Cross-Cultural Management: A Transactional Approach

The internationalization of business via the process of globalization has brought issues of culture to the forefront of management thinking. Although culture is by no means a new area of study in business schools, it remains frustratingly elusive and misunderstood. This textbook gives business students - or future managers - an understanding of the multitude of frameworks available to them to make sense of the cultural contexts they will encounter in their managerial careers. Starting from a general introduction to ‘culture’ and its role in businesses, Taran Patel encourages readers to shed a critical eye on the commonly accepted frameworks. She compels readers to ask three questions: Can I only make sense of the variety of cultures around me by categorizing people into static categories based on their geo-ethnic identities? Is it valid to make sense of people’s behaviours by categorizing them as ‘French’, ‘Indian’, ‘German’ or ‘American’? What other ways are there to make sense of people and their behaviours? Students studying from this textbook will benefit from a variety of conceptual tools that can be used to navigate the world of culture and its intersection with business and management. Taran Patel's unique textbook will be core reading for students of cross-cultural management / intercultural communication and essential reading for all those studying or researching international business and management.

Table of Contents:
Part 1: Overview: Culture and its impact on business 1. Culture: A complex construct of many layers 2. The impact of culture on businesses Part 2: Introducing and critiquing conventional frameworks of culture 3. Introducing and critiquing national, societal, and regional culture frameworks 4. Comparing national, societal, and regional frameworks of culture and exposing recent developments in the field 5. Understanding corporate culture: The integration perspective 6 Understanding corporate culture: The differentiation and fragmentation perspectives Part 3: Alternative cultural paradigms and their comparison to conventional cultural paradigms 7. Introducing the Transactional Culture Approach 8. Introducing the Douglasian Cultural Framework as a tool of the Transactional Culture Approach 9. Comparing the Douglasian Cultural Framework with conventional frameworks of culture Part 4: Applications of Douglasian Cultural Framework to resolve a variety of business problems and conclusions 10. Appraising the versatility of Douglasian Cultural Framework: Illustrations from varied managerial scenarios 11. Culture in business: Drawing the big picture

About the Author :
Taran Patel is an Associate Professor of Cross-Cultural Management, Organizational Behavior, and Human Resource Management in the People, Organization, and Society Department at Grenoble Ecole de Management, France.

Review :
This textbook provides an excellent and timely contribution to the field of cross-cultural management. It skilfully exposes the limitations of conventional cultural frameworks, which have dominated much contemporary thinking about international business and offers the reader an alternative way of addressing culture in the multicultural workplace. It is a must-read! Dr. Maria Dasli, Lecturer, The University of Edinburgh, UK. For a long time, I have been hoping for someone to take up the challenge of applying the cultural theory pioneered by Dame Mary Douglas to the study of corporations – realizing that, sometimes, "more tears are shed over answered prayers than over unanswered ones". In this book, my wishes are more than fulfilled. In it, Taran Patel highlights the limits to previous understandings of the roles that culture plays in companies and the ways in which cross-cultural management ought to be undertaken. She also shows how the Douglas’ framework surpasses these limits, and offers a theoretically sophisticated and eminently practical approach to cross-cultural management. Now I have new hope: that this excellent book will launch many graduate theses and practical applications. Marco Verweij, Professor, Jacobs University, Germany This is a very complete and inspiring book: it not only gives a very elaborated overview of the well known cross-cultural models (Hofstede, Schwartz and others); it also critically reviews these models, and offers an interesting alternative model for qualitative analysis of cultural differences. Joost Bücker, Senior Lecturer, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands Cross Cultural Management is an informative textbook which contains insight from a number of influential intellectuals in the field of intercultural management - Gerry Irvine, Global QHSE Manager, Veripos Limited