Multicultural behavior as an aspect of business holds special interest for employers and employees around the world. The magnitude of competitive international enterprises makes it imperative that producers and consumers develop multicultural behavioral skills to deal with today’s culturally diverse global market. Cultural diversity must be viewed as a reality in international business operations. Multicultural behavior is a phenomenon associated with accelerated novelty and creating cultural synergy. It stands alone in its concern with contentious problems such as ethnicity, race, gender, color, and religious faiths. In multinational environments, the most problematic issue is the friction generated by organizational and operational functions, along with the consideration of and integration of different cultural values and perceptions into the mission of an organization.
Along with these contradictions, we find a multitude of political ideologies, socioethnic perceptions, artistic artifacts, and religious faiths, with a variety of beliefs, ideas, doctrines, and material and non-material hierarchies. Clearly, knowledge is vital for the effective managerial integration within such a complex environment.
Understanding multicultural behavior and the global environments of businesses is crucial to every manager who belongs to and leads a multinational organization. In recognition of the development and rapidly growing importance of international relations, as well as the need for educating future managers and professional experts, the American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) now requires business schools to multi-culturalize their curriculum. Multicultural Behavior and Global Business Environments is a creative coverage of cultural differences and similarities for future use by students in both fields of domestic and international businesses; topics in this text are presented in a smooth and logical flow.
The author’s intention is to establish, as powerfully as possible, a frame of reference that expresses this judgment and method of study which is appropriate to multicultural behavior. Several international business texts are available to the scholarly community. This book was written not only to be useful for practicing international management but also to be used for students majoring in other areas, such as political sciences, international relations, public administration, and educational administration.
Many conceptual features ensure that this text is linked to current issues facing multicultural organizations. Multiculturalism is a highly goal-oriented effort. Its goals are not only related directly to application of business law, economics, finance, and the like, but they must also be concerned with what home and host cultures and societies value. Perhaps more specifically, in a free market economy, they are concerned with what producers and consumers want and expect. In addition, the author has become convinced that all multinational managers must travel this route for a more synergistic understanding of these environmental components.
In an era of highly sophisticated technology, we have found no significant evidence related to the holistically important issue of multicultural understanding among nations. We are living in an era in which we are moving from the Cold War’s competitive forced technology to an exchange and sharing of technologies between East and West; from simple cultural dependency to multicultural sufficiency; from national to multinational free market economies; from representative democratic societies to participatory democracies; and from oligopolistic industries to multiple, optional conglomerate enterprises.
Multinational corporations and the World Wide Web (WWW) play a special role, not only in building cross-cultural bridges among home and host nations, but also in providing innovative multicultural understanding through their informational and practical knowledge-based resources. Multicultural expectation has brought people’s thoughts, efforts, and natural resources toward more effective, efficient, and productive managerial outcomes.
Because of the rapid growth of such multinational e-commerce and the World Wide Web, people around the globe are becoming more culturally interdependent. Global interdependence is no longer a matter of belief, ideology, or choice; it is an inescapable reality. This text addresses, in a way that is both sound and thought provoking, the importance of multicultural behavior in multinational organizational management. This view, of course, is based on the fundamental focus—the managerial perspective of multicultural synergy. Multicultural synergy is a provocative effort by modern humans to create innovative thoughts and methods through application of international value systems. Multiculturalism is making possible all human efforts to create an understanding among all cultures. It is an effort to move from bureaucracy to meritocracy—a process by which intellectual innovation and creativity can meaningfully achieve synergy. Producers and consumers should not be victims of fate because of their limited resources. They should focus their concerns on the variety of choices in their physical features or intellectual ideas. People should share their efforts in making the history of humanity very successful.
It is the intent of the author not only to present a prescription for multicultural synergy but also to help develop a sense of understanding of the magnitude of multicultural synergy to minimize overall human behavioral efforts. However, in global business, managers should promote the pride of all cultures in home and host countries. Multinational corporations should provide room for the growth and development of all organizational constituencies—in sum, a human global multicultural synergy.
The author decided to examine many materials from many cultures, striving to bind the discussion of multiculturalism more closely to the theoretical and practical perspectives with which he had recently been concerned, particularly as expressed in multicultural behavior theory.
Boundaries of Multicultural Behavior and Global Business Environments
Multiculturalism is the study of concepts, knowledge, skills, and attitudes constituting multinational corporate management. It is a multidisciplinary, rather than interdisciplinary, phenomenon. The field of multicultural behavior covers an enormous territory; it is a research-oriented field and this book will be a valuable source of reference for both practitioners and academicians.
Multicultural understanding is expanding because of the diverse nature of communication and contact among nations. This is a growing discipline that will add new conceptual and scientific ideas for improving relationships among home and host countries.
The rapid demographic movements, expansion in tourism and trade industries, development in scientific resources, changing job skill specifications, and legal requirements are forcing multinational corporations to advance their organizations into the new millennium. By analyzing the behavioral philosophies, values, motives, and beliefs of an increasingly multicultural workforce, multinational managers must pay serious attention to global competitiveness in productivity as well as to the quality of their organizational performance. Therefore, multicultural behavior is a field that deals with the composition of a multinational workforce in a competitive free market economy, creating new challenges for multinational managers.
This book is deeply rooted in the variety of behavioral patterns of producers and consumers. It is not the first to seek multicultural understanding within the contextual boundaries of competitive partnership among nations, and, hopefully, it will not be the last. It is written from a multidimensional perspective to help readers gain multilateral advantages by addressing the needs of multicultural management. Achieving a multicultural behavioral synergy involves blending and capitalizing on multinational resources toward the creation of a competitive qualitative outcome.
One of the most valuable contributions of this book is its identification and clarification of the terms, meanings, and processes of multiculturalization, crossculturalization, biculturalization, enculturalization, and acculturalization. This book serves businesses as well as public administrations in understanding multinational organizations and management complexities.
This book will also help students understand the specific identity of many cultures around the globe. It will instill an appreciation of the structural operations and managerial decision-making processes and to understand new missions, strategies, and policies. It also helps multinational managers to build their cultural philosophies in order to better match their corporate fitness with their environmental conditions.
The primary users of this book will be college students. Its secondary users will be multicultural researchers; it can be used as a reference book. Tertiary users will be academicians, who will use the book as a new multidisciplinary source for conceptualizing the further path of their research. Understanding principles of acculturalization, multiculturalization, and crossculturalization requires a very broad base of knowledge. This text provides such a base.
This book will help readers understand the specific identity of many cultures and is unique in several ways. First, it provides a view of cultural philosophies broadened to the more common interpretation of cultural economy. In the field of international business, it provides the frame of reference, for religious, governmental, and regional forces as crucial synergistic role-players in an international free market economy. Second, it has gathered information from the wave of ever-changing management literature that promotes changes in the international marketplace. Third, this text addresses the blending of ideas of multiculturalism from diverse, cultural values in order to provide a compelling call for more understanding, cooperation, and, above all, multicultural synergy. Finally, the author has cited both theoretical and practical information as well as applications of both cultural and behavioral issues, for better understanding and crystallizing the necessity of paying attention to the needs of producers and consumers.