Chapter 5 Culture, Management Style, and Business Systems 139 CROSSING BORDERS 5.1 Don’t Beat Your Mother-in-Law! The crowding and collectivism of Chinese culture provide fertile ground for hierarchy. Add in a little Confucian advice, and status relationships become central for understand-ing Chinese business systems. Confucius’s teachings were the foundation for Chinese education for 2,000 years, until 1911. He defined five cardinal relationships: between ruler and ruled, husband and wife, parents and children, older and younger brothers, and friends. Except for the last, all relationships were hierarchical. The ruled, wives, children, and younger brothers, were all counseled to trade obedience and loyalty for the benevolence of their rulers, husbands, parents, and older brothers, respectively. Strict adherence to these vertical relations yielded social har-mony, the antidote for the violence and civil war of his time. Obedience and deference to one’s superiors remain strong values in Chinese culture. The story of the Cheng family illustrates the historical salience of social hierarchy and high power distance: In October 1865, Cheng Han-cheng’s wife had the inso-lence to beat her mother-in-law. This was regarded as such a heinous crime that the following punishment was meted out: Cheng and his wife were both skinned alive, in front of the mother, their skin displayed at city gates in various towns and their bones burned to ashes. Cheng’s granduncle, the eldest of his close rela-tives, was beheaded; his uncle and two brothers, and the head of the Cheng clan, were hanged. The wife’s mother, her face tattooed with the words “neglected the daughter’s education,” was paraded through seven prov-inces. Her father was beaten 80 strokes and banished to a distance of 3,000 li. The heads of the family in the houses to the right and left of Cheng’s were beaten 80 strokes and banished to Heilung-kiang. The educational officer in town was beaten 60 strokes and banished to a distance of 1,000 li. Cheng’s nine-month-old boy was given a new name and put in the county magistrate’s care. Cheng’s land was to be left in waste “forever.” All this was recorded on a stone stele, and rubbings of the inscriptions were distributed throughout the empire. We recommend you have your children read this story! But seriously, notice the authorities held responsible the entire social network for the woman’s breach of hierarchy. Status is no joke among Chinese. Age and rank of executives and other status markers must be taken into account during business negotiations with Chinese. American informality and egalitari-anism will not play well on the western side of the Pacific. Sources: Dau-lin Hsu, “The Myth of the ‘Five Human Relations’ of Confucius,” Monumenta Sinica 1970, pp. 29, 31, quoted in Gary G. Hamilton, “Patriarchalism in Imperial China and Western Europe: A Revision of Weber’s Sociology of Domination,” Theory and Society 13, pp. 393–425; N. Mark Lam and John L. Graham, China Now, Doing Business in the World’s Most Dynamic Market (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007). As businesses grow and professional management develops, there is a shift toward decen-tralized management decision making. Decentralized decision making allows executives at different levels of management to exercise authority over their own functions. As mentioned previously, this approach is typical of large-scale businesses with highly developed management systems, such as those found in the United States. A trader in the United States is likely to be dealing with middle management, and title or position generally takes precedence over the indi-vidual holding the job. In other countries, the influence of a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), for example, has been shown to be culturally dependent. That is, in cultures high in collectivism and uncertainty avoidance, CMOs have been shown to be given higher levels of trust.17 Committee decision making is by group or consensus. Committees may operate on a centralized or decentralized basis, but the concept of committee management implies something quite different from the individualized functioning of the top management and decentralized decision-making arrangements just discussed. Because Asian cultures and religions tend to emphasize harmony and collectivism, it is not surprising that group deci-sion making predominates there. Despite the emphasis on rank and hierarchy in Japanese social structure, business emphasizes group participation, group harmony, and group deci-sion making—but at the top management level. The demands of these three types of authority systems on a marketer’s ingenuity and adaptability are evident. In the case of the authoritative and delegated societies, the chief problem is to identify the individual with authority. In the committee decision setup, every committee member must be convinced of the merits of the proposition or product in ques-tion. The marketing approach to each of these situations differs. 17Andreas Englelen, Fritz Lackhoff, and Susanne Schmidt, “How Can Chief Marketing Officers Strengthen Their Influence? A Social Capital Study Across Six Country Groups,” Journal of International Marketing 21 (2013), pp. 88 –109.
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