1.5.2 Defining ‘cross-cultural management’
Unsurprisingly, there is no one clear or definitive answer to the question of what defines cross-cultural management. The answer depends on which perspectives on ‘management’ and the relation of this process to ‘culture(s)’ we choose to emphasise.
Mead and Andrews define cross-cultural management as the ‘development and application of knowledge about cultures in the practice of international management, when the people involved have different cultural identities’
(Mead and Andrews, 2009: 16).
This can be compared with the definition given by Laurie Jackson in his book International HRM: A Cross-Cultural Approach (2002). He emphasises the importance of ‘examining the contributions of different cultures in interaction’. This emphasis on the complexities of ‘interaction’ or ‘communication’ between ‘cultures’ (i.e. groups of people or stakeholders) is one shared by
Mead and Andrews, and it is developed throughout this course, where we discuss several case studies from the field of human resource management
(HRM) and international human resource management or IHRM (cf. Briscoe and Schuler, 2004; Harris, et al., 2003).
The text Cross-cultural Marketing, edited by Rugimbana and Nwankwo (2003, from which you’ll be reading in Unit 5) highlights the importance of communicating one’s cultural identity in international and cross-cultural management. The book eschews the traditional practice of asking how far marketing ideas that work in one context may be applied elsewhere. It focuses instead on the realities of marketing to different cultures both externally, from outside its borders, and internally – marketing to different cultural communities at home.

Objectives of WTO

Important objectives of WTO are mentioned below:

(i) to implement the new world trade system as visualised in the Agreement;