Globalized Management Practices and Local Cultures

The paper will give an overview of management practices in different world regions based on the existing literature in the social and economic sciences and case studies. One of the main questions will be: What is the future of "management"? The global discourse on management focuses on the principles of the market that have been introduced in all spheres of social life through university programs, training seminars, organizational strategies, government policies, and personal counseling literature. This knowledge is produced, distributed, and consumed by social actors in the South, North, and East. These forms of disciplinary knowledge have contributed to the creation of a world controlled by managers and management technologies.

One of the most important societal influences in the last quarter of the 20th century was this growing importance of the management discourse. There was a spread of the idea of management from large firms to the professions, NGOs, the public sector, and the daily lives of social actors. This management discourse consists of a given language and practices that global players produce in the socioeconomic world. This discourse is so widespread today that it seems difficult to escape its grip.

This paper gives an overview of its increasing propagation in non-western societies. One aspect of this research is: How do groups cope with the global discourse of management in a globalized world? For the last twenty years, management practices were propagated throughout the globalized world but only few studies on its local acceptance exist even if there are studies on the problematics of market fundamentalism (Albers et al. 2006). Because of the challenges related to globalization and the global financial crisis, it is important to understand this discourse of management and its functioning in global companies in order to better plan future developments of the socioeconomic world.