Title: Un-Packing Packaged Cultures: Chinese-ness in International Business

Author: Can-Seng Ooi

Publisher + year: Published online: 10 July 2007 # Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2007

Kew words: Chinese business practices . Chinese management . Critical management studies . Foucault

Short summary (approx five sentences):

This paper focuses on how the Chinese are represented in the international business literature. Chinese cultures are packaged to make knowledge about the Middle Kingdom more accessible to a general audience.
This paper concludes that researchers should reflect on the power they yield when they represent another culture, and that the general public may privilege theories that are accessible rather than sound.
The author tries in this paper to un-package packaged cultures, meaning that culture is hard to package, because culture is dynamic and heterogeneous.

Main points:

This paper is inspired via Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge – Therefore when we look at Chinese literature it is important to ask yourself: What is presented? Who is presenting? And for what purpose? All researchers face the same difficulties in framing a culture into a coherent and yet complex entity. A society is diverse, culture changes and it is at times difficult to differentiate between imagined culture and actual reality.

Packaging culture is a difficult task because society is heterogeneous and dynamic. Talking about culture has also become a political enterprise; cultural elements are accentuated and marginalized as politicians, researchers, residents and non-residents interpret and represent a culture. Such imaginations may then be reinforced and perpetuated through social engineering and selective perception.

In this paper the author focus on three different views on culture:

First is the General- macroscopic