Culture may not be the only factor to affect organizational structure. Size, strategic location, the industrial climate, the complexity of the task in hand and the kind of technology used all exert an influence and profoundly affect the relations between members of an organization. Managers therefore have to contend with weighing culture against other variables when trying to implement organizational structure.If culture is but one among a range of factors, then why are cross-cultural management skills so important? Mead crisply answers this question at the outset and his views may be summarized as follows. Today's business world is global and therefore firms are forced to establish branches and subsidiaries outside their national boundaries. Managers have to deal with people from other cultures, and it is imperative that they develop the ability to interact with individuals who have different cultural priorities.
Effective cross-cultural management increasingly means working with people from different cultures and learning to tolerate differences when devising shared priorities.In today's economic climate, market forces appear to have an increasingly anthropological dimension. The ethnocentric manager, for example, who is unable or unwilling to deal with members of other cultures has fewer career opportunities. To accommodate these changes management schools are giving increasing priority to teaching cross-cultural management skills. International Management combines theory and practice, and includes a variety of exercises to enable students to apply general concepts to specific situations.Mead acknowledges the difficulty in providing a single definition of culture, but does not duck the issue. Instead he provides a succinct account of the sociological and anthropological positions before moving on to the management literature.
This publication deserves a warm welcome because it acknowledges the contribution made by anthropologists to the understanding of culture. As Richard Mead demonstrates, there is clearly a great deal of scope for making more use of anthropological insights in clarifying the role of culture in international management. The book is aimed at students and has been written with admirable clarity, and should be of value to anyone involved in teaching applied social sciences.
