Customer Reviews

Cross-Cultural Management: A Knowledge Management Perspective

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Reading "Cross-Cultural Management" took me a long time, it is not an easy book to read. It is not that the subject is difficult, but the authors writing style is very dry and repetitive. At times, he dives into concepts and goes on and on where the point was already made in the first sentence. From that perspective, this book could be at least 1/3rd of its original size.

Cross-cultural management attempts to challenge existing ways of thinking about the management of multiple cultures and tries to define a new conceptual model. I felt the author succeeded only in part, and in part he complicated the subject unnecessary (e.g. with many analogies and introduction of new terms by overriding old words). The author tries to move away from describing cultural difference and how to manage them and towards a view of culture as an value to be exploited and benefited from.

The book consists of three parts. The first part introduces the current thinking about culture and also is the first attack on, what he calls, the Hofstedian perspective of managing cultural difference. At times, I felt the author was unreasonable in his attack of the previous work in the field and was disagreeing more from an intellectual challenge perspective than a practical one (although he argues the opposite). At times, I got the feeling that he doesn't appreciate the previous work, not even as, what he calls, general cultural knowledge. In the first part he also quickly overviews the knowledge management field as he is trying to adopt a knowledge management perspective to cultural management by looking at culture as knowledge that can be applied to a useful purpose (achieving business goals).

The second part described four case studies of companies dealing with culture: Novo Nordisk, Matsushita, Lego, and Sulver Infra. When starting to read this book, I expected this part to be the most interesting one, but in retrospect, I disliked this part most. All the studies felt very shallow and both unfocused (from the topic perspective) and focused (from the perspective that they didn't describe general events, but only one particular event). The studies are said to be the basis for the rest of the book, however I felt the author was only sparsely referring back to them and often in a shallow way.

The third part was perhaps the most interesting. In the first three chapters, the author tries to evolve his ideas about cross-cultural management from a knowledge management perspective. He takes the analogy of language (which I found unfortunate) and introduces the concepts of interactive translation and participative competence as the key skills needed in the modern multicultural workspace. Personally I felt the last chapter to be the most useful, where the author summarizes the main concepts of earlier chapters and shows how they relate and what impact they have on the field of cross-cultural management. This was the first time, for me, where I felt the author was convincing.

I disliked most of the book. Not from content perspective, but from attitude and style perspective. At times, I felt like stopping to read the book and instead read something else that was more engaging and inspiring. For most of the book, I wouldn't rate this more than 2 stars. Two because the content is not useless or wrong, just presented very dry. The last chapter made me glad that I actually finished the book and also let me change my rating to three stars, which means, this book does what is claims to do. The author wishes for a large impact on the field, though, I doubt it will have that. Yet, the author was convincing enough that makes me partly wish I'm wrong. I wouldn't recommend this book except for people who are students of the subject, and even then, I'd recommend to read, especially part 2, quickly and focus on part 3.