General Management Review

Culture of a nation is soul deep. It runs through the veins of its mortals. Gets inseparably woven into the social, political and economic fabric of the land. Touches the very bone of the system. And can never ever be severed.
Today even as globalization is undeniably blurring the boundaries and distinctions between societal cultures thus allowing Information Technology to spread its tentacles deep into the world, the managing systems of the not-so-advanced countries are often finding it difficult to adapt themselves with the bliss of IT because of the inertia of their deeply-rooted norms and values.
Significantly different issues need to be considered when analyzing the introduction and use of IT in countries with cultures far removed from those in the economically advanced Western World where it was born. To analyze the cultural differences between countries for this purpose, variables such as power distance, degree of individualism, role of information, attitude towards implementation of such systems etc need to be closely studied. Moreover, with increasing global interconnection and mobility together with the widespread application of common information and communication technology across the world, there is a visible increase in cross-cultural working with IT being used to facilitate interaction or being treated as the central focus of the work. As in the case of adoption of IT, cross-cultural working may turn equally problematic with different norms and values of different countries leading to the possibility of disagreement and conflict.
While some of the Western-origin methodologies are inappropriate for radically different cultural environments, in many a case there is also an unwillingness on the part of the Western aid agencies to take due account of different attitudes to fundamental issues such as conceptualization of knowledge, politics, information sharing etc. And, unfortunately, due to such biases towards the Western countries, the academicians have largely ignored the subject until fairly recently. And IT in developing countries was denoted with something like a Cinderella pursuit. To expand this consideration of the appropriation of information and communication technologies in non-Western cultures and the factors that tell upon cross-cultural working, the following key questions ought to be addressed:
* How does culture relate to the use of Information Technology?
* How to facilitate IT adoption in different cultural contexts?
* Where lie the problems in knowledge sharing across cultures?
* Do the West-born IS and methodologies embed features that inhibit cross-cultural thinking?
* How can effective co-working with IT in cross-cultural contexts be helped?
* Will exclusion of the third world lead to neo-colonialism?

Case Study I: MRP system in a Thai company

Quickfood, a large company in Thailand manufacturing bread, cheese and ice-cream decided to buy a material requirements planning (MRP) system, called Plus, to run on an AS4000 minicomputer platform. Headquartered in Bangkok, with the main production site in Rachada and a new production site at Sesami, the company had an overall Managing Director supported by three Vice Presidents. One VP was responsible for Rachada production site and two others were at the head office looking after accounting/computing and purchasing/ administration/human resources.
Simon was the first MD of Quickfood who assigned Sam to the position of VP of Rachada and made his own son Keith the VP responsible for accounting and computing. After Simon’s death, Peter was appointed as MD who brought along with himself his daughter Pam as R&D manager in Rachada. Soon Sam was transferred to China to explore new market opportunities and Pam was made to act as VP at Rachada. However, since the staff was not comfortable with her management approach, they resorted to a major strike. And Sam was brought back from China to dissolve the labour unrest.
In spite of having a very enthusiastic beginning, implementation of MRP system failed to make a noteworthy progress. And though various models were implemented, these did not normally replace the pre-existing manual systems. A study revealed that the implementation of MRP system in Quickfood suffered due to the social conditioning of the Thai society and due to a set of norms and values shared by the employees.
One such norm is Bunkhun which can be defined as the psychological bond between two persons: one who renders the needy help and favours out of kindness and other’s remembering of the goodness done and his ever-readiness to reciprocate the act of kindness. Creating this bond is Sang Bunkhun and this may be used to build up an empire of people who gain protection and benefits from a powerful person, but who in return will not question that person’s authority. With respect to the MRP project, Sam had built up a power base since long in Rachada, which could not be taken over by Pam. Hence the labour unrest and the strike threat. All of this diverted attention from the MRP project itself and Pam then needed some other way of promoting her own position which was largely at the expense of the project.
Another cultural concept that has also made the project suffer is kreng jai, which teaches one to avoid criticism in order to take another’s feeling into account and not to cause any discomfort/inconvenience to others. In a Thai context, a person whose opinions are criticized can perceive himself as insulted. The people involved in the MRP project at Quickfood were concerned about this value at all times. The attitude towards the MRP project of the employees lower down in the hierarchy who are the key-users never did find an expression. It is kreng jai that prevented them from telling the top management about their doubts and apprehensions, their fears about the negative results of MRP implementation. Thus there was never a chance to convince them about the positive aspects of MRP systems. Hence the failure.