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Date Submitted: 11/30/2012 03:08 PM
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Culture and international management: a review
St John's College, University of Queensland, St Lucia, Brisbane, Australia
Keywords Multinationals, Management, Cross-cultural management, Corporate culture, National cultures Abstract This is a review article on the effectiveness of cross-cultural managements of multinational companies. Analysis is based on the relationships between national and corporate culture and these corporate cultures vary across nations and how multinational companies can adopt the national differences.
Culture and international management 521
Received May 2000 Revised October 2001 Accepted October 2001
Victoria Miroshnik
There are many different definitions of multinational business. Frayerweather (1978) says that multinational business has ``only one central distinguishing characteristic ± it is business, involving two or more nations''. Farmer and Richman (1966) define it as ``business operations of any sort by one firm, which takes place within or between two or more independent countries''. Multinational business operations can take several different forms. In Figure 1 we can see four basic types of organizations and compare them in the degree to which international activities are separated to respond to the local regions and integrated to achieve global efficiencies. The ``international corporation'' is a domestic firm that builds on its existing capabilities to penetrate overseas markets (companies such as Honda, General Electrics, etc.). The ``multinational corporation'' (MNC) is a more complex form that usually has fully autonomous units operating in multiple countries. These companies have traditionally given their foreign subsidiaries a great deal of latitude to address local issues such as consumer...