The Origins and Intentions of this Handbook

Abstract

Differences in typical management practices and policy orientations are originated from cross-cultural knowledge management that is a quite difficult phenomenon to interpret, though very significant.

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1.1 One, Two … How Many Cultures in the Knowledge Society?

1.1.1 Synthesizing Dialectical Thinking on Cultures

In the beginning there was the scism between humanist knowledge and scientific knowledge.

This goes back, more or less, to the mid-nineteenth century, the time when science started to be considered a discipline separate from culture, rather than a fundamental and constituent part of it. Today, paradoxically, it is still believed that science is not fully part of “culture” and it does not throb forcefully in our everyday lives, in the “knowledge society.” This paradox goes back to Croce who, in the wake of Hegel, claimed that science did not have a cognitive value, it was not even knowledge; at most, it was a practical activity, useful for ordering our experiences and favoring memory, however, it was then to be revalued by neoidealism and to end up confined to the academic setting, because of its obvious technological spin-offs.

In the current situation, it may even appear reductive to speak about increasing the dialogue between two cultures (humanities and sciences), all the more so since the growing speculation and parceling of knowledge has now multiplied “cultures,” with reciprocal difficulties in dialogue and comprehension, while advancing the opportunities for knowledge which reveals a plurality of applications in knocking down disciplinary barriers.

As previously pointed out, it is necessary to perform a transdisciplinary research through the integration of various disciplinary approaches. The nature of cross-cultural knowledge management needs to be thoroughly investigated and this generally demands that different disciplines are flexibly combined.

Nevertheless, transdisciplinary research does not consist of the simple combination of two or more different approaches, it goes beyond the interdisciplinary perspective and it provides a new vision of human behavior, through the integration of existing approaches, that comprise cognition, group activities, and corporate management.

The integration of the theories regarding firm boundaries, cognition and action, language, knowledge creation, and leadership can help to develop cross-cultural knowledge-based theories of the firm and organization.

Although it is still difficult to imagine an integrated, fully comprehensive theory of cross-cultural knowledge management, it is possible that emerging cross-cultural organizational structures are better understood, thanks to the emerging knowledge-based view of the firm.

1.1.2 Organizations and Nations: Multicultural Focus and Knowledge Management Perspectives

The current situation of complexity or structural uncertainty which dominates a company’s economic life, produced by advances in the power of science and industry, cannot be governed, unless it is through the learning processes set in motion by the institutional couple of market-business which, however, being restricted to the principle of competitive performance, end up as learning to manage relationships in which there is a more and more extensive and intensive division of labor in the production and use of knowledge.

In conditions of rapid change and confronted with the strong differentiations which are characteristics of modern industrial capitalism, cooperation constitutes the fundamental process through which businesses deal with the restriction of cognitive limits, identifying whether their own capacities for solving economic problems are equal or superior to those already available in the market.

The characters of such dynamics between business and their reflections on the logic of cross-cultural management both depend on the eventual outcomes of cultural convergence on the economic behavior of businesses.

Relative to our understanding of collaborative ventures, there is a great need for more cross-cultural investigations of the value of dyadic collaboration in terms of information, technology, and knowledge sharing in cross-border exchange that could help relevant conclusions and offer meaningful insights.

Our cultural map of strategic intent and organizational behavior should provide additional findings into the relativism and convergence debates, but when attempting to make generalizations about nation states, the notion of subcultures and economic class levels within a society cannot be overlooked.

In fact, the necessity of overcoming the false contrasts (personal culture vs. business culture; individualist culture vs. collective culture; local culture vs. national culture; etc.), which constitutionally define others’ ideas, values, and mentalities as less attractive, takes us straight to those forms of knowledge which are hostile to diversity, to knowledge management, internal to a business and between businesses, which does not diminish sharing at overcoming

This is the real cultural development of our times.

