Business development across countries and cultures
Article Type: Guest editorial From: Cross Cultural Management, Volume 19, Issue 3
We are delighted to present this special issue, which is based on a selection of the very best conference papers from the Annual Conference of the EuroMed Academy of Business. The papers for the special issue were chosen from over 200 research papers presented by conference participants in the conference, and found in the conference proceedings. The title and main theme of the conference and this special issue is: Business development across countries and cultures.
Culture is present everywhere but culture is not tangible, it is defined as the mindset of values and beliefs that distinguishes one social group from another. Therefore, research with a culture perspective is a complicated. On one hand, culture influences all of our social, economic and business activities and decisions. On the other hand, it is indeed very complex to measure.
Based on the sessions and informal discussions at the conference, we are now able to offer a much clearer view of the current state of research on culture,and its future path. It seems clear that the future path will take two main directions. The first will incorporate existing cultural indicators into new fields or subfields in the social sciences. Economics and finance generally ignore culture when giving empirical explanations of economic phenomena. According to economists, the main reason for this that culture is too wide and difficult to define, measure and creates potentially endogenous problems (Guiso et al., 2006). North (1990) presents the relationship between culture and economics as culture’s impact on institutions that, in turn, influence economic outcomes. A majority of the few studies on the topic support this idea,by showing that culture is a determinant of institutions (Licht et al.,2007; Tabellini, 2008; Gorodnichenko and Roland, 2010; Guiso et al.,2010).
The second direction will present new ways, indexes and ideas for measuring culture. This can be achieved in two different levels. The general level studies cultural dimensions on the national level like Hofstede (1980), Hofstede and Bond (1988), Schwartz (1994) and House et al. (2004). The second level are measures for specific areas and locations. For example, Falck et al.(2010) used linguistic micro-data from Germany to portray deep cultural differences on the local level.
This special issue includes seven papers written by authors from seven different countries, which contribute to the relay race of academic literature on the two paths leading to the expansion of culture research.
The first paper contributes to our understanding of the mergers and acquisitions process via an analysis of the use of corporate culture. Weber and Tarba note that the literature on M&A does not deal with the impact of culture on premerger stages, such as planning and negotiating. The paper also clarifies the concept of corporate culture by articulating the seven dimensions that were found to reliably predict human resource problems in the post-merger integration process and overall M&A performance. In the last stage, the authors suggest a way to measure cultural differences and use cultural assessment at various stages of the M&A process to best promote cross-cultural management.
The second paper in this issue deals with adding culture to economic analysis by considering it one of the fundamental economic variables. In “The role of cultural attributes in savings rates”, Shoham and Malul show how culture impacts the average savings rate of a nation. The authors use the House et al. (2004) GLOBE study to characterize cultures. This research is important because it sheds light one of the main economic variable that instigated the current global economic crisis.
The third paper, “Regional differences in managerial leader behaviour preferences in China” by Littrell, Alon and Chan states upfront that the main goal of the paper is to deal with the intra-country, regional differences that are relatively neglected, and their research aims to help fill this gap. The authors based there study on an intra-Chinese sample that makes the result and conclusion more interesting.
The fourth work is provided by Bengoa, Kaufmann, and Vrontis, “A new organisational memory for cross-cultural knowledge management”. The paper proposes two innovative conceptualizations of organizational memory, based on respondents’ needs and demands for creating a synthesis of knowledge management and interpersonal interactions to achieve the highest level of efficiency, and high degrees of knowledge sharing and absorption. It moves from purely knowledge-based and unemotional management tools towards a lively and engaging tool. This would appear to be the first time that an investigation of this type has been attempted to explain culturally influenced factors of knowledge management in co-operative efforts by eastern and Western Europeans.
The fifth paper by Shneor is entitled, “Influences of culture,geography and infrastructure on website localization decisions”. The authors use Hofstede’s (1980) cultural dimensions to examine the role played by culture on European airlines’ decisions to launch market-specific web sites. The main finding is that cultural distance does influence an airline’s decision to launch market-specific web sites but the culture of its home country has no effect. The study shifts the research focus from what constitutes web site localization to what dictates the implementation of localization efforts.
The sixth paper titled “Opposing positions in M&A research:culture, integration and performance” by Dauber. The paper presents a study of culture in the M&A field, based on an extensive literature review that included 58 papers from 20 international journals. This method could be implemented in other subfields of culture where results have been inconsistent.
The final paper is “Impact of culture on online management education”authored by Lee, Becker, and Nobre. Online training has become very important and significant in educating employees, but there is a literature gap on how culture and cultural differences impact online learning. This paper presents the impact that cultural differences in learning styles can have on the acceptance of and outcome from online training. The study examined the differences between the USA and South Korea. These countries are both technologically oriented but very different culturally. The empirical results of the paper can provide insights into how to take into account the impact of cultural differences to design and better deliver online management education/training for different cultural environments.
We would like to thank the contributing authors for enduring a long and rigorous review process, which was indeed extremely important for developing the present special issue. We sincerely believe that you will find this issue both rewarding and useful for future reference, because it includes exceptional and vibrant research on business developments across countries and cultures.
Demetris Vrontis, Amir ShohamGuest Editors
