International Management Ethics. A Critical, Cross‐cultural Perspective

On August 5, 2011, the US was deprived of the highest credibility rank of AAA by the Standard & Poor and rated AA+, which was accompanied by a stern warning issued by the Chinese government advising the US presidential administration to curb excessive expenditures and to shape the US finances up. None of this attracted too much attention from the average US or EU citizen, busy with holidays, forthcoming elections and general volatility of financial markets caused by billions of euros lent to Greece in the wake of her financial break down. Having read International Management Ethics, a reader will be tempted to ask why European banks lend money to a country, which cannot collect taxes and had contributed to the crisis by systematical deceit of the EU lenders, while at the same time an amount 100 times lower (€1.5 bln as opposed to €150 bln) was needed to fend off the mass starvation in Somalia (as a result of a severe draught and civil war damages of infrastructure), which depends on charitable donations and may fail to materialize in time to save tens of millions of threatened lives. Those who might be saved, but may not receive food quickly enough, are innocent victims, who deserve to be helped and saved. Not all Greek citizens and not all EU bank managers are innocent victims. And yet, they can count on generosity of the European politicians and superbankers, while the Somalians cannot. Is this acceptable to us according to our best knowledge and moral judgment? Is this the world order we should uphold, support and defend?

According to Terence Jackson, who teaches cross‐cultural management at Middlesex University Business School and had conducted numerous research projects, primarily in sub‐Saharan Africa, we should answer such questions describing relevant context relations in which we act and respond to dominant influences, content of our collective and individual “interfaces” (the cultural contents are our specific constructs, that is, cultures are interfaces for improvisation, not matrixes shaped by nation‐states) and conduct – i.e. what we – individually and collectively – do. We do what we want to do, but we do so tacitly or explicitly recognizing the context of our actions (for instance powers that be, the hegemonic position of the United States in contemporary world with a single superpower). We do so after imagining the content of cultural determinants shaping our attitudes, beliefs, values and institutions into actionable knowledge and will. Finally we use our awareness of constraints and motivators inventing cultural (strongly ethical) compasses for guiding our actions. Thus in the case of the Chinese warning we are dealing with the explicit acknowledgment of a shift in global power relations – the Chinese will continue producing for the US market. They will continue buying the US government bonds, but they are in a position to ask for a more responsible conduct and even to hint at the international monitoring institution controlling financial policies of the economic and political elites in the USA. This is a significant shift, because it shows that in spite of the hegemonic role played by the USA in “media, education, literature, conditional aid and corporate activities including corporate sponsorship”, one of the countries formerly reduced to a status of a colony of the western powers, namely China, had already recovered and is now in a position to question the universal claims of the American way of life and of the US global conduct. Developing the ideas of Schech and Haggis (2000), Jackson compares the US and Chinese views of each other. He points out that while the US observers find that rights of Chinese citizens deteriorated with crackdowns on political dissent and their liberties have been suspended with internet censorship, blocked web sites and foreign broadcasts, the Chinese interpretation of the United States focuses on human rights abuses related to race and poverty, on a huge prison population, on the fact that one percent of Americans own 90 percent of the wealth, and on the fact that no medical insurance is available to millions of US citizens. Who is right, who gives us a more adequate idea of the relative merits of each country's values and politics? Mind you, it would be difficult to refer to an “objective” set of criteria for judging the worth of a given country's ethical conduct. Jackson is one of the few authors to point out that the attempts to lay down the universal standards of ethics, for instance in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, have been and are questioned by the African Charter of Human and People's Rights and Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam (for both the assumption that every individual is an isolated and responsible, free actor on a level playing field, is strongly criticized) or by the Chinese politicians, who claim that national development takes precedence over individual human rights. The Chinese also question the right of the US to judge the others by criteria that are not applied to the US actors themselves – quoting the Guantanamo Bay prison and torture facility. Jackson draws on the postcolonial theory (Said, Spivak, Chakrabortry, Bhabha), dismissing Habermas' claim that “in discourse the unforced force of the better argument prevails” and pointing out the dominant neoliberal ideology supported by the US as “ the dominant ideology in geopolitical relations” undermines the objectivity of a “better argument” idealized by Rawls, Habermas and other ideologues of liberalism. Said's concept of orientalism is evoked in order to explain a curious ambiguity of the western researchers and teachers of management, who condemn nepotism and corruption in African business companies and public institutions, but praise the long‐term relation‐building in China under a mysterious and attractive code‐name of guanxi. Jackson is one of the very few researchers to focus on this ambiguity and his analysis of the paternalistic and neocolonial assumptions of the authors who command authority in academic communities is a welcome and long overdue correction of the one‐sided, one‐dimensional approach to cross‐cultural studies. Jackson's quote from Inglehart and Baker resembles a well known philosophical exchange between Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald. The author of The Great Gatsby says:

Except that Inglehart and Baker write much more:

