Values, Expectations, Ad Hoc Rules, and Culture Emergence in International Cross-Cultural Management Contexts (Focus on Civilizations and Culture Series)

Product Description Is culture fixed and immutable, or is it emergent and changing? This is a question that has taken on growing importance in light of the culturally diverse and dynamic workplace realities that have resulted from increasing globalisation. It is also a topic that is in hot debate in international cross-cultural management (ICCM) research, in management and organisation studies in general, and in other disciplines. This book moves beyond the conventional dichotomous thinking of viewing culture either as fixed and immutable or dynamic and "in the making", and aims to develop a conceptualisation of culture that includes both a stable and a changing element. This book is based on empirical research on culture emergence in Sino-Western international cross-cultural management (SW-ICCM) contexts in China. Data have been collected by semi-structured interviews of Chinese and Western expatriates working in SW-ICCM contexts in China. Data analysis has led to the formulation of a grounded theory that views culture as comprising three cognitive components, Values, Expectations, and Ad Hoc Rules, which differ in time-space in their mutual shaping with behaviour, ranging from the enduring/universal, to the intermediate/context-specific, to the temporal/occasion-specific. About the Author Xibao "Tony" Zhang, PhD, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia, 2008; MBA, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, USA, 1990, is professor of international business at Qingdao University, Qingdao, China. After returning to China in 1990, he first worked for a Chinese state-owned company, and later on for a Sino-US joint venture where the US partner is a Fortune 500 company. This book is based on Professor Zhang's PhD thesis research. The inspiration for this research came from his own practical cross cultural experience, where people's behavior often changes with context, while many scholars still assume behavior is stable across contexts and can be predicted from national cultural values. For this research he has won a Highly Commended Award in the 2008 Emerald/EFMD Outstanding Doctoral Research Awards competition. Professor Zhang has been in academia for over ten years. His primary research interest is international management, especially cross cultural management issues. In recent years he has been teaching Cross Cultural Management in the Chinese Context (in English) to exchange students from America and Europe, International Marketing (a bilingual course) to Chinese undergraduate students, both at Qingdao University, and Strategic Management to international MBA students at Ocean University of China.