technologies.of these positions is a more accurate reflection of reality, and what are the implications for global managers? While both research and practical experience suggest that culture does matter, research and practical experience also suggests that culture alone is not sufficient to explain the behavior of our foreign counterparts. Otherwise, how can we explain the success of Nahed Taher in a male-dominated culture? This reason, we must be cautious in our interpretation of cultural phenomena.preconceptions about the role (or lack thereof) of culture may blind us to the ways in which culture often does matter. Understanding the role of culture in management practice requires a way of thinking about culture that will help to identify cultural influences and inform the best course of action to deal with them. In other words, we need to understand what culture is and what it does, how our own culture has influenced our way of thinking in terms of working assumptions and personal and group biases, and how to acquire a sufficient understanding of how culture works to be able to tease out cultural influences on various situations in which we find ourselves. This is clearly no easy task, but it may nonetheless be an important one for global managers.
Our two examples - Sweden s Anna H? kansson and Bahra in s Nahed Tahler - highlight some important limitations of applying simplistic models to complex phenomena. On the one hand, such models provide a good starting point to understanding the influence of culture and the challenges posed by cultural differences. On the other hand, they focus our attention to a limited set of parameters and may mislead our interpretation of reality.dualities perspective - using a both / and logic in which both alternatives or paths have merit for purposes of analysis, rather than an either / or logic that forces analysts to choose between alternatives that are simultaneously worth pursuing - was introduced in Chapter 1 as a tool that often proves useful 3.7 Cultural complexities and contradictions
in understanding complex issues. This concept can also be applied here in regards to understanding how culture works in and across various societies. In particular, taking such an approach highlights the fact that cultures often influence attitudes and behaviors in opposites ways. This forces us to delve deeper into our study of cultures in ways that go beyond simply comparing cultural dimensions. Instead, it requires us to seek out underlying complexities and contradictions that ultimately aid in our ability to act successfully in or across very different environments. We suggest five cultural complexities and contradictions worthy of note (see Exhibit 3.7). Stability and changeof the dangers in any attempt to categorize cultures into a set of fixed dimensions is that this implies that cultures are stable and remain unchanged. However, while some aspects of culture are indeed stable and persistent, others evolve and change over time. That is, at the same time that groups of people strive to remain faithful to what and who they are, they simultaneously accommodate change and evolve where necessary or desirable.change and evolve over time in response to pressures both outside and inside of society. Because cultures are learned, t...