1.2 Overview of Book

Differences in typical management practices and policy orientations are originated from cross-cultural knowledge management that is a quite difficult phenomenon to interpret, though very significant.

1.2.1 Part I: Managerial Dilemmas in Multicultural Organization

When research is performed in different contexts, blind spots shaped by culture may arise. This handbook aims at overcoming them, showing how the structuring of roles, power, and interests among different organizational factors, such as departments, teams, or hierarchical levels, where people from distinct intellectual and professional backgrounds are positioned, produces many paradoxes and frictions that attract a series of dynamics which have peculiar effects on learning processes.

The questions that arise from this premise can be summarized as follows: how does knowledge sharing occur in multicultural organizations? What problems and questions arise? On which basis can we affirm that an individual has a different mentality compared to another and how can we be certain that such mentality rebounds on the way individuals respond to new ideas and new knowledge? How can knowledge-sharing processes be refined? What are the terms under which individuals or groups of people coming from different cultural traditions generate ideas that have the possibility of being taken into account and put into practice?

These issues require a thorough examination of possible managerial dilemmas. A dilemma arises when there are two or more options which have the same validity: the most common consequence is friction when a decision has to be made.

How can research be of assistance in detecting and overcoming these issues?

Research considers how significant it is to comprehend the setting and assign the correct value to perceptions related to knowledge sharing. Coming in contact with the knowledge of a person from a different culture can be both stimulating and difficult to manage. Most of the time we just do not have the knowledge of the unknown and we follow what we “hear”: nevertheless, this “voice” may not be representative of the truth and may be just an alteration of the knowledge that the other person was willing to share with us. When interacting with people from different cultures we can easily overlook the hidden shades and the real sense of their behavior.

Given common knowledge of the business, the knowledge sharing processes may not be necessarily obstructed by culture. Instead, knowledge sharing tends to be mainly affected by perceptions of roles and psychic distance. Moreover, the concept of knowledge transfer may be subject to criticism, if regarded as excessively objectifying knowledge: it fuels expectations that put a strain on cross-border relationships.

Cultures can be visualized at various levels that vary from a mere exterior appearance to very significant values. Generally, individuals are not willing to alter their basic values, unless they experience a personal or societal trauma. Nonetheless, it can be proved that individuals may acquire sensitiveness to their own culture and to the way it distinguishes itself from the others, and that, in specific contexts, such as the place of work, they are ready to adjust their usual behavior, if they recognize it is worth doing so.

1.2.2 Part II: Knowledge and Cooperative Strategies: Managing Cultural Diversity Between Organizations

This handbook analyzes how the implementation of cooperative strategies can be affected by culture: it shows, on the one hand, how the knowledge embodied in cultures can be a very important asset for an alliance and, on the other hand, how it can equally build barriers to cooperation between organizations. We attempt to give an answer to the following questions: what is culture? Why is it so important for cooperative strategy? What are the peculiar consequences a culture may have? What are the policy options to manage cultural diversity within an alliance and how can cultural fit be reached?

Cooperation between organizations has to face cultural diversity, as every actor brings its own culture into the alliance.

Cultural diversity is also spreading thanks to the diffusion of cooperation between firms that operate in relatively new industries, such as those based on highly specialized technologies, in which connections are created between small companies that focus on research and other large ones that can easily gain access to mass market. Differences in social cultures are mainly related to nationality, while corporate cultural variation is due to differences in size and basic competencies of the single firms.

This phenomenon is becoming more frequent, since the number of international partnerships is increasing, as a result of globalization.

In all kinds of cooperative alliances, there is an underlying cultural friction between the two partners, which affects the creation and conservation of the relationship. Previous works on cultural features of management have taken into account the national cultural differences which originate from numerous elements such as language, habits, tradition, and business ethics; nevertheless, there are also other factors from which cross-cultural tensions can arise.

