About the book

Navigating Global Business:
A Cultural Compass
Simcha (Simi) Ronen & Oded Shenkar
Cambridge University Press; Expected release: June 30, 2017

The book Navigating Global Business: A Cultural Compass is the first book to offer a comprehensive and rigorous mapping of cultural regions around the world and delineate their managerial consequences at both the macro and micro levels. The book expresses cultural differences between countries in a map of clusters, showing both the roots and correlates of cluster formation and the managerial and business repercussions of operating within, across, and in specific combinations of clusters. The resulting product is a global atlas that provides navigation guidance to a wide spectrum of readers, ranging from the layperson and student to the scholar and globally seasoned executive.

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Book Synopsis

The book Navigating Global Business: A Cultural Compass is the first book to offer a comprehensive and rigorous mapping of cultural regions around the world and delineate their managerial consequences at both the macro and micro levels. The book expresses cultural differences between countries in a map of clusters, showing both the roots and correlates of cluster formation and the managerial and business repercussions of operating within, across, and in specific combinations of clusters. The resulting product is a global atlas that provides navigation guidance to a wide spectrum of readers, ranging from the layperson and student to the scholar and globally seasoned executive.
The book opens by describing the roots and logic of cultural grouping and its role as a vital navigation tool in a global environment. Pressures towards a “flat world” notwithstanding, the world remains divided by numerous fault lines, not the least of which is culture. Scholars as well as experienced executives know that global business activity takes place somewhere between the two poles of homogeneity and heterogeneity, which is where “cultural grouping”, or clusters, come in. The origin of cultural grouping lies in the century old concept of "families of nations" that was used in political science, sociology, and law and which at the time stirred a raging debate among prominent social circles of the time. The concept implies that civilizations and countries are grouped together on the basis of some similarity, underpinned by antecedents such as language, religion, history, customs, and institutions, as well as by subjective self-identification. In business, cultural grouping is vital since culture and cultural differences have been consistently found to correlate with various management phenomena such as the process and outcome of cross-border alliances, mergers, and negotiations, to name but a few.
Having discussed globalization process, the effects and need of grouping, and the rationale for clustering country cultures, we now turn to our own clustering process. Chapter two of the book describes in detail the clustering methodology we employed and the dataset to which we applied it. Selecting the dataset was no small task, and the specific characteristics and methodology used by each of the studies we used as an input is described in detail as it bears on the final outcome of our own clustering endeavor.
The synthesized three-layered cultural map we have generated is at the heart of the proposed book. It is (a) a summary expression of global cultural variation, (b) an independent aggregate explained by a variety of predictor variables, and (c) a visual guide displaying variations in organizational behavior and strategy.
As with a geographic atlas, we offer not only a legend but also a guideline on how to read and interpret the displayed maps. We present the world in three levels of country clustering, producing 11 Global clusters, 15 Consensus clusters and 38 Local clusters while also pointing out singletons and additional cluster information. These levels represent vertical (inter-cluster) cultural evolution and cohesiveness within each cluster.  At the same time, the map also shows cluster adjacency, representing horizontal (intra-cluster) relationships and cultural proximity. These three rigorously drawn elements – nesting (multi-level), cohesiveness, and adjacency – are a first in the literature. Yet the enhanced rigor does not come at the expense of readability and ease of use; on the contrary, our map and its various spinoffs (shown in subsequent sections) offer an easy to read, visual display of information accessible to the practitioner as much as to the scholar.
To understand societies, values, beliefs, attitudes, and behavioral propensities - mainly in the work environment as analyzed - one may be directed to the major antecedes of a culture both in terms of past history, geography, and present economic conditions. The clustering solution provided in the previous chapter was based on cultural data gathered in the organizational milieu. It shows how countries worldwide cluster in that milieu alone. International businesses, however, do not operate in a void, and for proper understanding of our results, as well as for any kind of application, it is important to see the cultural antecedents that have potentially affected them. Here, we take a longitudinal look at each of the proposed eco-cultural antecedents and correlates, also comparing cluster ratings on each separately. The meaning and importance of each of these correlates is explained, providing a unique and inclusive outlook on cultural antecedents in relation to cultural country clusters. Investigating these correlates will yield deeper insights into the underlying formation of cultures. This exploration also serves a secondary goal: that of future prediction for countries that did not participate in our analysis or have not been investigated specifically in the organizational milieu. Under the hypothesis that similar scores on eco-cultural correlates reflect similar clustering propensity, to the extent that the eco-cultural correlate discussed in this book indeed correspond with our three-layered clustering map, it would be possible to postulate the prospect assignment of countries beyond the scope of our map.
The impact and causal effect of eco-cultural correlates have been explored in the past, but these ventures are typically limited in the number of correlates or the scope of countries. Overlapping numerous correlates with our clustering map offers a regional perspective on these data while showing which are more closely tied to organizational culture and which have a lessened impact on the regional clusters. Results are explored in both inter- and intra-cluster contexts further adding to cultural preferences that characterize each cluster, as will be discussed subsequently. Eco-cultural correlates explored in this part include geographic traits, religion, language, GDP-PPP, economic freedom, democracy index, and human development index.
To apply content to theory, one must be acquainted with behavior propensities, beliefs, and attitudes of employees and managers. While recognized as a crucial variable in organizational life (Cavusgil et al., 2004; Gould & Grein, 2009; Leung et al, 2005), culture remains an elusive construct, the complex, evolved product of multiple and diverse elements, ranging from geographic landscape (Van de Vliert, 2008) to historical, religious, economic (Peterson & Smith, 2008) and ideological (Ralston et al., 2008) variables. A country clustering captures the minimization of within-group variance and maximization of between-group variance (Bailey, 1994; Estes, 1994). This is especially appropriate in our context, given that cross-national variance in individual values is greater than within-nation variance (Hanges & Dickson, 2006).
Comparative studies of culture seek underlying attitudinal and behavioral dimensions with which to capture cultural variation (Smith et al., 1996). The most recognized of those is Hofstede’s (1980), whose dimensions have been consistently studied and often validated (Kirkman et al., 2006). The dimensions have been used to measure cultural differences and their impact on organization behavior constructs such as locus of control (Smith, Trompenaars, & Dugan, 1995) and work-related guidance sources (Smith et al., 2002). Subsequently, alternative sets of attitudinal and behavioral dimensions have been offered (e.g., House et al., 2004; Schwartz, 1992; 1994; Bond, 1988; Bond et al., 2004). We follow Javidan et al. (2006) in viewing this abundance as an opportunity as much as an obstacle. Our analysis rests upon some sixty variables and dimensions, all rooted in organization behavior and can therefore be considered to come from the same “world of content” (Guttman, 1968) in addition to being partially overlapping. They are interrelated by the dynamism of managerial and organizational processes. It is this abundance of variables and dimensions that we investigate in this section. Here, we take a longitudinal look at each of the participating dimensions, also comparing cluster ratings on each separately.