Suchergebnisse

Shakespeare has been widely recognized as a dramaturgist who through his intriguing pageantry of kings presents an effective text of leadership, communication and management that has inspired hosts of modern day business practitioners. Yet it is interesting to note that the management perspective which Shakespeare seems to espouse has emanated from the cultural ethos of his native country, Great Britain. Britain has been portrayed by prominent interculturists such as Geert Hofstede, Fons Trompenaars, Edward T. Hall as a low power distance, weak uncertainty avoidance, low-context culture with high masculinity and individualism index, demonstrating achievement and inner-directed value orientations. Even Global Leadership and Organizational Behaviour Effectiveness (GLOBE) study in its cultural taxonomy identifies a ramification of Anglo-cluster leadership model with a distinct skill set which includes Great Britain. The character lineaments of Shakespeare's king leaders present congruence with the leadership profiles defined for diverse cultural demarcations by these seminal works on cross-cultural management with remarkable fidelity thereby endorsing the view that culture and leadership are inextricably woven together in a symbiotic engagement. The article applies theories of intercultural management to the leadership, communication and management inferences that can be drawn from the literature of this bard of Avon to reach the conclusion that this master craftsman evinces a strong cultural affiliation to his native country in offering his sagacious exhortations which are designed for an English audience and hence, cannot be transplanted in the Oriental part of the world without indigenizing them in the process of transposition to fit into foreign cultural constructs. Thus, in order to be globally relevant an intercultural reading of Shakespeare has to be practised with systemic mutations in his scripts in order to offer an effective transnational discourse to management practitioners keeping in view the plurality of disparate socio-cultural business contexts.

The objective of the study is to analyze the communicative experiences of Indian managers with other culture interactants from a geopolitical perspective of colonialism. The authors collected data from 21 Indian managers working in diverse industries with experience of working in multinational environments. The study discovered that contrary to the thesis of cultural distance that presupposes ease of communication with culturally proximal countries, Indian managers voice their predilection for working with the culturally distant West. This study contributes to intercultural communication literature by presenting an interpretation of such communication through a geopolitical perspective that recognizes colonialism and asymmetric power relations of global value chains (GVCs) as factors intersecting with intercultural discourses. It is in this aspect that studies focusing on intercultural business communication should go beyond the bounds of conformity to the essentialist cultural paradigm of Hofstede, Hall and Trompenaars to explore the complexities that underlie interpersonal conversations in multinational transactions beyond the stipulations of a semiotic focus. An important implication of this study is that training for intercultural business communication needs to go beyond sensitization to language and semiotics to address the evaluative compulsions that are triggered owing to years of subconscious conditioning by the potent geo-political and historic forces of colonization.