Organising Principles - Lecture on Intercultural

Management

 Guest article of transcript of Prof Hayashi's lecture on Organising Principles

Professor K. Hayashi, 1992 (Transcript)

SIETAR-Japan, Aoyama University, Tokyo

The subject matter which I would like to address myself to has to do both with international communication and international management. In fact my background is basically management and international marketing management, but I have been interested in intercultural communication for the past roughly twelve to thirteen years and I have been trying to combine the two areas. I have not been doing any frontier research in the area of international communication, but I have heavily borrowed from what others found, in order to help myself find more about what's going on in the area of what I call the cross-cultural interface. The cross-cultural interface means interactions between people from different cultural backgrounds, which you often see in culturally mixed organisations.

I have been doing research basically covering Japanese subsidiaries located outside of Japan. I have probably covered about 80 of them so far in North America and in Asia basically, though I have covered some other locations. I have interviewed 150 local managers working for Japanese corporations and roughly 200 or more Japanese expatriate managers separately, so that I was able to gather some good information particularly from local people. Also I have visited quite a few non Japanese firms operating in Japan and the comparison between the problems of the latter firms operating in Japan with those that I found in relation to Japanese operations out of the country is rather interesting.