Abstract
Scholars assigned a certain importance to culture in the field of management only when they understood that culture is not a universal concept, because what is valid for us may not be so for other people from different countries. Since strategies are formulated by taking into account assumptions that concern the social setting and the relationships that link individuals to one another, national culture is fundamental when deciding a strategy.
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Notes
- 1.
This approach to mentality makes us think of individuals as people who take part in many changing cultures, subjected to numerous types of “cultural influences.” Such influences are representational clusters linked to class, religion, ethnicity, and organization, rather than just the “nation–country–tribe” notions of culture used by many humanistic scholars (Ames and Peng 1999) (see Chap. 5).
- 2.
Scholars who have analyzed the cross-cultural generalizability of labeling strategic problems have been inclined to stress cultural divergences in the tendency to label problems as threats or opportunities. For example, Sallivan and Nonaka (1988) asked US and Japanese managers to interpret certain strategic problems that were illustrated to them in their native languages, and discovered that Japanese managers were more inclined than their American colleagues to identify strategic problems as threats. The researchers’ conclusion, after discarding other possibilities, was that such tendency was caused by the influence of native culture. In a research on managers from different countries, Schneider and De Meyer (1991) discovered that Latin European managers were more inclined than their European and North American colleagues, except Anglos, to interpret an important problem, discussed in English, as a threat. Barr and Glynn (2004), in their turn, analyzed the way cultural values influence specific attributes of a problem linked to the labels of threat and opportunity. They concluded that cultural values affect the perception of a strategic problem and the way it is labeled, so there was evidence of a definite and immediate connection that binds the specific cultural dimension and the specific problem attribute.
- 3.
All the actors (individuals, organizations, etc.) have to accept and support with their behavior the above-mentioned social structures. A cognitively oriented perspective believes that a process of socialization encodes a certain institution into an actor. When it is absorbed and internalized, it changes into a script, that is a patterned behavior. The institution is enacted if the actor’s behavior complies with the script. By this way, institutions constantly repeat themselves. The institution is externalized by its enactment, because other actors realize that it is functioning, so socialization can begin once more. Over time, sedimentation occurs as the institution itself and the consequent patterned behavior is considered as naturally established. Later, every actor may not even be aware that an institution partially controls its actions. People who share the institution rationalize behaving in compliance with it.
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Del Giudice, M., Carayannis, E.G., Peruta, M.R.D. (2012). Organizational Boundaries as Social Phenomena: Culture, Interfirm Arrangements, and National Learning Style. In: Cross-Cultural Knowledge Management. Innovation, Technology, and Knowledge Management, vol 11. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-2089-7_4
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