Making Sense of Managing Culture

Making Sense of Managing Culture

DAVID CRAY and GEOFFREY MALLORY. London: International Thomson Business Press,1998.187 pp. ISBN 1-86152-178-2

This is a very good summary of the field of comparative management to date. Chapter 1 provides the reader with an overview of the current salient issues and the associated barriers to doing research in the field. I noted immediately that the authors prefer to think of the field of `comparative management' as `comparative organizational behavior'-fair enough, I thought, and framed my thinking around an OB book about managing culture. The next point that struck me about the first chapter was the discussion of research barriers (theoretical, conceptual and methodological) and just how formidable they are when taken collectively. This only whetted my appetite for how this new cognitive approach was going to overcome these barriers, or at least make some progress towards solving them.

Chapter 2 is a very comprehensive overview of the discipline of comparative management and the three dominant schools of thought-naive comparative, culture-- free and culture-bound. I thought the literature review was thorough, and would be appropriate for readers new to the field. It was here that one of the methodological barriers leapt out at me-problems with the unit of analysis. The naive comparative and culture-bound schools of thought clearly center at the individual/group level, reinforcing the OB flavor that the authors present in the...