International Management Behavior [antikvár]

Preface Nancy J. Adler^ Japanese and American management is 95 percent the same and differs in all important respects. - T. Fujisawa, Cofounder of Honda Motor Corporation JN^anaging the global enterprise and modern business management are becoming synonymous. "International" can no longer be relegated to a subject of organizations or to a division within the organization. Definitions of success now transcend national boundaries. In fact, the very concept of domestic business may have become anachronistic. As the authors aptiy describe, "The modern business enterprise has no place to hide. It has no place to go but everywhere." To succeed, corporations must use global strategies. The last decade made the importance of such recognition commonplace, at least among leading firms and managment scholars. New approaches to managing research and development (R&D), production, marketing, and finance incorporating today's global realities have evolved rapidly. Yet, only now is an equivalent evolution in managing global human resource systems beginning to emerge. Although the other fiinctional areas increasingly use strategies that were largely unheard of or that would have been inappropriate only one and two decades ago, many firms still conduct the worldwide management of people as if neither the external economic and technological environment, nor the internal strucmre and organization of the firm, had changed. In focusing on global strategies and management approaches from the perspectives of people and culture, this book is an important step in helping us, as managers and scholars, to create effective worldwide human resource systems. International Management Behavior, Third Edition, allows us to examine the influence of national culture on organizational fijnctioning. Rather than becoming trapped within the more commonly asked, and unfortunately misleading, question of «/organizational dynamics are universal or culturally specific, the authors ask us to focus on the crucially important question of when and how to be sensitive to national culmre. They allow us to investigate the implications of global approaches for traditional human resource management decisions, as well as for those decisions that will only make sense from the perspective of firms in the 1990s and the twenty-first century. 'Nancy J. Adler is a management professor at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. She conducts research and consults on global management issues worldwide. She has published numerous articles and books, including International Dimensions of Organizational Behavior, 3rd edition (Southwestern, 1997), and Competitive Frontiers: Women Managers in a Global Economy (Blackwell, 1994).