Management and Culture

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Management and Culture

• National Values
• Roots and Context of Management
• Institutions

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National Culture
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National values

• National cultures are based on long established
  shared values whereas organizational cultures
  tend to be based on shared practices
• Power-distance broadly, the extent to which
  inequality in decision-making is seen as an
  irreducible fact of life
• Uncertainty avoidance roughly, the lack of
  tolerance for ambiguity and the need for formal
  rules
• Individualism/collectivism the degree to which
  people are concerned for themselves as
  individuals as opposed to concerned for the
  priorities and rules of the group to which they
  belong
• Masculinity/femininity the extent of emphasis
  on work goals and assertiveness as opposed to
  concern with personal goals (such as a friendly
  atmosphere) and nurturing

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Cultural differences in approaches to
problem-solving

• Interestingly, it is Confucian work dynamism
  rather than individualism that has correlated
  best with economic growth for the last quarter of
  the twentieth century
• Hampden Turner (1993) has identified further
  factors on which national cultures differ,
  including attitudes towards managing authority,
  managing relationships, managing oneself,
  managing uncertainty and managing time
• Seven groupings of managerial characteristics
  Northern Europeans, Anglos, Latins, Asians,
  Developing Countries, Arabs, East-Central
  Europeans
• European national cultures are lower on the
  power-distance variable than the rest. Latins and
  Asians, Arabs and those in the Developing
  Countries group are postulated to be more
  collectivist than the individualist Anglos and
  Northern Europeans

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Chinese and UK cultures compared
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Italian and British attitudes to work
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Culture and economic development
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Social capital

• Fukuyama argues that national differences in
  economic performance and business and
  governmental organization are related to deeply
  held cultural values. He singles out attitudes to
  trust and norms of reciprocity as critical. Trust
  has some unusual characteristics. It takes a long
  time to establish but can very quickly disappear.
  Unlike conventional physical assets, the more it
  is used, the more valuable it gets. And the
  degree of trust in a society or organization has
  profound implications for management
• Fukuyamas main thesis is that there is
  convergence between the various countries
  economies, values and practices throughout the
  world, and that the US needs to ensure that its
  social capital is renewed for it to remain
  competitive as a nation
• Key ideas in management draw on the idea of
  reducing exchange relationships to their minimum
  individual components such as contracts between
  individuals motivated by their own self-interest
• Great trust should reduce these costs as
  inspection and monitoring costs would be lower

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Fukuyamas thesis challenge and implications

• It is perhaps not surprising that under different
  conditions different factors such as levels of
  investment, the roles of the state and of the
  banking system, labour relations and so on will
  produce different and sometimes unfavourable
  effects in a global economy
• Lack of empirical evidence how do you measure
  social capital or the degree of trust in society
• A third problem is one of values the Japanese
  system, for example, has produced some
  notoriously corrupt politicians is that the
  price we must pay for trusting them? One persons
  trust may be anothers lack of accountability
• Once social capital is destroyed, it cannot
  easily be replaced
• Societal change programmes take at least a
  generation to come to fruition, as some
  commentators and academics propose, then
  prospects for doing anything dramatic in the
  short term seem bleak

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Roots and Context of Management
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Roots and Context of Management

• History of management ideas Management ideas are
  historically as well as culturally located.
  Although now widely used and adopted throughout
  the world, the term management has fairly
  specific origins which may alert us to the
  conditions under which it was originally used,
  and lead us to consider how far those conditions
  apply today
• We may identify management in our modern sense as
  originating in the development of sets of generic
  and transferable ideas and practices
• This alerts us to the possibility that management
  may have evolve in response to some specific
  local factors and in accordance with some
  cultural values that may not be applicable to
  other situations

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Cultural bias in management

• The idea of management knowledge being specific
  to a specific to a particular industry or sector
  is reminiscent of the attitudes to management
  taken by the French, Germans and Japanese, which
  contrast with the Anglo-American perception. It
  reinforces the idea that management has an
  intrinsic cultural element that may not be
  transferable
• American origins of management Based on
  standardized, high-volume production, and
  required different management methods from the
  previous owner-controlled, entrepreneurial small
  businesses using internal contracting for things
  like labour and materials
• Managerialism can be defined as the vast array
  of customs, interests, prestige, actions and
  thought associated with but nevertheless
  transcending the needs for the efficient running
  of commercial and industrial organizations

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West German management

• Expectations about the role of the state and its
  role in legislating for works councils and worker
  co-determination, rather than the antagonistic,
  individualistic and exclusive attitudes that
  characterized American management-labour
  relations
• The general expectation that people in
  supervisory jobs were likely to be able to
  perform the work of those they supervised rather
  than be expert in management
• That the understanding necessary to do this was
  based on practical experience and a technical
  education, rather than the functionalist
  specialization of management

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Japanese management

• The Japanese approach to management as evident in
  quality management and lean production. Some of
  the general differences from the American
  approach to management are
• The strong group norms and pressures to conform
  that dominate Japanese society, including their
  historical origins and their effect on concepts
  like responsibility and accountability
• The key role of the state, which defined and
  implemented an industrial strategy and an
  educational policy to support it
• An early emphasis on engineering and product
  variety rather than standardized products

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A comparison of four systems (I)
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A comparison of four systems (II)
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A comparison of four systems (III)
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A comparison of four systems (IV)
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International swiping

