Reflections of a Cross Cultural Scholar Context and Language in Management Thought

This reflective contribution highlights the author's 25 years' involvement in cross cultural management education and research. He chronicles how he came to write about cross cultural management as a form of knowledge management in a bid to break away from conventional thinking that was, and in his opinion still is, hampering the intellectual development of the field. He argues that the challenge is not to make company behaviour fit into this or that classification scheme of culture, but to recognize that culture as a transnational influence is waiting to be discovered in companies' global networks. Various future directions for cross cultural management research are posited. A major subtheme of the article concerns the position of language as 'management's lost continent': a definition of the expression 'language of management' is proposed, while discussion of a philological investigation brings to light a management term last attested in English in 1614.