Recent investigations regarding cooperative alliances have proved that it is more important to be able to share tacit knowledge in a common corporate culture than sharing a common national culture. For this reason, it is fundamental to comprehend the various degrees of cultural tension, so knowledge can be effectively transferred between organizations and possible halts or delays can be prevented.

To achieve this goal, mechanisms of conflict solution, mediation of cultural contrasts, and enforcing agreements have to be implemented.

1.2.3 Part III: Cross-Cultural Knowledge Management and Open Innovation Diplomacy

Innovation (and in particular Open Innovation) as well as Diplomacy, Research, Education, and Entrepreneurship are in essence cross-cultural phenomena, processes, and activities with knowledge at their core, hence the concepts outlined and discussed in this chapter are essential elements of a cross-cultural knowledge management theory and practice framework which is the theme of the manuscript part of which is this chapter.

Developed and developing economies alike face increased resource scarcity and competitive rivalry. Science and technology increasingly appear as a main source of competitive and sustainable advantage for nations and regions alike. However, the key determinant of their efficacy is the quality and quantity of entrepreneurship-enabled innovation that unlocks and captures the pecuniary benefits of the science enterprise in the form of private, public, or hybrid goods. In this context, linking university basic and applied research with the market, via technology transfer and commercialization mechanisms including government–university–industry partnerships and risk capital investments, constitutes the essential trigger mechanism and driving device for sustainable competitive advantage and prosperity. In short, university researchers properly informed, empowered, and supported are bound to emerge as the architects of a prosperity that is founded on a solid foundation of scientific and technological knowledge, experience, and expertise and not in fleeting and conjectural “ financial engineering” schemes. Building on these constituent elements of technology transfer and commercialization, Open Innovation Diplomacy ¹ encompasses the concept and practice of bridging distance and other divides (cultural, socioeconomic, technological, etc.) with focused and properly targeted initiatives to connect ideas and solutions with markets and investors ready to appreciate them and nurture them to their full potential.

The emerging gloCalizing, globalizing, and localizing frontier of converging systems, networks and sectors of innovation that is driven by increasingly complex, nonlinear, and dynamic processes of knowledge creation, diffusion and use, confronts us with the need to reconceptualize—if not re-invent—the ways and means that knowledge production, utilization, and renewal takes place in the context of the knowledge economy and society (gloCal knowledge economy and society). Perspectives from and about different parts of the world and diverse human, socioeconomic, technological, and cultural contexts are interwoven to produce an emerging new worldview on how specialized knowledge, which is embedded in a particular sociotechnical context, can serve as the unit of reference for stocks and flows of a hybrid, public/private, tacit/codified, tangible/virtual good that represents the building block of the knowledge economy, society, and polity.

We postulate that one approach to such a reconceptualization is what we call the “Mode 3” Knowledge Production System (expanding and extending the “Mode 1” and “Mode 2” knowledge production systems) which is at the heart of the Fractal Research, Education and Innovation Ecosystem (FREIE) ² consisting of “Innovation Networks” and “Knowledge Clusters” (see definitions below) for knowledge creation, diffusion, and use. This is a multilayered, multimodal, multinodal, and multilateral system, encompassing mutually complementary and reinforcing innovation networks and knowledge clusters consisting of human and intellectual capital, shaped by social capital and underpinned by financial capital. The “Mode 3” Knowledge Production System is in short the nexus or hub of the emerging twenty-first century FREIE³, where people, culture, ⁴ and technology ^{5 6} (—forming the essential “Mode 3” Knowledge Production System building block or “knowledge nugget”) meet and interact to catalyze creativity, trigger invention and accelerate innovation across scientific and technological disciplines, public and private sectors (government, university, industry and nongovernmental knowledge production, utilization and renewal entities as well as other civil society entities, institutions, and stakeholders) and in a top-down, policy-driven as well as bottom-up, entrepreneurship-empowered fashion. One of the basic ideas of the article is coexistence, coevolution, and cospecialization of different knowledge paradigms and different knowledge modes of knowledge production and knowledge use as well as their cospecialization as a result. We can postulate a dominance of knowledge heterogeneity at the systems (national, transnational) level. Only at the subsystem (subnational) level we should expect homogeneity. This understanding we can paraphrase with the term “Mode 3” Knowledge Production System.

