hapter 2 4. What do you think should be the role of MN s toward human rights issues in other countries? What are the major human rights concerns at this time? What ideas do you have for dealing with these problems?
What is the role of corporate codes of conduct in dealing with these concerns?
I think that MN s should seek to strike a better balance between their responsibility to shareholders and to society at large. They underestimate the influence that they have in countries like hina, who want the investment as much as the companies do. I believe that they should push their host country partners for human rights improvements by explaining to them that it is economically beneficial in the long run, to have international public opinion on their side. Some of the major human rights concerns currently involve forced labor in factories (or sweatshops), where workers of all ages are operating in poor conditions for meager wages. Then there is the more visible media censorship that goes on in many countries. Most companies in response to similar problems have created codes of conduct or taken it a step further and banded together to have a unified charter. They’ve had success in at least publicizing issues. Solutions to the above are deceptively complex though. For one, crudely branding factories
“sweatshops” and forcing broad reforms will raise manufacturing costs and put companies out of business. The jobless workers may end up resorting to illegal professions or working in hazardous landfills collecting scrap metals. MN s should instead be mandated to have reviews of their factories done by independent agents to see where improvements are needed. Media censorship is done in order to maintain a level of control over the population. In order to have these controls loosened the offending government would have to be convinced that they don’t have to fear social upheaval. In fact, censorship often has the opposite effect by making a situation more volatile. This is an impossible task for a MN , but if done incrementally by a company with direct dealings with the issue (Google, Yahoo, etc), than some gains can be made. 7. What do you think are the responsibilities of MN s toward the global environment? Give some examples of MN activities that run counter to the concepts of ecological interdependence and sustainability. The management of environmental interdependence includes the need to consider ecological interdependence, as well as economic and social implications of MN activities. Examples of problem areas in environmental interdependence include the export of hazardous wastes from developed countries to less-developed ones and the exporting of pesticides. Chapter 3

1. What is meant by the culture of a society and why is it important for international managers to understand it? Do you notice cultural differences among your classmates? How do those differences affect the class environment? How do they affect your group projects? The culture of a society comprises the shared values, understandings, assumptions, and goals that are passed down through generations and imposed by members of the society. These unique sets of cultural and national differences strongly influence the attitudes and expectations and therefore the on- the- job behavior of individuals and groups. It is important for managers to understand the cultural variables because these determine basic attitudes toward work, time, materialism, individualism, and change. Such attitudes affect an individual's motivation and expectations regarding work and group relations, and ultimately affect the outcomes that can be expected as a result of those work and group relations. Students will have differing perceptions of their international classmates.
3. Discuss the types of operational conflicts that could occur in an international context because of differences in attitudes towards time, change, material factors, and individualism. Give examples relative to specific countries. International managers often face conflicts in the workplace as a result of differences in these four basic values of time, change, materialism, and individualism. If these operational value difference and their likely consequences are anticipated, managers can adjust expectations, communications, work organization, schedules, incentive systems, and so forth to provide for more constructive outcomes for the company and its employees. To Americans time is a valuable and limited resource; it is to be saved, scheduled, and spent with precision, lest we waste it. The clock is always running – time is money. Therefore, deadlines and schedules have to be met. Similar attitudes toward time are found in Western Europe and elsewhere. In many parts of the world, however, people view time from different and longer perspectives often based on religious beliefs, on beliefs in destiny, or on pervasive social attitudes. The word bukra in Arabic can mean “tomorrow” or “sometime in the future.” While Americans usually regard a deadline as a firm commitment, Arabs often regard a deadline imposed on them as an insult.
They feel that important things take a longtime and therefore cannot be rushed. International managers have to be careful not to offend people – or lose contracts or employee cooperation – because they misunderstand the local language of time. Based largely on long-standing religious beliefs, values regarding the acceptance of change and the pace of change can vary immensely among cultures.
Western people generally believe that an individual can exert some control over the future and can manipulate events, particularly in a business context – that is, individuals feel they have some internal control. In many non-Western societies, however, control is considered external; people generally believe in destiny, or the will of their God, and therefore adopt a passive attitude or even feel hostility toward those introducing the “evil” of change. In large part, Americans consume resources at a far greater rate than most of the rest of the world. Their attitude toward nature – that is there to be used for their benefit – differs from the attitudes of Indians and Koreans, for example, whose worship of nature is part of their religious beliefs. Whereas Americans often value physical goods and status symbols, many non-Westerners find these things unimportant; they value the aesthetic and the spiritual realm. Such differences in attitude have implications for management functions, such as motivation and reward systems, because the proverbial carrot must be appropriate to the employee’s value system. In general, Americans tend to work and conduct their private lives independently, valuing individual achievement, accomplishments, promotions, and wealth above any group goals. In many other countries, individualism is not valued. In hina, for example, much more of a “we” consciousness prevails, and the group is the basic building block of social life and work. For the hinese, conformity and cooperation take precedence over individual achievement, and the emphasis is on strength of the family or community – the predominant attitude being, “We all rise or fall together.”