A Company Odyssey in the South

This chapter recounts the successive reforms experienced over almost thirty years by the Cameroon Electricity Corporation. Its history is emblematic of the issues facing companies in emerging countries. First of all, it illustrates the remarkable permanence, over the long term, of a set of Cameroonian cultural traits. However, these national culture specificities have only been addressed episodically during successive modernizations. The first part summarizes the analyses carried out in the early 1990s on the ‘hyper-centralization’ of the company and the subsequent implementation of a detailed procedures manual to reduce it. The second part displays the disappointing results of the universal management solutions later applied to comply with the privatization recommended by the World Bank. This story shows that changes in corporate culture are possible as long as they are in line with the persistent universes of cultural meanings.

Intercultural Team Challenges

Working in multicultural teams can be a challenge since members do not share the same cultural references. How can they reach an agreement when decision-making does not mean the same things to participants? How can expatriates empower local staff when managers and employees do not have the same empowerment prerequisites in mind? A Franco-Swedish and a Franco-Malagasy case illustrate these misunderstandings, which are emblematic of the misperceptions that emerge in bi-national work contexts. Training in intercultural communication and awareness of cultural distances are not sufficient to overcome these misunderstandings. In addition, cultural misunderstandings are sometimes strategically constructed and often not even acknowledged as such. A better intercultural cooperation requires deciphering the participants’ universes of meaning.

Decision-making

Making decisions involves many risks such as ignoring relevant points of view; angering those who are frustrated, inducing them, once the decision has been made, to hinder its implementation. One way to limit these risks is to frame decisions with rituals. However, for a ritual to work, it must appear respectable; and this relies on an eminently cultural interpretation. To understand what is at stake, two aspects of the decision-making process are explored successively. First, a Franco-Dutch case demonstrates how social interactions intervene in the idea selection. Second, examples from Cameroon and Jordan show the suspicions and resentment that any decision is likely to generate among those who suffer from it. However, appropriate procedures are likely to overcome suspicions and to give a sense of fairness.

Procedures and Control

The content of expected procedures, their precision, the more or less strict compliance requested, and the way their implementation is audited, depend on cultural contexts. The first part of the chapter depicts a Cameroonian company in which the expectations for detailed procedures manuals to be applied literally are high. Such a use of procedures can be explained by the need to ward off the underlying fear that personal relationships outweigh the objectivity of the rules. Conversely, the second part shows that, in France, detailed operating procedures in the automotive and nuclear sectors contradict the quest for autonomy, associated with the importance of mastering one’s profession. A comparison with the nuclear sector in the United States shows that there the stakes are again different. This chapter deals with the way procedures are articulated with the expectations and fears, specific to each universe of meaning, which are generally ignored.

Efficient Multicultural Teams

The quick training of expatriates prior to departure meant to raise their awareness of cultural habits is insufficient to increase the efficiency of multicultural teams. Such improvement requires helping each team member to decipher the main cultural references of their counterparts and to organize themselves in a way that is acceptable in all of their universes of meaning. This chapter provides an example of such cross-cultural coaching for a Franco-Malagasy team and details the six-step method implemented by the cultural analyst. It also suggests different leverages for improvement depending on the team’s specific context. Whenever tight intercultural integration is required, organizing complementarity between sub-groups may turn out less costly than striving for complex arrangements.

Transferring Management Practices

Transferring ‘good practices’ and management ‘tools’ is a recurring challenge for companies working internationally, particularly in emerging and developing countries. As regards management tools, distinguishing what is part of universal rationality from what should be adapted to the local universe of meaning is particularly tricky. This chapter discusses two cases of Total Quality implementations which highlight the key influence of cultural contexts. In the first case, a Japanese company failed in transferring their methods in the United States, in the second one, a French multinational company succeeded in transforming the Moroccan subsidiary’s management. Drawing lessons from both examples, the third part provides some clues to significantly improve management practice transfers. While companies are concerned with ‘knowledge management’, they lack an operational method for dealing with cultures. However, scrutinizing successful local practices will reveal the characteristics of the local culture and provide replicable solutions.

Interpersonal Communication

In today’s linguistically-diverse business world, communication using English as a lingua franca (ELF)—the most frequently chosen common corporate language (CCL)—often overlooks intercultural difficulties. ELF words are generally perceived as conveying a unique meaning to all when, in fact, the sense that speakers make out of them draws on what is most easily accessible in their own minds—that is, their specific universe of meaning. This, along with the communicative styles imported from their native languages, slows organisations’ dynamics—a fact often mistakenly attributed to speakers’ poor ELF skills. Such meaning relativity has an impact on the credibility of cross-cultural studies relying on questionnaires. They use ELF formulations that, taken out of their original contexts, undergo back-and-forth translations, before being amalgamated and presented as evidence, although inherently flawed.

Introduction

We are experiencing a rather curious situation today. Globalization is in full swing. International cooperation actions are more and more frequent. An increasing number of agents, who were socialized in different worlds, experience first-hand the difficulties that need to be overcome in such situations. Yet management practices are being homogenized all over the world. The elites in emerging countries are falling over themselves to follow the expensive training given by Western universities. Attempts to achieve a global standardization of management practices have probably never been stretched so far in multinational companies. However, the dissemination of the best practices of a management claiming to be universal is confronted with the irreducible resistance of the diversity of cultures. This resistance remains poorly understood. The most common representation of cultural differences taught in universities and in training seminars for companies disregards the analysis of concrete realities, thus failing to shed light on what is actually taking place in these encounters. Understanding this constitutes a major intellectual and practical challenge for researchers who focus on both ...

Customer Relations

Everywhere customer satisfaction is crucial to business success. As a result, cross-cultural marketing has extensively studied the specific cultural expectations of customers regarding products and services. It has also investigated the influence of cultures on negotiation processes, especially in business-to-business transactions. However, the literature has overshadowed that what customer relations mean and how they are maintained vary across cultures. Three examples from China, France, and Côte d’Ivoire respectively illustrate different conceptions of customer relations. In each country, relations to customers make sense according to the prevailing forms of social relations. Providing, as well as obtaining, good customer service in each context requires an understanding of that specific cultural background.

Corporate Communication

Establishing a worldwide corporate identity is a priority for most organizations nowadays. To do so, they generally include in their corporate websites ELF self-presentations that were either initially written in the companies’ home language for their home audiences and simply translated into ELF, or written in ELF with an international audience in mind. However, can these self-profiles achieve their trust-building objective with audiences that are unknown but for their ability to understand the language? In other words, does the cross-border linguistic transfer of the content and rhetoric underpinning their presentations work well? A case study of self-profiles produced in China and France points to discrepancies that not only indicate a possible negative answer, but also that the ideal company image that organizations are striving to convey differs with their cultures. Some rare companies show that adaptation to local communication styles and culture could help corporate communication to fare better.