Hybridisation of business norms as intercultural dialogue: The case of two post-Soviet countries

This article provides an in-depth exploration of the nature of the cultural shift in business norms in two former Soviet Union republics: Estonia and Belarus. While questioning the linearity of existing models describing social-cultural change and, drawing on Lotman's model (1990), the paper points to a complex interplay of past and present, Western and local traditions in the transformational context of the post-Soviet countries. The analysis is based on a set of semi-structured in-depth interviews with Belarusian and Estonian entrepreneurs, who conveyed their attitudes towards transition and current management practices in the region. Exploring the issue oil both a temporal (pre-Soviet and post-Soviet) and a spatial (Western/non-Western) axis the paper discusses the relationship between the 'importing' and, 'exporting' of values, which take place across each of them, and concludes with what the analysis can tell us about cultural transformation more generally. (C) 2009 Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of The Regents of the University of California.