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146 European J. International Management, Vol. 3, No. 2, 2009

Copyright 2009 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

Organisational models and culture: a reflectionfrom Latin America1

Luis Montao-Hirose

Department of Economics,Universidad Autnoma Metropolitana Unidad Iztapalapa,Av. San Rafael Atlixco No. 186, Col. Vicentina,C.P. 09340, Iztapalapa, Mxico D.F.Email: [email protected]

Abstract: This paper offers a cultural analysis of Latin America organisationalmodels. In order to address this issue, the concepts of culture and modernityare discussed. Additionally, this paper briefly analyses some key problemsin Latin America, particularly its modernisation process and its relationshipwith culture. Finally, organisational models, focusing especially on their socialconstruction, transfer and re-appropriation, with a view to questioning theircultural relevance and contribution to organisational and social developmentare discussed. This paper concludes with some remarks on modernity, cultureand the future avenues of research on organisational models in Latin America.

Keywords: Latin America; organisational models; culture; modernity andpostmodernity.

Referenceto this paper should be made as follows: Montao-Hirose, L. (2009)Organisational models and culture: a reflection from Latin America,European J. International Management, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp.146166.

Biographical note: Luis Montao-Hirose is a Professor of OrganisationStudies at the Universidad Autnoma Metropolitana (UAM), Mexico. He holdsa PhD in Organisation Sciences at Universit de Paris IX-Dauphine, France,and has been a Visiting Professor at Osaka no Machi Daigaku (Osaka CityUniversity), Japan, cole Polytchnique, France, and cole des Hautes tudesCommerciales, Canada. He has produced several articles and books. He wasDirector of the Organization Studies Postgraduate Program at UAM andPresident of the Mexican Researchers Network in Organization Studies.

Latin America neither wants,nor has any reason, to be a pawn without a will of its own;

nor is it merely wishful thinking that its quest for independenceand originality should become a Western aspiration.Gabriel Garca Mrquez2

1 Introduction

In this day and age, few academics question the importance of the concept of culture incharacterising organisations, nations and even large regions of the world. The ongoingdiscussion between modernity and culture appears to have been abandoned. However, inLatin America, modernity is broken up into multiple realities: pre-modernity, peripheral



Organisational models and culture 147

or backward modernity, post-modernity, dismodernity. The symbolic world of traditions

sometimes seems to be contained within, and sometimes overflows beyond, instrumentalrationality, technological display and the global village; while modernity seems to waverbetween the past and the future, the universal and the local, the literal and the figurative.This paper is divided into three sections in order to address these issues. The first sectiondiscusses the relevance of the concepts of culture and modernity on two levels. First, inwhat sense can we talk about culture in a modern, globalised world? Second, is culturethe most suitable way of referring to a social space that contains as broad a spectrum ofmodernities as Latin America does? The second section offers a brief reflection on LatinAmericas modernisation process and its relationship with culture. Will Latin Americasmodernisation support the notion of a culturally globalised world in the future? The thirdsection discusses the history, transfer and re-appropriation of organisational models,and questions their cultural relevance and contribution to organisational and socialdevelopment. Are such models as transferable as the majority of business schools seemto believe, given their high level of technical and instrumental rationality? This articlethus uses two of the most controversial and elusive concepts in the humanities and socialsciences, culture and modernity, in order to unpack another concept, Latin America,that also refers to a highly complex and diverse reality.

2 Does a Latin American culture exist?

As Rouqui (1989) notes, America is the continent of the misunderstood: the New Worldwas discovered while explorers sought the route to the Indies. The first accountsdescribed mermaids, footless birds, hogs with navels on their haunches, and wereconvinced that of the continent harboured the fountain of eternal youth. Latin America is

not an abstract concept, as Henry Kissinger3once said, but simply an ambiguous one.Broadly speaking, it refers to a part of the American continent in which mainly Romancelanguages derived from Vulgar Latin Spanish and Portuguese are spoken. It is alsoused to refer to all the countries in the Western hemisphere located south of the UnitedStates. The term Latin America was first used in 1856, both by the Chilean writer andpolitician, Francisco Bilbao (1866), at a conference;4and by the Colombian writer, JosMara Torres Caicedo, in his poem The Two Americas.5It was used shortly afterwardsduring the French invasion on Mexican territory by Napoleon III in 1862. Seen froma geostrategic and cultural point of view, these first three historical references toLatin America share the need to recognise a certain cultural and geopolitical unity, inorder to differentiate the region from a threatening Anglo-Saxon America. Bilbao andTorres proposed uniting the Latin American nations to face up to this threat while

Napoleon III sought to justify a military invasion.The name Latin America has often been criticised: Simn Bolvar preferred the nameColombia since he considered Christopher Columbus to be worthier than AmricoVespucio. It has also been argued that the term Latin America excludes the indigenouspeoples and blacks; and it is also sometimes rejected because of its use as a rhetorical-military ruse to legitimise the Napoleonic empire. Other terms have emerged in anattempt to depict the regions diversity, such as Ibero-America, Hispanic America, Indo-America and even, as Carlos Fuentes (1992) proposes, Indo-Afro-Euro-America. Thecontroversy over culture is even more heated, particularly when it comes to the eternalquestion of whether this great geographical space, characterised by two main languages,



148 L. Montao-Hirose

a shared colonial past and a major religion, Catholicism, comprises a culture in the broad

sense of the word. The answer is multiple, nuanced and invariably unsatisfactory, butalways affirmative: Latin America exists as a cultural reality.

