Entering the Market: Culture and Context (Zubko/Sahay)
Your bags are packed and you have a boarding ticket in hand. A few months earlier, you received word that you would be going to India on business, maybe for your first time or your fifth time. Visas have been arranged. Language lessons may have moved to the top of your MP3’s playlist. In addition to putting together any presentations and plans, a running list of do’s and don’ts runs through your head haphazardly, beginning to jump together. Besides wondering if the project will go smoothly, and thinking through any areas to troubleshoot, you also may be concerned about the food and water, the heat, and whether you will by mistake cross some unknown cultural taboo and offend your Indian colleagues. Friends and co-workers offer advice, both solicited and unsolicited. The company may have handed you a manual on things to know about life in India or brought you a few books. As you sit there in the airport, you may be asking yourself: What do I really need to know to be able to adapt to any business situation in India? Do I have the tools I need for a successful trip?
The two most overlooked strategic tools that foreign managers often forget to pack are inseparable: culture and context. Accurate and practical facts about the culture within which you will be working are essential. And yet this key information can become trivial unless you know when, where, and how to use your knowledge of culture within and across appropriate con texts. If you do not include these two indivisible tools in your toolbox, get ting things done efficiently and successfully is statistically harder to do and more costly
With the increasing internationalization of business practices and the interchangeability of products, intercultural understanding is of major importance.
From the point of view of international business management, it has become obvious that intercultural management has the task to prepare people, who are confronted with intercultural encounters so that they are able to identify the effective features of the respective other culture and integrate them into their own course of action. Thus, they can fulfil their specific management tasks under unfamiliar cultural conditions and in interaction with partners from a different cultural background. (Holzmüller, 1997, p. 790)
Intercultural management implies an analysis of the diversity of the respective countries, regions or subcultures and the establishment of general codes of conduct. Cultural concepts provide a framework for action. However, before a deeper understanding of cultural phenomena and dimensions and their background factors is created, it is necessary to deal with the differences in cultures. Here, one of the first questions is: What is actually defined as culture and what contribution can it make to enable us to understand patterns of cultural behaviour?
III..1 –
III..2 – Connecting Intercultural Communication and Management (Gary R. Weaver)
We cannot be experts on every culture. However, we can develop the flexibility to put ourselves in the psychological and cultural shoes of those who are different. We can begin to appreciate the reality that there are numerous ways of solving a problem and that our way is in large part a result of growing up in our culture. Intercultural awareness and under standing begin with knowing your own culture first. Often this can only come through interaction with those who are different.