The Internationalisation of PTT Telecom: A Cultural Perspective - Free

cultural strategies. Most literature lacks detailed information on cross-culturalmanagement as a result of expensive and time-consuming fieldwork and due tothe lack of access to execute fieldwork within the companies. Till now, little orno attention has been given to the cultural complexity of cross-culturalmanagement. Hannerz’ (1992) concept of cultural complexity focuses on thecomplex relation of three dimensions of contemporary culture; (1) ideas andmodes of thought, (2) forms of externalisation and (3) social distribution.Researchers of cross-cultural management give the most attention to the firstdimension, the shared values of people in a social unit (Hoecklin 1995, Lewis1996). This is surprising, because while globalisation processes may haveresulted in technical and economic integration, they have certainly not led tocultural integration or, to what might be called a global culture. The studies ofFeatherstone (1990), Hannerz (1992) and Friedman (1994) seem to show thatcontemporary culture has become more complex yet almost no detailed studieshave been conducted on the cultural complexity in cross-cultural managementthat provide a clear understanding of the ideas and modes of thoughts incorporations, the ways in which meanings are made public and the ways inwhich these cultural meanings are distributed. Research on cross-culturalcooperation in organisations therefore lacks a historical, processual andcontextual approach that is focused on actors (Bate 1997).A holistic anthropological approach is applied in this study to support theconnection of the restructuring of the telecom market, the history of the PTOand the change of organisational culture of the PTO with the daily life of PTOemployees. I support Mansell (1994: 40) who stressed the need to combine theanalysis of the social, cultural, political and economic constraints that shapeinstitutions in order to understand the process of globalisation of the PTOs.Behaviour of employees in organisations cannot be understood without ourknowing the context in which they are situated and cross-cultural managementcannot be studied separately from organisational cultures. The individualemployee plays an important role in the reproduction and renewal oforganisational culture. Tennekes (1995) points at the dynamic character ofculture, which cannot be separated from social action and therefore, is subjectedto permanent change. Galjart (1993: 8) also argues that reproduction and changeof culture have to be at the interaction level. The question is not whether a newelement will be accepted but whether people can convince each other aboutwhat is right and what is wrong. In this way, employees try to establish theirposition within the organisation. Changes in the organisational culture dependon the power and position of the employees introducing them. The success ofinternationalisation therefore is strongly related to the change in organisationalculture of the PTOs.To obtain detailed information on cross-cultural cooperation the daily life inan organisation is studied. Even if detailed information has been presented oncultural complexity as was done by Deresky (1994) and Schneider and Barsoux(1997), it is still limited to a mosaic of small cases from a diversity ofcompanies, industries and countries. Latour (1988, 1994 and 1997) studied thedaily world of scientists in laboratories, offices and construction places. He3