A Review of
“Cross-Cultural Management, Vol 1: The Theory of Culture”
edited by G. Redding & B. Stening
by Roger Bell, ESADE Barcelona
This selection of articles and book extracts which first appeared elsewhere
is a big book and it is the first of two. It is organized as follows: what
culture is; how culture works to shape society; culture and the economy;
mapping inter-cultural differences; and putting culture into the explanation.
This choice of sections seems a little idiosyncratic as is the choice of pieces
within the sections until one realizes that it is essentially a sociologist’s and
economist’s guide to the role of culture. The book retains the page
numbering and formats of the original articles and extracts and irritatingly
is full of references to other sections in the books from which the extracts
are taken but which are not available to the reader of this one. There is no
overall index.
In “What is culture?” we find two anthropologists, the eminently readable
Geertz with his introduction to “The Interpretation of Cultures” describing
the spirit of thick description and Robert LeVine on ethnography as a
methodology for cultural research. This approach is essentially concerned
with “emics”, social meanings in participants’ heads. As Geertz observes:
“culture is public because meaning is” and “culture is not a power, ... to
which (things) can be causally attributed, it is a context, within which they
can be intelligibly described”. Or: “understanding a people’s culture
exposes their normalness without reducing their particularity”; the
anthropological approach is essentially semiotic.
The third extract, from “The Societal Foundations of Industrial Power” by
sociologists Marc Maurice et al is heavily oriented towards labour relations
and organizations and Marxian studies of exploitation. It is not obvious
why this focus in particular was chosen for an introduction to a
compendium on cross-cultural management, fascinating though it is.
To open the section entitled “How culture works to shape society” we find
an extract from Hall’s classic “Silent Language” showing how his “infracultures”, the biological roots of all cultures, develop into ten Primary
Message Systems. This quest for the universals underlying culture is
common among anthropologists (Kluckhohn & Strodtbeck 1961 etc), and
work value modellers (S Schwartz 1991 etc) all meanings are locally
validated but all cultures have meanings. Hall insisted that cultures are
originally rooted in these biological activities, capable of analysis as
complex systems in their own right (i.e. as systems of emics), though to the
modern reader the account is weak on academic framework. From these
roots he developed his analysis of meaning in communication.
The second, widely known piece in Part II, by sociologists Berger and
Luckmann (1967), though not particularly accessible, deals with the
important idea of the social construction of reality: “man’s self production
... of necessity, a social enterprise” and of social order, “a human product”,
manifested in institutions with varying degrees of cohesion emerging from
a long process of habitualization and dialectically affecting the society that
produced them. These are universals and in that sense not cultural features
at all until the authors speak of “sedimentation”, as social awareness
emerges and explicit awareness sinks below consciousness in individuals’
heads and actors assume roles in the institutional order. For this to be of
cultural interest emphasis needs to be placed on the specific and emic
nature of the experience for any given group of actors in an institutional
environment. We return frequently to this theme throughout the book.
The next piece, by Jean Philippe Platteau, is highly focused on trust
through a variety of prisoner’s dilemma exercises that explore motivation
for honest behaviour through guilt, shame or pragmatics. It is a treatise on
moral norms and rather specialized for the broad topic of the book. An
interesting argument is developed about whether moral norms are a prerequisite or a consequence of stable market economies, also a recurrent
theme. A provocative idea: cultural norms as rules a society uses to
“determine focal equilibria in game situations”, so social control.
There follows an especially interesting discussion on “transplanting the
market into unreceptive soils”, that is, other social contexts. As this review
is written, the EU refused to recognize China as a market economy on
grounds of “state interference, weak rule of law and poor corporate
governance” (FT 28/6/04) as if to illustrate this. The key for Platteau is the
“prevalence of abstract and impersonal relationships” and “norms of
generalized morality”. Action by the state alone is not enough since the
market needs to be “embedded in society” and fertile social conditions. The
great majority of non-Western societies are largely governed by “the logic
of traditional relations” and “entangled in tightly-knit networks of
personalized relationships” “compartmentalizing the social space” and
making the “abstract universality” and trust needed for markets to flourish
unlikely. Islam significantly is seen as embodying “strong codes of
generalized morality [that] helps build up trust within large transaction
spaces”.