Let us briefly review three examples of attempts to characterise the culturalcharacteristics of this part of the American continent. The first is the geopolitical analysisconducted by Huntington (2005); the second is the proposal put forward by Inglehart andCarballo (2008), based on the World Values Survey; and the third was the work of theBrazilian anthropologist, Ribeiro (1984).

Huntington proposes the concept of civilisation for recognising cultural spaces in avery broad sense. This author conceives civilisation as the broadest level of culturalexpression, providing the individual with his most generic identity. He recognises sevenmajor civilisations: two Asian civilisations China and Japan Hindu, Muslim,Orthodox, African and, finally, Western civilisation in which he distinguishes three

sub-civilisations, the European, the North American and the Latin American. Althoughhe recognises some specifics of Latin American civilisation, Huntington deals with ittoo superficially in our view, treating it as though it were a simple, passive project.Moreover, he overvalues Western civilisation in particular, the USA and Europe byconsidering it the creator of modernity, thus imposing the idea of white supremacy. Healso ferociously attacks the multiculturality of his own country, the United States, whichhe sees as a terrible threat, forgetting the nations historical process of development andthe important role played by immigrants. The authors stance is more like that of apolitician committed to a particular extremist ideology than that of a scholar interestedin understanding and mediation. In this way, he openly scorns certain civilisations thathe deems dangerous, such as the Muslim or Chinese civilisations; or lesser, due to theirlower profile participation on the global stage, such as Latin America and Africa. Inkeeping with Spengler (1993), he considers that the United States has entered a phase ofmarked decadence, which manifests itself in antisocial behaviour, family break up, thedeterioration of work ethics and a lack of interest in intellectual activities. However,despite all of this, the USA is still an economic and military power. Huntington arguesthat international conflicts are more often a result of clashes of civilisations than ofpolitical or economic issues.

The notion of culture does not imply, as is sometimes supposed, total homogeneity orbehavioural determinism. Culture does not constitute an autonomous sphere of social life,but is part of a broader dynamic social process. In this sense, we cannot think of cultureas separate from economic, political and social development. In this vein, Inglehart andCarballo (2008) offer an analysis of the relationship between economic development andcultural change. The authors argue that although the former can profoundly transformcertain social practices, many old principles and values are nonetheless jealously

preserved. Some of these changes brought about by modernity include the developmentof education, equal rights for women, the democratisation of society and the desire toachieve a better quality of life. These elements are grouped under the generic headingof self-expression as opposed to the values associated with the simple promotionof economic development for the sake of survival. Another fundamental aspect ofmodernity, they argue, is the gradual substitution of religious or traditional beliefs by theprinciples of secular or rational order. Based on these two statistically founded ideas, theauthors recognise eight major cultural regions: the Confucian, which includes Japan andChina, amongst other countries, ex-communist, Islamic, African, English-speaking,




Catholic Europe, Protestant Europe and, finally, Latin America. Protestant Europe is the

cultural region that is most inclined towards self-expression and rational values, whileless economically developed countries, such as the Islamic and African nations, arecharacterised by religious and survival values.

According to this study, Latin America is located in a cultural zone in which religiousvalues overlap with self-expression values, i.e. in a zone that is adjacent to Africa,Catholic Europe and the English-speaking countries. Therefore, Guatemala and Peru,owing to the importance of tradition, are close to African countries such as Nigeria.Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil are similar to countries such as Spain, Italy and Portugal,while Mexico is more isolated from the other Latin American countries and from theUnited States. Without doubt, the methodological bases of the survey should be analysedin depth in order to identify, in detail, the stratification of the sample and the completequestionnaire. However, with the elements available to us, we can argue that the

questions are simplistic and the results presented lead us to believe that the sampleconsists mainly of urban populations, and includes very few or no representatives fromnative communities.

In any case, the results deserve to be discussed further in the light of other analyses.Ultimately, the unilateral relationship established in the aforementioned survey betweeneconomic development and sociocultural dynamics discards the importance of theinverse relationship, that is to say, the way in which values and beliefs, for example,affect economic behaviour, which is the analytical idea privileged in organisationalanalyses (Hofstede, 1991).

