72 GLOBAL DEBATE When in Rome, Should You “Do as the Romans Do” . . . and Feel Comfortable about It? Overseas travel, whether for work or vacation, may force you to decide whether to follow local practices. Sometimes you have no choice—when in Britain, you drive on the left side of the road. Some local practices may seem liberating, but others may not make sense to you, and some may not seem morally right. The Japanese protect delicate tatami mats on their floors by removing their shoes. Do you conform? If you are a non-Muslim woman, do you wear a headscarf and long cloak when in a conservative Islamic country such as Saudi Arabia? Do you promote your manager’s family members in Colombia? Other customs may conflict with your home culture’s moral or perhaps legal standards. If you are from a country or state where cannabis is illegal or reserved for medicinal use, do you visit the Grasshopper, a cannabis coffee shop, when you are in Amsterdam? At the business level, do you follow the corporate tax law as you would in your home country, or do you underreport and then negotiate, along with the locals, in Italy? Do you pay fixers or agents in cultures where this practice is widely followed? Such practices will violate most companies’ ethical codes, and possibly the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, but what if your competitors localize their practices, leaving their moral judgment at home? Do you observe the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in cultures where your competition readily pays bribes? Do you outsource your legal or moral issues to an agent, in order to distance yourself? In Saudi Arabia, do you avoid hiring women to sidestep the many gender issues you might encounter there? To what extent should you follow local practices and conform to local customs? Where are the lines? What do you think? Questions 1. Are all actions that conform to local customs morally defensible? 2. If the competitive environment includes legally marginal activities, and you can distance yourself from those activities, should you follow them in order to compete successfully? 3. Recommend an approach to resolving ethical issues in the international arena. The family is the basic unit of institutions based on kinship. Unlike the U.S. family, which is generally composed of the parents and their children, families in many nations are extended to include all relatives by blood and marriage. This extended family can be a source of employees and business connections and also of potential problems. The trust people place in their relatives may motivate them to buy from a supplier owned by their cousin’s cousin, even though the price may be higher. Local human resource managers may fill the best jobs with family members regardless of qualifications. Although the extended family is large, each member’s feeling of responsibility to it is strong. The practice of favoring family members may violate the Western notion that nepotism is generally to be avoided. Free associations are the second class of social institution. Not based on kinship, these groups may be formed by age, sex, or common interest.11 International managers need to understand them, since they influence behavior at a fundamental level, and their rules and organization are likely to differ across cultures. Recently a new kind of free association has emerged on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks in the form of groups with their own sets of unwritten cultural rules. Such organizations, in which messages can go global with one finger stroke, have greatly influenced the way business is conducted. Virtual consumer action groups have forced firms to change their products, the ways they promote them, and their pricing strategies. Starting in Spring 2011, we also have seen social networks influence politics, specifically in Egypt and the Middle East. We can expect to see much more social network influence on firms.
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