The next extract is the chapter from Hofstede’s Cultures and Organizations:
Software of the Mind on individualism (and not concerned with power
distance as the editors claim in the introduction). It might be helpful to
have an insight on the criteria for the selection of this particular chapter but
this is not to be found in the editors’ introduction.
Section three of the book deals with the impact of culture on economics.
Karl Polanyi is concerned to show how traditional exchange depended on
non–economic motives and that the norms of the market society are the
exception rather than the norm: minimizing effort is not natural, and
rewards traditionally valued throughout history have been reciprocity and
reputation, not gain.
Di Maggio, a difficult but rewarding writer, observes that “economic
processes have an irreducible cultural component”. He distinguishes
between constitutive and regulatory definitions of culture and wonders how
we explain the low profile of culture in economics compared to other social
sciences; he observes that “hard-wired” psychology is an easier explanatory
option than culture with its “perturbations” caused by “varying schemes of
perception and value”. Text analysis suggests that culture is seen to be
situated outside economics: in history, in the developing world and in
organizations rather than as a feature of developed market economies. He
notes that for Oliver Williamson “culture is social conditioning to help
assure that employees understand and are dedicated to the purposes of the
firm”, which is in line with Chester Barnard. The strength of their cultures,
however, may not guarantee corporations success in changing
environments.
Notoriously, culture tends to be used to explain others rather than
ourselves, such as Japanese success in the 80s; but we should exercise
caution in sorting out cultural, structural and circumstantial interpretations,
a major theme of this book. Individuals “wrap themselves in shreds of
culture drawn from each of the roles they occupy” as they “switch among
available repertoires” and we might expect “so much heterogeneity with
respect to scripts, attitudes or values as to make the very notion of culture
... too rigid to use” In any case we must “move beyond sterile
generalizations” and reach for “the double understanding of ... culture as
first a finite set of context-dependent orientations and second a set of rules
for switching among them”. Sterling stuff.
The important issue of the effect of economic change on culture is far from
clear-cut; issues become entangled, but broadly marketization means
“individuation, tendency to rational thought, disruption of primordial
loyalties and identities (...) fluidity in human relations and new notions of
freedom”. On the question of tastes, the economist’s de-contextualized
approach differs profoundly from Weber and Veblen’s view. The idea also
emerges of consumption as a quest for identity. Dense but worth the
trouble.
A classic extract from Granovetter deals with the now familiar issue of
embeddedness of economic behaviour in social relations, echoing Karl
Polanyi (see above) and stated more extremely by the Marxians’ economic
imperatives. Granovetter sees the debate as between over and undersocialization theses, hence the famous quip that “economics is about how
people make choices; sociology about how they don’t have any choices to
make” (Duesenberry 1960): how autonomous is homo economicus?
Culture is rather “not a once for all influence but an ongoing process
continuously constructed and reconstructed during interaction” as argued
elsewhere by Tony Watson (2002). Granovetter is not persuaded by the
new institutional economics’ rational explanation of behaviour in terms of
interest, guile and opportunism, a view which harks back to Hobbes’
Leviathan, wondering that business is so gentlemanly. We internalize the
belief that peace and stability are not only the sufficient condition but the
consequence of business activity.
The author discusses Williamson’s market-hierarchy dichotomy in which
bounded rationality and opportunism lead actors to seek the most
convenient authority structure. Both organization (“hierarchy” for
Williamson) and market are seen as control mechanisms which make sense
of otherwise not obviously rational behaviour.
Weber’s analysis of Protestantism and the spirit of capitalism is too well
known to need comment but is highly relevant in this book since it
emphasizes the cultural value system inspiring behaviour: not greed nor
meeting basic needs, which have existed since the beginning of recorded
time, but a spirit which existed before capitalism and was rooted in virtue
and vocation with strong religious inspiration, in turn leading to the
pragmatic utilitarian world views epitomized by Benjamin Franklin.
Boisot’s linguistic elegance and erudition inform the chapter from
“Information Space” (1995) on “establish(ing) culture specific institutions
that contribute to the creation of a stable and meaningful order for group
members”. Boisot is full of brilliant quotes; I limit myself to this one: “it
would appear then that if man can escape becoming a prisoner of his
material circumstances he may yet be trapped and coerced by the way he is
made to construe these”. Using a cubic representation of three dimensions
of information - abstraction, codification and diffusion – the I-space - he
sees diversity and management producing different configurations - and he
is reluctant to accept the mechanistic implications of the cultural
convergence hypothesis. Cultures react in different ways: the more
centripetal, closed on themselves and resisting change as has been Japan’s
case, are contrasted with centrifugal cultures that “aim to exploit conflict
and uncertainty constructively, making use of them as drivers of adaptive
change”.
