East, West, Best

Address given in shortened form at the occasion of accepting the appointment as Full Professor of "Cross-Cultural Management" at the Rotterdam School of Management / Faculteit Bedrijfskunde of Erasmus University Rotterdam on Friday, September 28, 2001cultural encouters;beliefs;globalization;emergence;internet

Tracing Cold War in Post-Modern Management's Hot Issues

Tracing Cold War in post-modern managerial science and ideology one encounters hot issues linking contemporary liberal dogmas and romanticized view of organizational leadership to the dismantling of a welfare state disguised as a liberation of an individual employee, empowerment of an individual consumer and a progressive, liberal and global development of a market/parliament mix. The concept of totalitarianism covers fearful symmetries between three modes of paying the bills for western modernization; liberal, communist and the emergent "egalibertarian"(1), while the ideologies of organisationalism and globalization testify to a search for a post-Cold War mission statement. Messiness of re-engineering the enlargement of the European Union testifies to the hidden injuries of Cold War, not all of them caused by a class and class struggle.empowerment;liberalism;Cold War;hidden costs of modernization;egaliberty;organizationalism;paradigm;romanticized view of leadership;Managerialist ideology;totalitarianism

Trading Virtual Legacies (Management of Tradition from Alexandria to Internet)

Will the reconstructed library of Alexandria prevent a forthcoming clash of civilizations? Inventing and re-inventing traditions requires total quality management and multiple networking in shifting alliances in the information space. Stock exchange of cultural forms has long abandoned the golden standards of Enlightenment and follows a theory of cultural relativity and an international political economy of attention.Virtual legacies;cultural relativity;detraditionalization;political economy of attention;re-enchantment

Critical Complexities, (from marginal paradigms to learning networks)

The concepts of critical theory require critical changes. Strategies of a Frankfurt school had been transformed in the new academic and institutional environment. The development of scientific research programs resulted in a flexible restructuring of research communities. The new complexity of research networks is less hierarchic, more mobile, not easily centralized. Theories of organizational learning reflect methodological compromises with respect to the paradigms and political compromises with respect to the governance structures. Nomadic, virtual and flexible research communities float in cyberspace discovering the fundamentals of democracy in an era of informational affluencecritical theory;methodological and political compromises;research paradigms and communities

Under Construction (Identities, Communities and Visual Overkill)

Most of modern identities emerge from mediated interactions in public and virtual spaces. There are no acknowledged authorities to watch over organizational identities and grant them legitimacy. These identities are renegotiated in real and virtual communities, often carry a permanent label 'under construction' and can be violently contested in public space. Garrulous behaviour stimulated by interactive media and by the forthcoming Evernet allows for a gradual build-up of individual and social response to the visual overkill in media-regulated societies. Voicing the images over, we mobilize for action, dismantle institutional structures and generally speaking mix gate-keeping with data-dating, thus contributing to the overall change of world's cultural climate - one of bricks, clicks and flicks. Benetton's Toscani campaign and Napster's ordeal are cases in point.corporate identity;cultural climate;flicks;virtual community;visual overkill

Organizing as Improvisations (Methodological Temptations of Social Constructivism)

Academic communities in social sciences are still dominated byneo-positivist paradigm, but communities of practice developing socialconstructivism have started to redress paradigmatic imbalances.According to the latter man-made organizational reality is processualand saturated with sensemaking (Weick). Social constructivistssucceeded in reconstructing complex organizational disasters andcontributed to organizational innovation and change (for instance inthe wake of ICT challenges). They belong to postmodernist critics ofmodernity's failure to regulate social development and contribute to abetter understanding of organizing (e.g. implementing a new technologyor managing knowledge production) as patchworking and improvising. Inspite of discriminating practices, they survive in academiccommunities.critical theory;managerialism;improvisation;relativism;social constructivism

Social Life of Values

The case of the Danish “cartoon war†was a premonition of things to come: accelerated social construction of inequalities and their accelerated symbolic communication, translation and negotiation. New uses of values in organizing and managing inequalities emerge. Values lead active social life as bourgeois virtues (McCloskey, 2006), their subversive alternatives or translated “memes†of cultural history. Since social life of values went global and online, tracing their hybrid manifestations requires cross-culturally competent domestication (Magala, 2005) as if they were “memes†manipulated for further reengineering. Hopes are linked to emergent concepts of “microstorias†(Boje,2002), bottom-up, participative, open citizenship (Balibar,2004), disruption of stereotypical branding in mass-media (Sennett, 2006). However, Kuhn’s opportunistic deviation from Popperian evolutionary epistemology should fade away with other hidden injuries of Cold War, to free our agenda for the future of social sciences in general and organizational sciences in particular (Fuller, 2000, 2003).Complex Identities;Cross-Cultural Competence;Intersubjective Falsificationism;Managing Inequalities;Political Paradigms;Professional Evolution

Elective Identities, (Culture, Identization and Integration)

Most of contemporary individual and social identities (constructedwith societal, cultural and technological resources) are radicallyautonomous, nomadic and virtual - i.e. they are de-traditionalized,open to negotiation and not based on a single interpretation of atradition. Identizations can be recycled - elements of formeridentities are being re-used in constructing later ones or identitiesemerging in one context can be implanted in another or hybridised - anation state as a model for socio-political identity is a case inpoint (and so is its recent crisis). Values, political, cultural andsocial identities - elective identities of "nomads of the present",often emerging out of new social movements or informal networks - playan important role in determining choices of information codes, imagesand identities. Theories of clashes of civilizations and offundamentalists versus modernists should be seen against thebackground of increasingly complex and successful attempts at globalgovernance and increasing criticism of the ideologies of status quo.They may testify to the success of globalization instead ofdemonstrating its failure. The rise of religious fundamentalism andthe emergence of network types of organization contribute to furtheracceleration of identization processes. "Girotondi della liberta" inBerlusconi's Italy and radical re-evaluation of cosmopolitanism as afamily of images of representation are cases of emergent identizationswith unclear but potentially critical political implications.clash of civilizations;globalism;processual;recycled and virtual identities;fundamentalism

Measures of Pleasures

Measuring culture originated in cultural anthropology, but all social sciences contributed to comparative cultural studies. Tracing critical approaches towards a measurement of cultural values one is bound to strip the biases and stereotypes bare and to invade numerous academic fiefs. Hofstede defined interdisciplinary cultural dimensions but failed to anchor studying of culture's consequences in the academia. Measuring culture (rituals, patterns, business recipes, symbols, standards) we end up measuring values and competence in management of knowledge and skills, of norms and behaviours, cutting many corners of established disciplines. Demanding, but should we fail to do so, our cross-cultural experiment with the European integration could result in the corrosion of character and bowling alone.integration;knowledge management;bias;cross-cultural measurements;learning standardscomparing values

Zeitgeist in the machine or humanities in the net

The essay offers a reflection on transformations of contemporary culture in the context of technological revolution and rapid development of cyber reality. It deals particularly with the limits of humanistic cognition. The article provides a critical analysis of contemporary condition of knowledge and academic activities. Nevertheless, crucial function of humanities is recognized on the normative level. To prove his points, author introduces the idea of humanistic management and compares historical developments in various cultural backgrounds