international business

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Chapter Overview Culture is the set of shared goals, values, practices, and attitudes that

characterize a society, or in the business sense, an organization.1 Culture provides answers to questions pertaining to who, what, why, and when and how for a specific group of people. Business culture provides answers to questions pertaining to who, what, why, when, and how of any particular organization or type of business. The concept of business culture becomes increasingly complex when applied to a multinational corporation (MNC). Since the MNC culture evolves from the employees of more than one nation, the variables that comprise that specific culture are potentially limitless. One can commonly find that numerous different subcultures exist within the confines of the culture in any particular nation. The global manager must understand the complexities of the relationships between the different subcultures within any particular culture or nation and organizational operations in several different nations.

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the relational complexities that potentially exist between a culture and a foreign organization seeking to do business in that culture. Major topics of this chapter include the following:

Cultural paradigms

An examination of the major dimensions of cultures (major world religion, ethics across cultures, values and attitudes across cultures, business manners and customs across cultures, social structures and organizations, and education)

The major theories and models of analyzing and understanding cultures from a business and managerial perspective