Finally the emic/etic debate. By getting inside cultural meanings is one
sacrificing scientific rigour and definition? Do etic observers’ dimensions
reveal the truth – whoever chooses them? Boisot ironizes: “there are those
that think they know - the participants – and those who really know – the
observers”. He feels there is “no reason to treat emic categories as any less
scientific then etic ones; ..... they may be less extensively corroborated but
...... are just as capable of approaching the truth”.
In the “Mapping intercultural differences” section we first find Ronald
Inglehart and his ambitious World Values Survey dealing with the
persistence of traditional values in the face of changing economic
conditions. The work is articulated through the two dimensions: traditional
/ secular rational values and survival / self expression, and presented using
Huntington’s ten cultural zones, which fitted closely with Inglehart’s
(1997) own map. Not surprisingly economic development turns out to
correlate with both the variables.
The analysis includes plots of levels of trust and GNP per head and shows
the Islamic zone low on trust and income per head, the Confucian zone
high on trust though not high on income and the Catholic zone low on trust
even where high on income. The historically Protestant zones are found to
be high on both trust and income. This is an extensive and conscientious
study that goes on to discuss religious observance and faith. The
conclusions are that the modernization thesis is largely right but
oversimplified. It is path-dependent and reversible and not to be thought of
as Americanization: there is a high incidence of traditional values in the US
for the level of economic development.
Why the next section, Trompenaars and Hampden Turner’s reply to
Hofstede’s criticism of their book “Riding the Waves of Culture” is
included and not the original comment from Hofstede is a mystery. This
reply reveals a series of defensive, loosely argued protestations which fail
to address the original criticism of multi-colinearity of the “dimensions”
used in the book. The response to this simple methodological fact is
inappropriately dressed up as a defence of complexity in culture and the
fact that clusters of features co-exist. Needless to say in interpreting culture
we must take into account many epistemological approaches and use
ranges of etic dimensions cautiously and in triangulation with emics and
experiential approaches. The table of contrasting assumptions purports to
show the dynamism of Trompenaars’ approach in contrast to the static
nature of Hofstede’s. They protest too much. Hofstede himself points out
his dimensions are “an abstraction that should not be taken beyond its
limited area of usefulness”; culture should be approached in a multi-faceted
dynamic and contextualized way, which Hofstede’s factors do not help us
to do.
Peterson and Smith enter the debate about using countries as culture
delimiters and conclude with some surprise that Hofstede’s results were
“more meaningful and more stable than we had expected”. They set out to
show that ambient temperature is more culturally influential than power
distance in explaining role stress and conclude that this may be a
contributory factor when considering clusters of influence. No major
breakthroughs here.
The next section, by Osland and Bird, has a very promising name: “cultural
sense making in context”. It starts by citing a number of paradoxes:
Americans are individualistic but give to charity, Costa Ricans are
relationship-oriented but their service workers are indifferent, Japanese
high on UAI but low on detail in contracts, behaviours that reflect different
dimensions and are not at all contradictory. Linear dimensions describe
cultures but we must exercise caution in using them.
The story about the expat progressing through layers of alternating
perceptions of the differentness and the sameness of the Japanese is
enlightening: an experiential learning process. It is also axiomatic that other
cultural and situational variables be taken into account. People don’t
behave as we expect them to for many reasons: we are confusing individual
and culture-level observations, the role they are in and “value trumping”:
different sets of values are called on in different circumstances. The article
concludes with practical advice for teaching cultural sensitivity.
In their study of leadership in Japan and America, Peterson et al. explore
culture-free and culture-laden comparisons. Weiss argued “straightforward
management decisions” rather than cultural differences explain high
productivity in Japan, risking downplaying the cultural dimension to our
cost. Circumstances, such as competitive pressure, may be significant as
purely cultural phenomena: a balance of interpretation is needed. Studies
have tended to be of Japanese practices and American theories, and
Misumi’s performance maintenance theory is unusual in going against this
current. In Japanese-owned plant in America, this has meant an ongoing
learning process on many levels.
