Cross-Cultural Management – serie

Academics worldwide need empirically developed, concise ideas to make their cross-cultural teams and organizations productive. This invaluable reference tool provides an essential resource for academics to develop their understanding and professional practice in working across cultural boundaries. It considers the fundamental theories and frameworks of cross-cultural management and deepens our understanding of how they can be applied to management knowledge. Managers, researchers, students, HRM practitioners, and specialists in international business and cross-cultural affairs, will find this book a valuable reference source. Chapters suggest how frameworks can be further developed and how managers and employees can put them to use so as to build cross-cultural understanding and productive cross-functional teams.

This volume explores how the idea of 'culture' is used and exploited by transnational managers to further their own ambitions and their companies' strategies for expansion. It thus provides a more complex picture of culture than has previously been presented in business studies, in that it deals with the strategic value of culture within organizations rather than viewing it as a neutral concept and, through using qualitative methodologies, gives us a full picture of the lived experience of culture in a multinational corporation. It also considers the impact of global corporate activity on both national and organizational cultures, as well as looking specifically at the ways in which communications technology is used as a site of conflict and negotiation in business. This book will be an invaluable resource for both researchers and professionals, yielding important new insights into the roles of local and global cultures in the operation of transnational corporations.

This book is concerned with trainee professionals and their search for meaning through the determined and creative pursuit of a cross-cultural career transition. Adopting a qualitative research framework, the book describes the career experience of professional trainees from non-Western cultures who have chosen to develop their careers in the West. It examines the process of the initial consideration of change, the exploring of options (including whether to emigrate) and how the many issues and challenges of adapting to the socio-cultural environment of the host country were met. In addition it examines how the process provided the trainee professionals involved with greater self-understanding and how as a result they were able to further consider their future career plans. The book then highlights the implications of these experiences for theory, research and practice.