The unit of analysis for theories and practices based on cross-cultural knowledge should be enlarged. In detail, it should extend from individual to group, firm to industry, and region to nation. Actually, not every area is well investigated. An even more difficult task is to link, without contradictions, research with distinct units of analysis. Although every single unit should lead to significant perceptions, they must all be included in order to acquire the complete vision of the new cross-cultural knowledge management framework.

This handbook underlines the necessity of analyzing value reconciliations in cross-fertilization of ideas and theories, by detecting a fundamental range of theoretical and practical dimensions in which knowledge management is not limited to a single organization or a single country. In a paradoxical way, it can be stated that ambivalence is required in an ambiguous world and, in an organizational setting, “ambivalence” is nothing but the encounter and creative comparison of various minds, overcoming the natural barriers that separate groups, cities, regions, countries, and languages.

Appendix The Nature of Culture…

von Herder Johann Gottfreid (1776), Yet Another Philosophy of History, in Berlin, Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas, p 188 [1976: London: Hogarth Press]

How much depth there is in the character of a single people, which, no matter how often observed (and gazed at with curiosity and wonder), nevertheless escapes the word which attempts to capture it, and, even with the word to catch it, is seldom so recognizable as to be universally understood and felt. […] Words, pale shadow-play! An entire living picture of ways of life, of habits, wants, characteristics of land and sky, must be added, or provided in advance; one must start by feeling sympathy with a nation if one is to feel a single one of its inclinations or acts, or all of them together.

Coleridge ST (1830), On the Constitution of Church and State, pp. 42–43 [1976: Princeton]

Civilization should be grounded in cultivation, “in the harmonious development of those qualities and faculties that characterize our humanity. We must be men in order to be citizens.”

Raymond Williams (1921–1988, Cultural Studies): “Moving from High Culture to Ordinary Culture” Originally published in N. McKenzie (ed.), Convictions , 1958

Culture is ordinary: that is the first fact. Every human society has its own shape, its own purposes, its own meanings. Every human society expresses these, in institutions, and in arts and learning. … The growing society is there, yet it is also made and remade in every individual mind. The making of a mind is, first, the slow learning of shapes, purposes, and meanings, so that work, observation and communication are possible. Then, second, but equal in importance, is the testing of these in experience, the making of new observations, comparisons, and meanings. A culture has two aspects: the known meanings and directions, which its members are trained to; the new observations and meanings, which are offered and tested. These are the ordinary processes of human societies and human minds, and we see through them the nature of a culture: that it is always both traditional and creative; that it is both the most ordinary common meanings and the finest individual meanings. We use the word culture in these two senses: to mean a whole way of life--the common meanings; to mean the arts and learning--the special processes of discovery and creative effort. Some writers reserve the word for one or other of these senses; I insist on both, and on the significance of their conjunction. The questions I ask about our culture are questions about deep personal meanings. Culture is ordinary, in every society and in every mind.

During S. (ed.) (1993), The Cultural Studies Reader, London: Routledge

As the old working class communal life fragmented, the cultural studies which followed Hoggart’s “The Uses of Literacy” developed in two main ways. The old notion of culture as a whole way of life became increasingly difficult to sustain: attention moved from locally produced and often long-standing cultural forms… to culture as organised from afar – both by the state through its educational system and by what Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer called ‘the culture industry’, that is, highly developed music, film and broadcasting businesses. Much more importantly, however, the logic by which culture was set apart from politics… was overturned (Pg. 4 - Introduction).

