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.

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.

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.

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.

And, as multinational corporations (MNCs) and Transnational Corporations (TNCs) spread their wings across nations with numerous employees of different nationalities, with their different cultures, different mores and different behaviours, organizations have to reconcile these differences and have to forge a unified organizational culture to achieve their mission, vision and objectives. This book eminently suits as a text to address these goals. Divided into 14 chapters, this comprehensive and well-organized text discusses in detail the many cultural issues facing organizations. Professor Bhattacharyya, with his expertise and wealth of experience, provides a masterly analysis of the subject, harmoniously blending the theory and practice of cross-cultural management, making it a unified whole. Not only does the text give a thorough understanding of culture, showing that it is an amalgam of shared values and behaviours of groups as well as a phenomenon applicable to individuals, it also delineates the many facets of corporate culture. The text discusses the entire gamut of organizational culture, cultural differences, diversity management, cross-cultural management, globalization, impact of culture on globalization, and the impact of technology and culture on organization. In addition, it focuses on cross-cultural communication, cultural issues in mergers and acquisitions, resource management, cross-cultural decision making, and ways and means of managing cross-cultural teams.

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.

In Cross-Cultural Management, the author takes a critical, power-sensitive and culturally-aware perspective that moves beyond the paradigms debate, placing greater emphasis on the holistic nature of culture and its managerial consequences and taking into account the diversity and multiple identities apparent in cross-cultural management. Conceived by Chris Grey as an antidote to conventional textbooks, each book in the ‘Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap’ series takes a core area of the curriculum and turns it on its head by providing a critical and sophisticated overview of the key issues and debates in an informal, conversational and often humorous way. Suitable for students of cross-cultural management, human resource management or workplace diversity and professionals working in organizations and intercultural training.