International Business and Cultural Diversity Case Study - Essay Example

This paper seeks to establish whether there is any direct relation between cultural change and socio-economic-political changes in an organization or company, the variables present that are to be encountered and how these variables, if present, can be able to effectively mediate or moderate the effects of culture in today’s business environment. 2.0 Cultural Changes In the modern, contemporary society, one of the most overused terms is culture (Samovar, Porter and McDaniel 2012). According to Schein 2010, culture can be divided into four broad categories.

These are macro cultures, subcultures, organizational cultures and micro cultures (Bosshardt 2006). Culture is a dynamic phenomenon and a basic background structure that has the effect of influencing us in a wide variety of ways. It is constantly changing and reenacted by our constant interactions with other people and is progressively shaped by our own behaviour. The main connection between culture and leadership can clearly be seen in micro cultures and organizational cultures where the culture in such systems is usually thought of as the end result of the embedding that an organization’s founder or leader within the group has imposed upon it and it with positive results (Schein, 2010).

Culture can also be broadly defined as a set of shared values like beliefs, norms, behaviours, attitudes, material objects and symbolic resources. Basically speaking it can be thought of as the basic rules for functioning and living within a given society (Samovar, Porter and McDaniel 2012). 3.0 What are Variables? Variables can broadly be defined as items that we can control, measure or even manipulate while performing research. They are viewed as characteristics that have the potential of having more than one value or score.

They can be viewed as being relatively straight forward for instance when we consider variables such as income or age while sometimes they can be viewed as being relatively abstract such as when we are considering items such as degree of prejudice or even social class (Inglehart and Welzel 2007). Researchers constantly analyze variables in order to determine how they end up influencing each other. 3.1 What are Social Variables? Social variables can be viewed as logical sets of attributes. An attribute like a person being either male or female will have the main variable of gender or sex (Weinstein 2005).

While a variable such as occupation will be attributed by items such as a truck driver, farmer or professor (Babbie 2010). 3.2 What are Economic Variables? Economic variables can be subdivided into endogenous variables, which are defined as economic variables which are dependent on the occurrences within a given economy such as inflation and employment rates, while exogenous variables are those variables, which are seen to be external to the economy of a given country and are mainly determined by the current global events and policies (Keillor 2011).

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