While most of the notoriety assigned to Hofstede is related to his groundbreaking work on the dimension of national culture he has also conducted smaller studies that focused on organizational culture.  A brief report on this work is attached and provides an interesting foundation for comparative study of organizational structures and processes adopted in different countries and industries.

The future of comparative management studies must embrace opportunities to analyze and understood new management practices that are developing around the world.  Of particular interest to me are the startling developments in China, India and other countries that had largely been ignored by early comparative management theorists.  A good place to start is the recent special report in The Economist on "Innovation in Emerging Markets".  Among the topics introduced in this report that warrant further study are new business models in emerging markets, innovation systems and the strategies selected by firms in emerging countries seeking to grow quickly in their domestic markets and in foreign markets that have typically been left to Western companies.

As I began to delve further into some of the core issues that have been covered in the past relating to comparative management studies it became clear that the interaction of culture and management would be a topic that I need to explore in greater depth.  The well known work of Hofstede has been praised and sharply criticized and remains a "must read" for anyone interested in this area.  One of his first articles described how he collected and analyzed extensive amounts of data from IBM subsidiaries in 40 countries to empirically determine the main criteria for differentiating among national cultures.  At that time he identified four cultural dimensions--power distance, uncertainty avoidance, individualism and masculinity--and attempted to demonstrate how cultural differences might impact the effectiveness of widely accepted Western management theories relating to motivation, leadership and organization.  In future posts I will provide a more detailed examination of Hofstede's work and studies undertaken by others to test Hofstede's proposition and identify their own cultural dimensions.

Students of comparative management studies should review the recent article in The Economist that argues convincingly that the recent troubles suffered by Toyota illustrates fundamental flaws in notions of corporate governance in Japan.  Would the presence of independent directors on the Toyota board have made any difference?  Is there something that Japanese companies can learn from governance trends and practices in other countries and, if so, how can changes be effectively implemented?  This is just one of the many interesting questions in the area of comparative management studies.

Our first real post on this blog is to announce that we have launched the Working Paper Series at the Center for Comparative Management Studies.  Each Working Paper is, by definition, a "work in progress" and provides the discipline necessary for us to collect our thoughts about what we have been researching and try to put them down on paper in some sort of order.  Working Papers will change over time and the scope of the Series is hard to determine at the very beginning.  The first Working Paper is a basic summary of some of the most common cross-cultural management research techniques.  Our plan is to refresh our website at least once a month and add a new blog posting at least once a month.

Welcome to the Comparative Management Studies blog!  We're not quite ready to launch a steady stream of posts; however, please check back soon to see what we have to say.  The blog will be a regular publication of the Center for Comparative Management Studies.  See the Center's site at www.comparativemanagementstudies.org.