. Thus, a core mistake arguably made by cross-cultural management has been to take cultural positioning at face value, and even to feed into that process in a self-fulfilling way.

In the chapters that follow, our journey will be somewhat different. Through a vehicle of emerging research, we will explore the dynamics of cultural positioning and repositioning in some detail. In the interim, however, the key point to this chapter, and our best preparation for the journey to come, is to remember the following: Although cultural diversity and identity are complex, they are not completely unpredictable, nor are they unmanageable. On the contrary, one of the keys to managing them, both for our selves, and alongside others, is to respect their inherent glocality, and the debt this fluidity owes to culture.

Culture consists of patterned ways of thinking, feeling and reacting, acquired and transmitted mainly by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievements of human groups, including their embodiments in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional (i.e., historically derived and selected) ideas and especially their attached values. Source: C. Kluckhohn (1951: 86).

... the effort for these years to live in the dress of Arabs, and to imitate their mental foundation, quitted me of my English self, and let me look at the West and its conventions with new eyes: they destroyed it all for me. Source: T. E. Lawrence (1926/7, 1997: 14)