Since Tylor’s founding definition of 1871, the term has designated a rather vague ‘complex whole’ including everything that is learned group behaviour, from body techniques to symbolic orders. There have been recurring attempts to define culture more precisely… or… to distinguish it from ‘social structure’. But the inclusive use persists. For there are times when we still need to be able to speak holistically of Japanese or Trobriand or Moroccan culture in the confidence that we are designating something real and differentially coherent. It is increasingly clear, however, that the concrete activity of representing a culture, subculture, or indeed any coherent domain of collective activity is always strategic and selective. The world’s societies are too systematically interconnected to permit any easy isolation of separate or independently functioning systems. The increased pace of historical change, the common recurrence of stress in the systems under study, forces a new self-consciousness about the way cultural wholes and boundaries are constructed and translated (Pg. 61 - Clifford, J., “On Collecting Art and Culture”).

Culture is a notoriously ambiguous concept as the above definition demonstrates. Refracted through centuries of usage, the word has acquired a number of quite different, often contradictory, meanings. Even as a scientific term, it refers to both a process…, and a product. More specifically, since the end of the eighteenth century, it has been used by English intellectuals and literary figures to focus critical attention on a whole range of controversial issues. The ‘quality of life’, the effects in human terms of mechanization, the division of labour and the creation of mass society have all been discussed within the larger confines of what Raymond Williams has called the “Culture and Society” debate. It was through this tradition of dissent and criticism that the dream of the “organic society” – of society as an integrated, meaningful whole – was largely kept alive. The dream had two basic trajectories. One led back to the past and to the feudal ideal of hierarchically ordered community. Here, culture assumed an almost sacred function. Its ‘harmonious perfection’ was posited against the Wasteland of contemporary life. The other trajectory, less heavily supported, led towards the future, to a socialist Utopia where the distinction between labour and leisure was to be annulled (Pg. 358 – Hebdige, D., “From Culture to Hegemony”).

Hall S. (Ed.) (1997), Representation: Cultural Representation and Signifying Practices. Milton Keynes: The Open University

‘Culture’ is one of the most difficult concepts in the human and social sciences and there are many different ways of defining it. In more traditional definitions of the term, culture is said to embody the ‘best that has been thought and said’ in a society. It is the sum of the great ideas, as represented in the classic works of literature, painting, music and philosophy – the ‘high culture’ of an era. Belonging to the same frame of reference, but more ‘modern’ in its associations, is the use of ‘culture’ to refer to the widely distributed forms of popular music, publishing, art, design and literature, or the activities of leisure time and entertainment which make up the everyday lives of the majority of ‘ordinary people’ – what is called the ‘mass culture’ or the ‘popular culture’ of an age. High culture versus popular culture was, for many years, the classic way of framing the debate about culture – the terms carrying a powerfully evaluative charge… In recent years, and in a more ‘social science’ context, the word ‘culture’ is used to refer to whatever is distinctive about the ‘way of life’ of a people, community, nation or social group. This has come to be known as the anthropological definition. Alternatively, the world can be used to describe the ‘shared values’ of a group or of a society – which is like the anthropological definition, only with a more sociological emphasis.

…the ‘cultural turn’ in the social and human sciences… has tended to emphasize the importance of meaning to the definition of culture. Culture… is not so much a set of things… as a process, a set of practices. Primarily, culture is concerned with the production and exchange of meanings – the ‘giving and taking of meaning’ – between the members of a society or group. To say that two people belong to the same culture is to say that they interpret the world in roughly the same ways and can express their ideas, their thoughts and feelings about the world, in ways which will be understood by each other. Thus culture depends on its participants interpreting meaningfully what is happening around them, and ‘making sense’ of the world, in a broadly similar way.

Sardar Z. and van Loon, B. (eds.) (1997), Cultural Studies for Beginners, Cambridge: Icon Books

One of the older definitions of culture was given by the British anthropologist, Sir E. B. Tylor, in the opening lines of his book Primitive Cultures (1871): “Culture is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, customs and other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society”.

