Cultural (In)Sensitivity in International Management Textbooks: A Postcolonial Reading

The aim of this paper is to analyze, with a broadly postcolonial sensibility, the discourses on culture found in some of the international management books that: 1) especially claim to emphasize the cultural factor, and 2) claim to be ‘international’, supposedly appropriate for reading in all parts of the globe. We intend to show that very similar discursive patterns characterize the conceptualizations of culture found in these books. We especially emphasize three striking features, present in all five textbooks, which reveal how managers are meant to get to see the world once disciplined by these powerful discourses on culture: - a unanimous call for ‘cultural sensitivity’, which is presented as a skill that should be found in international managers – but has insidious implications - a general tendency to essentialize national cultures, presenting them as static and homogeneous - a way of addressing a managerialistic purpose through a reductionism that subjugates culture to the needs of successful business We contend that the claimed book audiences - ‘international’ or even ‘global’ - are constructed upon the legacy of a colonial thinking in the sense that the knowledge is meant to be propagated through a one-way communication from the Western, mostly Anglo-Saxon, world (through standardized MBA education) to a rest of the world that is considered as economically and culturally peripheral. We conclude that the books contribute to producing both a guilt-free Western subjectivity and a collective cultural responsibility on the part of the people from so-called ‘developing countries’.