Cultural factors are often identified as a crucial influence on the success or failure of
Information Systems in general and Electronic Customer Relationship Management
Systems (eCRM) in particular. Several researchers have suggested ways in which
management can accommodate these factors or solve the problem they pose. This paper
attempts to go one step beyond management measures and ask whether there is a
theoretical foundation on which one can base the mutual influence of culture on eCRM.
There is a lack of pervious literature on the impact of culture differences on eCRM
systems. A normative literature review on the impact of culture on different types of
Information Systems has been done to explore different cultural factors that might
influence eCRM systems as an application of Information Systems. The authors highlight
the cultures factors in macro and micro level that have been investigated in the literature of
Information systems. At the macro level, it is necessary to consider the differences at a
national level. The differentiating characteristics will include: organizational structures,
function and process oriented views, supervisory control mechanisms etc. Micro level
considerations will be at the individual level and will include human responses to
organizational change, cultural acceptability of different organizational structures etc. The
authors propose a framework of cultural concerns for management of eCRM systems
within multinational environment organizations. This framework will be tested in future
research and will be modified according to the results