Inglehart and Baker are in an internationally acknowledged company of the late Samuel Huntington as the author of Who We Are? and the editor of Culture Matters, of Francis Fukuyama as the author of Falling Behind and of numerous other distinguished researchers, presidential advisers and members of prestigious think tanks, who ponder the grave questions of the peculiarities of cultural software of, say, the Argentinians, Brazilians or Nicaraguans, who somehow fail to become as rich as either the US Americans or the northern Europeans (one of the younger critics said that normative handbooks of management view most of the empirically found non‐western managers as failed Norwegians, tacitly comparing them to one another). Jackson fully acknowledges a contribution made by the abovementioned World Value Surveys to our knowledge of the empirical differences between, say, some country's managers and employees' views on trust and democracy on the one hand and their permissiveness for corruption on the other. Jackson also offers empirical comparative studies of Anglo‐Saxon, Japanese, Korean, Hong Kong Chinese, Russian and Polish managers and finds out that the Anglo‐Saxon ones try to make their decisions predicting the consequences of their actions and then evaluating them from the point of ethics. East Asians try to employ social referencing to make value judgments and the Poles and Russians try to base their ethical judgments on principled or deontological analysis. Some findings are far from being intuitive and do provide food for critical thought:

His general conclusions are also fairly counterintuitive. First, he suggests that we stop making cross‐national comparisons, which are becoming both less feasible and less relevant and focus on cross‐cultural dynamics – which is why he defends the concept of a cultural interface rather than a ready‐made culture as a software. Second, he suggests a critical reflection on the universality of the universal rights of man. We should try and find out whether these rights are universal or simply happen to be in the cultural package of norms, which happen to be asserted and disseminated through the most powerful players in the world power relations.

Jackson quotes a comparative study of German and US American managers by Betina Palazzo and tries to understand why the US government had repeatedly tried to “enforce” the concepts of democracy (and of liberal attitudes) on the rest of the world. He should have quoted the post Second World War President Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower, who had once said that:

Indeed, we should uphold our values as if they were a profound cultural belief, whether they had been canonized in the UN Global Compact (2000) or any other declaration, or not – but we should also be free of the arrogant belief that our cultural interfaces, our third spaces of reinvented traditions and identities are somehow mystically, mythically superior to the others, invented in a similar way, though in different places and at different times. Ike aserted their equal status in brief but powerful terms.

But the core part of Jackson's book deals with the comparative overview of the Arab, African and Chinese managerial ethics as demonstrated in context‐specific insights and compared on a level of region, country, organization or individual, each of them with the third space of a genuine, original, invented and constructed cultural competence. Competence is probably not a good word. The author talks of a third cultural space, the one constructed under structural constraints and with a specific background of cultural contents, which influences ethical performance, once it comes into being, emerges, with often unpredictable behavioral consequences (e.g. the veil worn by some professional women in the Muslim countries in order to promote their feminist views on equality and fairness). I found his comparison of the role played by one aspect of culture, namely religiosity, in the US American, Arab or Chinese constructions of the cultural space – fascinating. His case in point, namely the challenging of the Hofstedian description of the American culture as based on individualism and achievement by the black community responding in a collectivist way to the disaster of Katrina flooding New Orleans‐ does bring ethnic and racial diversity back into the homogenized discussion of the American Dream. Same holds true for his plea to assess “the denigration of the non‐Western ways of doing things, values structures and knowledge, and the internalization of such negative attitudes”(p. 145). He thinks that it may be one more example of the orientalist fallacy, which certainly was not acknowledged and rejected after the neocolonalist critique (which has been marginalized in the western academic discourse, in spite of a token representation in the mainstream media, as testified, for instance, by the fate of Edward Said embedded at the Columbia University in NYC). Even closer to home, when discussing a strange empirical finding that German managers appear to be less concerned with ethics than their US counterparts (though not necessarily less ethical in their conduct in the third world countries), Jackson tries to understand the institutional context, which makes an individual and individual corporation a focus of ethical decision‐making in the USA, while collective institutions tackle ethicality in Germany, France or the Scandinavian countries. Social Europe does not have an equivalent in social USA and a new New Deal does not look likely. Hence more corporate codes of ethics in the US and more general legal arrangements for all agencies and agents in Europe. The third innovative idea in his book is the reconstruction of Ghandi's cultural identity for independent India as an invented tradition mediated by an enlightened leadership – the emergent postcolonial elite. Jackson claims that very much like Ghandi reinvented the Indian tradition, the Chinese leadership is reinventing the Chinese cultural tradition in the post‐communist context. He notes that while the African leaders' reinvention of traditions did not prevent them their countries from economic stagnation, the Chinese elite has so far been very successful in developing economy and raising the living standards of the population at large.

Let me sum up. Terence Jackson has written a very good study of cross‐cultural differences, and his African experience makes it possible for him not to fall prey of the media‐induced bias. I hope to see more equally competent and critical, honest studies of what is going on in the rest apart from the West, that is in the former Third World, which is bound to catch up with the First (the disappeared Second one is partly incorporated into the EU, partly left alone like Russia and partly re‐assembled as the Balkans or the Soviet enclaves in Moldova, Georgia or Kaliningrad) in either nearer or further future.