Miss

Saunders, Lewis amd Thornhill: Research Methods for Business Students, 5th edition, Additional Case Studies

Case 3c National cultures and management styles

Petro decided to research cross-cultural management. He was interested particularly in national cultures and wished to compare and contrast differences between Britain, France and Nigeria in terms of their management theory and practices. He spent several days in the university library searching the online catalogue for information on national cultures in order to make comparisons between the countries selected for his project. He also used the Internet search engine Google and was taken by surprise to find over 50 million hits on ‘national cultures’. He was aware of the research of Hofstede and Trompenaars from his third-year studies. Google highlighted 159 000 hits on Hofstede and 77 000 on Trompenaars. Given the numbers involved he quickly realised how time consuming this would be. Discussing this with a fellow student alerted him to the problems of such data. Apart from the fact that commercial and academic information was not easily differentiated, much of the information was not referenced in the way expected for his academic project. Nevertheless, given the problems he had in selecting the appropriate data on cross-cultural differences in management, he arrived at his first tutorial with a range of material for his literature review. This included photocopied extracts from textbooks on management theories and practices and copies of the articles from a variety of journals. He realised that there was a lot more data on Britain and France compared to Nigeria. However, he perceived that his managerial experience in Britain and France as well as his three years working in Nigeria for a large multinational company would give him insights that were valuable for his project. Petro emailed his project tutor his written work so far on his literature review. He was careful to make what he thought were...