Authors: Richard Fletcher Tony Fang
The increasing importance of Asian markets for future global economy and internationalbusiness has been emphasized by business leaders and management gurus (Drucker &Nakauchi 1997). China, in particular, has become ?the workshop of the world? (Roberts &Kynge 2003) and ?the engine behind global trade growth? (Pfanner 2004). The pervasiveinfluence of culture on Asia management systems and business behaviours warrant morededicated academic attention (Chen 1995).So far, most studies on the impact of culture on the development of relationships andformation of networks in Asian country markets have been based on the etic (culture-general)approach which depends on evaluating markets by applying a set of underlying culturaldimensions as represented by Hofstede’s (1980, 1991, 2001) theory. For the most part thesedimensions are ?western? concepts and research instruments which rest on the notion thatdifferent cultures are separated by politically defined and artificially created nationalboundaries. These studies are likely to be unsuitable for Asian markets where regional andethnic boundaries are more likely to be different to political boundaries and where a numberof culturally different regions and ethnic groups are to be found within the same politicalboundary. Furthermore, the reliance on ?western? based cultural dimensions ignores the existence ofindigenous cultural traits that are unique to Asian markets. For example, whereas Hofstede(1980, 1991, 2001) bipolarizes national cultures in terms of ?either/or? dimensions such asfemininity vs. masculinity, the Asian worldview and life style is intrinsically ?both/and? and paradoxical which is represented in the image of Yin Yang (Chen, 2001, 2002, Fang, 1999,2003).In addition, the widely used cultural dimensions that have so far prevailed in the academicliterature were derived either in the Cold War era or before the advent of the unprecedentedglobalization and Internet revolution. The changing nature of national culture given the freeflow of information, capital, technology, and human resources, has been fundamentallymissed in the current etic paradigm. It is timely to study the emergent global culture and itsinteractions with the core national culture (Bird & Stevens 2003).Because of these arguments, this paper proposes that an emic approach of assessing culturaldrivers specific to Asian markets be used and then these markets will be clustered on the basisof cultural commonalities. The purpose of this paper is to develop an alternative approach toresearching the impact of culture on relationship creation and network formation in Asianmarkets. We argue that the proposed approach is likely to provide a more comprehensivemeans of assessing culture’s consequence on predicting relationship creation and networkformation in Asian markets.
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Publish Year: 2004
Conference: Copenhagen, Denmark (2004)