• Management developed in an American tradition
  that stressed maximizing shareholder value
  through mass production of standard products in
  mass markets of individually competitive and
  self-optimizing consumers
• Privatization One idea that has been widely
  copied is the privatization of state-owned assets
  and industries. In principle, the idea should
  apply to any situation where products and
  services could be subject to markets but are not.
  But studies of privatization throughout the world
  show that the motives, methods, results and
  commitment to privatization very widely, even
  within similar regional economies and countries
• Development The attitude that western
  management will, in principle, work anywhere is
  particularly challenged in developing countries.
  More recently, this approach has come to be
  questioned, and more thoughtful and less
  intrusive ways of promoting local
  self-sufficiency have been developed

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Institutions
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Institutions

• People need a sense of order in their lives, and
  this sense of order is constructed in different
  ways in different societies. But once
  accomplished, it becomes part of the
  taken-for-granted aspects of a society what
  might be called the mental habits of its
  population
• The idea of going to work is a case in point
  peoples willingness to go to work, say in a
  factory, at a particular time to do particular
  tasks that are set for them, is an institution
  and a cultural phenomenon in itself. Peoples
  responses and attitudes to their experience of
  work will be affected by cultural factors arising
  in society rather than simply in workplace
• The network organization of today depends for its
  success on self-responsibility and drive, with
  lower levels of managerial surveillance being
  possible or desirable
• Examples of institutions like prisons, schools,
  hospitals, the courts, the judiciary, the Law
  Society
• An established law, practice or custom. Or
  enduring and habitual ways of doing the things
  that often seem to need doing

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Institutional theory

• The most effective kinds of institution, the
  ones that perform their social functions for us
  in what we regard as the best way, are probably
  those that we are not conscious of
• Disciplinary institutions in the sense in which
  they produce discipline in their subjects and in
  the use they make of academic disciplines such as
  psychiatry, medicine, pedagogy, criminology and
  so on in constructing the discourses about social
  order and efficacy (including the concept of the
  individual patient or subject) that these
  institutions embody in their practices

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Legitimacy

• Gaining legitimacy is ultimately more important
  for example, it helps in obtaining funds, and
  with transactions with other organizations.
  According to the institutional perspective,
  legitimacy is obtained by imitating others rather
  than through independent action or reasoning
• This perspective would argue, for example, that
  organizations adopt strategic plans and mission
  statements not because they intended to use them
  to run the organization, but because they wish to
  signal to themselves and the outside world that
  they are rational and worthy members of the
  organizational community. This interpretation
  might account for the widely held sentiment that
  plans and mission statements have mainly symbolic
  rather than practical value
• Legitimate management is not something
  constructed by individuals in isolation, but
  depends on collective traditions and institutions
  such as private property, education, stock market
  and so on
• If legitimation is not measured by success, but
  can also produce legitimate failure through
  conformity to procedures, it is difficult to see
  how managers legitimating behaviour can be
  assessed

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Postmodernism

• Perhaps the major paradigm shift in the current
  period is from modernity to postmodernity. Where
  the former is characterized by a belief in
  rational knowledge, grand theories such as
  capitalism, and the notion of progress through
  rational planning, along with a need for control,
  the latter is characterized by a rejection of
  grand narratives such as the belief in capitalism
  in favour of a more relative and pluralist
  perspective

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Deconstruction

• The postmodern approach of deconstruction offers
  one method of analysis. Deconstruction places at
  least as much emphasis on what is not said as
  what is said. It is argued that the presence of
  something in a text simultaneously constructs an
  absence of something else and that attending to
  these absences will illuminate a lot of our
  textual practices and hence what we regard as our
  common sense. Postmodernists go further and
  argue that there is no necessary relationship
  between our texts and the world out there that
  can be satisfactorily established in fact, our
  texts are simply a set of arbitrary signs that
  only have meaning because we treat them as though
  they were meaningful

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Derrida and deconstruction

• Rather than attempting to find a true meaning, a
  consistent point of view or a unified message in
  a given work, a deconstructive reading.. .
• Deconstruction is political
• Deconstructors tend to seize on the
  inconsistencies, inequalities, or hierarchies
  which are expounded or glossed over either by a
  text, by a whole discourse, or even by an entire
  system of beliefs
• chaos to re-examine other such binary
  couplets
• Deconstruction then is the very means, Derrida
  suggests, by which to expose, reverse and
  dismantle binary oppositions with their
  hierarchies of value

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Deconstructing management concepts

• We rely on our mutual understanding of certain
  concepts like organization, environment and
  network
• Words like change and innovation
• Environment is a good example of a concept
  which seems self-evident to us and which we
  presume has always existed
• Like environment, strategy also has a very
  recent history in its application to business as
  compared to its long use in military discourse
• The environment we exist in today is different
  from earlier times in particular ways now make
  strategy
• Businesses did have strategy in the past in the
  sense of having purposes, goals, intentions or
  whatever they just didnt have the benefit of
  the modern conceptions of it which we have
  acquired through our research and experience
• Deconstruction ideas like strategy rely on a
  notion of progress, which is challenged by
  postmodernists. They argue that to believe that
  the future will be better than the past is simply
  a value judgement that cannot be verified by
  science or other methodologies