Foundations: Pragmatic

Franz Boas (1911), The mind of primitive man, New York, p 149

Culture may be defined as the totality of the mental and physical reactions and activities that characterize the behavior of individuals composing a social group collectively and individually in relations to their natural environment, to other groups, to members of the group itself and of each individual to himself. It also includes the products of these activities and their role in the life of the groups. The mere enumerations of these various aspects of life, however, does not constitute culture. It is more, for its elements are not independent, they have a structure.

Foundations: Weberian

Weber Max (1905), The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, p 181 [T. Parsons, trans. 1958: Charles Scribner’s Sons]

“The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. In Baxter’s view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the ‘saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment.’ But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage.”

n.b. recent translations revise this significantly to read something like “steel carapace.” In contrast to iron, steel is of course a man-made product, indeed the preeminent emblem of the industrial revolution and, at the time Weber was writing, probably symbolically analogous to the internet today. A cyborg-like carapace or shell is at once less incarcerating than a cage, and yet emphasizes the historical mutability of human nature. Nevertheless, the “iron cage,” in Talcott Parsons’ rendering, is the formulation which has worked the most influence in the English-speaking world.

Foundations: Structuralist

Claude Lévi-Strauss (1949), The elementary structure of kinship, Tr. by J. Bell and J. von Sturmer. Boston: Beacon Press1969 [1949]

Man is a biological being as well as a social individual. Among the responses which he gives to external stimuli, some are the full product of his nature, and others of his condition… But it is not always easy to distinguish between the two… Culture is neither simply juxtaposed to nor simply superposed over life. In a way, culture substitutes itself to life, in another way culture uses and transforms life to realise a synthesis of a higher order.

At various anthropological fringes:

Tylor Edward Burnett (1871), Primitive Culture, John Murray, London, vol. I, p. 1

Culture or civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.

John Dewey (1916), Democracy and Education, An introduction to the philosophy of education (1966 edn.), New York: Free Press p 123

Social efficiency as an educational purpose should mean cultivation of power to join freely and fully in shared and common activities. This is impossible without culture, while it brings a reward in culture, because one cannot share in intercourse with others without learning--without getting a broader point of view and perceiving things of which one would otherwise be ignorant. And there is perhaps no better definition of culture than that it is the capacity for constantly expanding the range and accuracy of one’s perception of meanings.

Radcliff-Brown Alfred (1940), On Social Structure in Structure and Function in Primitive Society, p. 190 [1952: London: Cohen and West]

We do not observe a ‘culture,’ since that word denotes, not any concrete reality, but an abstraction, and as it is commonly used a vague abstraction.

Schneider David (1976), Notes toward a Theory of Culture, in Meaning in Anthropology, Edited by Keith H. Basso and Henry A. Selby, 197–220. Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press

Culture contrasts with norms in that norms are oriented toward patterns for action, whereas culture constitutes a body of definitions, premises, statements, postulates, presumptions, propositions, and perceptions about the nature of the universe and man’s place in it. Where norms tell the actor how to play the scene, culture tells the actor how the scene is set and what it all means.

Developments: Symbolic

Clifford Geertz (1966), Religion as a cultural system in his The interpretation of cultures . New York: Basic Books.1973 [1966]

[the culture concept] denotes an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life… (p.89)

[…]The point is sometimes put in the form of an argument that cultural patterns are “models,” that they are sets of symbols whose relations to one another “model” relations among entities, processes … The term “model” has, however, two senses – and “of” sense and a “for” sense… Unlike genes, and other nonsymbolic information sources, which are only models for, not models of, culture patterns have an intrinsic double aspect: they give meaning, that is, objective conceptual form, to social and psychological reality both by shaping themselves to it and by shaping it to themselves (p. 93).

Contrast with a later statement expressing the fundamental problem with “meaning” theories of culture:

What do we claim when we claim that we understand the semiotic means by which, in this case, persons are defined to one another? That we know words or that we know minds? (1976: 225)