Cross-Cultural Management: Essential Concepts, Fourth Edition introduces readers to the fundamentals of cross-cultural management by exploring the influence of culture on interpersonal interactions in organizational settings and examining the ever-increasing number of cross-cultural management challenges that global managers face in today’s workplace. Instead of taking a country specific approach, authors David C. Thomas and Mark F. Peterson offer a predominantly psychological perspective—focusing on the interactions of people from different cultures in organizational settings. This approach shows readers the effects culture has on a wide variety of cross-cultural interactions across organizational contexts.

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.

Cross-Cultural Management: With Insights from Brain Science explores a broad range of topics on the impact of culture in international business and vice versa, and the impact of businesses and individuals in shaping a culture. It provides critical and in-depth information on globalization, global/glocal leadership, cross-cultural marketing, and cross-cultural negotiation. It also discusses many other topics that are not typically found in the mainstream management textbooks such as diversity management, bias management, cross-cultural motivation strategies, and change management. While most literature in the field is dominated by the static paradigm, that is, culture is fixed, nation equates to culture, and values are binary, this book takes a different approach. It regards national values as a first-best-guess and balances it with an introduction of the dynamic paradigm. This school of thought posits that culture is not static, context is the software of the mind, opposing values coexist, change is constant, and individuals can develop a multicultural mind. A unique feature of this book is the contribution of an interdisciplinary approach. It’s the first textbook of cross-cultural management that incorporates latest findings from the emerging discipline of cultural neuroscience and evolutionary biology in the discussion. Such a holistic approach is meant to help readers gain a deeper and broader understanding of the subjects.

Advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students and researchers in international business, international management and cross-cultural management, and all concerned with the transfer of knowledge in the global economy. It will also be a valuable source of concepts and ideas to cross-cultural trainers and to various categories of practitioners within knowledge management and international human resource management. This book forges a break with the concept of culture that has dominated management thinking, education, and research for several decades. Culture, rather than being presented as a source of difference and antagonism, is presented as a form of organisational knowledge that can be converted into a resource for underpinning core competence. This perspective based on extensive research into the operations of four major international corporations, challenges traditional thinking by contending that cross-cultural management is a form of knowledge management. Key to this text are the four global case companies contrasting experiences, presented as insightful case studies about rarely observed aspects of firms cross-cultural communication behaviour.

All cultures appear to share the belief that they do things ‘correctly’, while others, until proven otherwise, are assumed to be ignorant or barbaric. When people from different cultures work together and cannot take shared meanings for granted, managers face serious challenges. An individual’s parsing of an experience and its meaning may vary according to several cultural scales – national, professional, industrial and local. Awareness of cultural differences and the willingness to view them as a positive are therefore crucial assets. This edited textbook sets itself apart from existing cross-cultural management texts by highlighting to the reader the need to avoid both ethnocentrism and the belief in the universality of his or her own values and ways of thinking: the success of international negotiations and intercultural management depends on such openness and acceptance of real differences. It encourages the development of ‘nomadic intelligence’ and the creative use of a culture’s resources, according to a symbolic anthropology perspective. Through the essays and case studies in the chapters, readers will become aware of the intercultural dimension of business activities and better understand how they affect work. Cross-Cultural Management will help interested parties – students of business management, international relations and other disciplines, and business managers and other professionals – develop their ability to interact, take action and give direction in an intercultural context.

Given the global nature of business today and the increasing diversity within the workforce of so many industries and organisations, a cross-cultural component in management education and training has become essential. This is the case for every type of business education, whether it be for aspiring graduates at the start of their careers or senior managers wishing to increase their effectiveness or employability in the international market. The 4th edition of Understanding Cross-Cultural Management has been adapted in line with the feedback from our many readers, and boasts new case study material based on recent research, as well as a stronger focus on Asian cultures, thereby providing more non-Western examples.

If you are employed or studying cross-cultural management—what is culture and to what extent is it important in international business—then you will need to have this book, as it answers these questions through an exploration of the major theories that have been developed in the fields of business anthropology and international management. Dr. Velo also discusses the application of previously analyzed cultural frameworks as a basis for the elaboration of new ideas relating to current issues in organizational behavior. International organizations often deal with relationships between the employee as a socialized individual and the culture of his/her organization, managing in a globalized context, the development and management of cross-cultural teams, and negotiating intercultural with potential conflicts. This outstanding contribution to this field will help explain these relationships, questions, and possible conflicts in the world of cross-cultural management.