The cross-cultural management literature is still dominated by the quantitative approach to cultures which made the research field popular in the early 1980’s. While the hegemony of this approach was being consolidated, a French research group, Gestion & Société, led by Philippe d’Iribarne, was conducting alternative research. Over the past thirty years, the team has carried out investigations in over fifty countries, collecting data from a large sample of companies concerned with making the most of the cultures with which they were dealing. This book provides an overview of the lessons learnt from thirty years of empirical research and of the refinements of a new theoretical approach to national cultures which challenges the mainstream ones. It introduces an interpretative approach to culture considered as a filter through which people understand reality and give it meaning. Throughout the world, employees confer different meanings on the daily situations arising from companies’ operations such as being subject to the authority of a manager, responding to requests from a client, or having one’s work monitored. All interactions within organizational contexts are underpinned by social relations which make sense in different cultural universes of meaning. Drawing upon this interpretative perspective, the book covers the main management issues: leadership, procedures implementation and control, decision-making, industrial relations, customer relations, ethics and corporate social responsibility, interpersonal and corporate communication, multicultural teams, and international transfers of management practices. Finally, the book provides methodological guidelines to enable researchers and practitioners to engage in this alternative approach.

We are experiencing a rather curious situation today. Globalization is in full swing. International cooperation actions are more and more frequent. An increasing number of agents, who were socialized in different worlds, experience first-hand the difficulties that need to be overcome in such situations. Yet management practices are being homogenized all over the world. The elites in emerging countries are falling over themselves to follow the expensive training given by Western universities. Attempts to achieve a global standardization of management practices have probably never been stretched so far in multinational companies. However, the dissemination of the best practices of a management claiming to be universal is confronted with the irreducible resistance of the diversity of cultures. This resistance remains poorly understood. The most common representation of cultural differences taught in universities and in training seminars for companies disregards the analysis of concrete realities, thus failing to shed light on what is actually taking place in these encounters. Understanding this constitutes a major intellectual and practical challenge for researchers who focus on both ...

Multinationals' corporate codes of conduct are meant to guide employees throughout organizations. Research draws attention to their problematic cross-cultural transferability but hardly ever considers whether a monolingual version or a translation into employees' mother tongue is used, making language a non-issue. A position disproved by empirical work on the diverse understandings of values formulated in English as a lingua franca or on translation negative impact when employees do not recognize themselves in the personnel depicted. Drawing upon the translation (from English into French) of a specific code of conduct that embeds it in the local culture, I contend that translation is the key to corporate code cross-cultural transferability. Articulating a cross-cultural discourse analysis (using semantic, syntactic and enunciative categories) of the source and target texts with a culture interpretive approach (d'Iribarne, 1989, La Logique de l'Honneur. Paris: Seuil.), I 'deconstruct' the translation process and show how the combination of apparently insignificant linguistic modifications-that is, collective staff designations replacing individual ones or vice versa; moral qualities turned into social or professional merits; and so on-make the target-text steer away from the initial cultural context and set action in a new cultural setting likely to entail a similar effect on the staff. The cultural underpinnings of the translated code find confirmation in local organizations' corporate codes of conduct as well as in literature on the targeted country. The findings also highlight the fact that the transposition of the corporate code core notions brings about different manners of putting them into practice. Applying such an interdisciplinary approach to explore either locally produced or translated corporate codes of conduct could highlight the beliefs and business norms acceptable here and there and help practitioners to successfully perform the advocated cross-cultural transfer of corporate codes of conduct. Keywords Corporate values, cross-cultural discourse analysis, cross-cultural transferability of corporate codes of conduct, culture interpretive approach, English as a lingua franca, French, translation

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Référence électronique Sophie Moirand et Geneviève Tréguer-Felten, « Des mots de la langue aux discours spécialisés, des acteurs sociaux à la part culturelle du langage : raisons et conséquences de ces déplacements », ASp