Oulu UAS – School of Business and …
Business Competence – Ismo Koponen
OKBIT22 Managing International Relations
Contents (topics for us) of the course book: Ghauri Pervez N. & Usunier,
Jean-Claude, Ed:s (2005). International Business Negotiations .
Amsterdam, … Pergamon. A collection of articles. 522 p.
[Ismo’s comments]
Part One:
4 … National Culture, Organizational Culture … [The figure on the white board in B336, on Wed 12:th of March, 2008]
From a paper of Sudhir H Kalé: “Conceptualizing buyer-seller interactions using the construct of national culture, organizational culture, and temperament yields a wide array of managerial insights. It can help predict the outcome of a sales encounter. [Here the author refers to someone Evans,
1963]: Based on the similarity hypothesis, the greatest level of success in buyer-seller interactions would occur where the buyer and seller are akin in their milieu of national culture, organizational culture, and individual personality.
Conversely,
the most challenging scenario and the one with the least chance of success is denoted by a complete lack of congruence between the buyer and seller …
” (G&U: 2005, 88).
[The author sees national and organizational culture – as well as the individual – as cultural dimensions, or levels / layers / branches. For learners: can we scale up and down in the model, when trying to manage the whole] ?

“This paper provided a general framework to investigate cross-national personal selling transactions. Three levels of influences were identified: national culture, organizational culture and individual temperament. Buyerseller positions along these constructs largely determine the overall compatibility in dyadic communication.
For each of these constructs, there exist field-tested measurement instruments. Scholars in marketing and international business are urged to utilize these instruments in their studies of cross-national negotiation and marketing issues. From a managerial perspective, the practical applications and intuitive appeal of the proposed three-construct framework are indeed exciting. This conceptual schema should prove useful in the areas of selecting national markets, shaping an appropriate organizational culture, and the recruitment and training of cosmopolita n salespeople” (G&U: 2005, 93).
[In other words, the authors has the idea that there are other aspects – not only the economical ones – when “selecting national markets”].
Part Two:
5. Cultural Aspects of …
“…, the word ‘intercultural’ in this text directly relates to the study of interaction between people with different cultural backgrounds. The word
‘cross-cultural’ relates to research design that is generally comparative but may also be centered on the en counter/interaction” (G&U: 2005, 103). [We can see the above mentioned as two approaches to everything cultural; the first one is about the different cultures – cultural differences and similarities i.e. the cultural properties in total, and the latter one about cultural gaps, maybe, cultural distances].
“The process of intercultural encounter in negotiation has been described as akin to a dance in which one dancer dances a waltz when the other dances a tango [originally in Tinsley et al.: 1999]” … “Culture clash in negotiation may be strong in the very start, when negotiators expect behavior from the other side which normatively corresponds to what they are used to as well as to what they consider as the most appropriate for effective negotiation. Cultural adaptation is not necessarily symmetrical …” (G&U: 2005, 134).
6. Hofstede’s Dimensions of …

This chapter is pages 137 through 153, in the course book. If you do not have access to the book, please, see study materials of other appropriate courses, and quotations from Geert Hofstede’s works, in general.
[JC Usunier’s comment on the relevance of Hofstede’s cultural dimensions:] “… they do not work as isolated predictors of the negotiation process and outcomes, but rather in conjunction with key aspects of the structure and the context of negotiation” (G&U: 2005, 153).