Calori and Dufour in their classic analysis of European management style
conclude that whilst there are major sub-sets of European styles such as
Latin, Germanic and Scandinavian, one can talk meaningfully of a
European model significantly different from the American or Japanese
ones. This model is characterized by greater orientation to people and more
personalized management, more organized interests such as labour and
internal negotiation in organizations, less short-term decision-making and
more awareness of cultural and diversity issues. Europeans are seen as less
individualistic and more loyal to their companies. A projection into the
future is that regional block differences can be expected to lose force and
differences between the best and the mediocre become crucial, “wherever
they come from”.
In the final section, “Putting culture into the explanation”, Redding is
concerned with the relationship between cultural analysis and
organizational behaviour. Inspired by Triandis, he encourages research that
minimizes American assumptions and fits into a more global model, a plea
that has not been responded to so far. The problems facing research are
summarized using two dimensions: micro to universal and interpretive to
positivist description. Almost all Western research is descriptive and
idiographic, that is, has no universal reach and little concern for meanings
and ethnography. Economic approaches have no claim to deal with
meanings and familiar writers in the OB organizations field such as Adler,
Hofstede, Laurent, Boisot and Child are in a central region; anthropologists
such as Geertz and Hall and sociologists such as Berger and Luckmann are
in the area high on both measures according to Redding. Accepting that the
sociological perspective offers so much insight to participant meanings is
not intuitively a very obvious conclusion. The study founders ultimately in
the paradox of comparisons of systems of meanings, bi-lateral emics if you
will: as Geertz points out, “ the tension between .... the need to grasp and
analyze is .... essentially irremovable”. The dilemma of social science and
its necessary differences from natural sciences are once again raised here.
The former is different in purpose being interpretive and dealing with
social constructs that “vary by meaning” and are value laden. The positivist
paradigm cannot apply. We are required to accept “non-closure” of systems
and use several different perspectives to understand phenomena: in a word,
triangulation. Redding concludes by recommending various fusions that
seek to rise above the apparently irreconcilable differences of the areas of
work going on. A little pious and not altogether convincing.
In the last section of the book, John Child builds on Redding, dealing
essentially with the same frustrations of bringing together diverse and
fragmented approaches to culture in organizations and seeking conceptual
consistency and operational synthesis. The quest is still for valid
instruments and concepts to make cross-cultural comparisons, made more
complex because the field has concerned itself with both “cross-national
studies of organization and the study of cross-national organizations”.
In a novel use of the terms “high” and “low context”, Child contrasts
universalist approaches that do not take national “rationales” into account
as low context. This focus sees “operational contingencies that establish a
functional imperative” and favours convergence hypotheses and universal
theories: culture is not then a determinant. “High context” theoretical
perspectives “posit national uniqueness” ascribed to “specifically national
properties of a culture”. Low context approaches, he suggests, play down
culture and context but run into “serious problems when (they) address(es)
so-called higher order needs” (as in motivation theory), which are
“primarily subject to social definition”: supposedly universal theories turn
out to be heavily culture-bound. We are dealing, in Kluckhohn’s phrase,
with “conditional absolutes”.
Using concepts and equivalent operational measures “derived from only
one culture” sums up the dilemma of the etic dimensions approach: it is the
question of “conceptual equivalence”. Child concludes that we still do not
have “an adequate theory on the relevance of culture for organization”. Can
culture be regarded as an independent variable? In reality, it is a
phenomenon with antecedents and consequences, part of a complex whole
constantly moulded by external pressures of economic, technological and
institutional pressures. He quotes the Chinese case in which “transactional
order rests on social obligations to higher authority and community”, a
tradition brought down from the Tang dynasty rather than on rules oriented
to protecting the individual: “social structures and processes ... (are)
historically embedded”.
The institutional view seems to show a way forward integrating cultural,
contextual, economic and institutional factors. Weber’s model incorporated
systems of ideas, economic/technological systems and social institutions as
significant inputs, offering “antidotes against the temptation to ascribe
explanatory primacy to any one theoretical perspective” and against “the
fallacy of regarding culture as immutable”. Child believes that conceptual
consistency and a framework that synthesizes “partial sometimes narrow
perspectives” are the way forward, essentially the same conclusion as
Redding.
I look forward to reviewing the second part of this compendium:
“Managing Cultural Differences”.
Roger Bell
16th July 2004