We believe that a more appropriate way of constructing a global configuration thatconsiders cultural aspects is the one formulated by Darcy Ribeiro (1984), who identifiesfour categories of extra-European societies that have emerged from different historicaland cultural processes: the transplanted, the testimony, the new and the emerging. Thefirst try to reproduce the lifestyle of the large European metropolises in other lands;this is the case, inter alia, of the United States and Canada; and in Latin America, ofArgentina and Uruguay, the most European countries on the subcontinent. The testimonypeoples consist of great civilisations that were not totally assimilated to Europeanmodels, such as the Japanese or Hindu cultures; or in America countries such asGuatemala, Mexico, Peru and Bolivia, with indigenous populations that preserve many oftheir original cultural aspects, thus preventing the establishment of a homogenouscultural unity. According to the author, new peoples represent a sui generis culturalproject. They consist of nations that have managed to blend ethnic diversity throughmiscegenation European, indigenous and black in Latin America, sometimes attaininghigh levels of solidarity, as has occurred in Brazil, Colombia, Cuba and Venezuela.Finally, the emerging peoples are characterised by their struggle to preserve their identity

throughout centuries of subjugation and modernising policies. In America, these includethe indigenous communities Mayas, Aymaras, Incas among others, who ceaselesslyclaim their cultural right to self-determination.

The author addresses the concept of civilisation in the context of economicdevelopment and proposes that transplanted peoples have achieved the most advancedmodernisation processes, while testimony peoples have encountered serious obstacles inthis process. As survivors of ancient civilisations, their incorporation into modernity hasbeen incomplete; their encounter with Europe signalled the end of glorious eras but theyalso experienced difficulties in gaining access to the new development opportunities.




According to Ribeiro, new peoples adopted patterns of subjugation to the powerful,

limiting their possibilities for development; while the emerging peoples were alwaysseen as extremely backwards and anchored in their past, and unable to encountermodernity.

Although Ribeiros work is highly suggestive, some of his points requireclarification, as we shall discuss later on. Nations were not built on the basis of culturalaffinities, but according to economic and political criteria. As Carlos Fuentes (1992) sorightly said, borders are the scars of geopolitics. This translates into a high level ofcultural heterogeneity for some countries. Therefore, we can observe that there arecertain social sectors that are representative of several of the societies proposed byRibeiro. This is the case, for example, of Mexico, a country in which we see sectors thathave reproduced in their own way the mentality and lifestyles of countries from thecentre and that form very few social ties with the emerging peoples who they regard

as folkloric elements; others are more representative of the new peoples, whichmiscegenation has provided with a particular identity. Finally, as occurred recently in thestate of Chiapas in Mexico, we can even find rebellions, like that of the NationalLiberation Zapatista Army, that demand particular cultural rights and forms oforganisation inherited from their indigenous past.6Although in this case, tradition andmodernity paradoxically exist side by side, there are other cases in which tradition andmodernity mingle in attempts to imagine a future that is consistent with a peoples past,as in the recent case of the new political constitution approved by Ecuadorians in whichthey recognise their thousand-year-old roots, exalt Pacha Mama, a female divinity thatprotects the indigenous world, and declare themselves to be a multinational, interculturalnation, committed to Latin American integration.

3 Latin American modernities and post-colonialism

Western modernity arose, at least in part, as a rejection of culture, which was confined tothe countries or regions that preserved their old traditions, strongly rooted in religiousbeliefs. Their time is said to be circular, forming a sort of vicious circle that is impossibleto unfurl and integrate into the linear time of rationality and progress. Modernity wasinterpreted as Westernisation, i.e. not just as the possibility of political consensus andeconomic growth based on respect for individual rights, but as a completely newlifestyle. But, what features does modernity assume in Latin America? Table 1 showstwo countries that concentrate just over half of the regions population: Brazil, with195 million inhabitants, and Mexico, with 107 million. The population differencesare extreme. Belize, the smallest of the countries considered in this study, has only294,000 inhabitants and Uruguay just over 3 million. In other words, Brazils populationis 600 times larger than that of Belize and Mexicos population is 32 times larger thanthat of Uruguay.




Table 1 Socio-demographic data of Latin America and the Caribbean (in thousands)

(selected countries)




Table 1 Socio-demographic data of Latin America and the Caribbean (in thousands)

(selected countries) (continued)




One of the most generalised indicators of modernity is urban concentration. At present,

77% of Latin Americas population lives in cities, even though a large number of people(almost 131 million) do live in rural areas. Argentina, Uruguay and Venezuela possessthe highest percentages of urban population nearly 92%, while in countries such asBelize, Haiti and Honduras the figure amounts to less than 50%. Another indicator is theproportion of the population that works in the three major economic sectors. On average,19% 113 million people work mainly in agriculture, 22% in industry and 59% inservices. Peru and Honduras devote more than 35% of their activities to agriculture,while the most industrialised countries are Chile and Mexico, with over 50%; the mostservice-oriented nations are Argentina and Uruguay, with over 70%. Nevertheless,behind these general indicators of modernity lies a social reality that cannot be readilyextrapolated from them. Urban life is an outcome, for many Latin American cities, of thedeparture of farmers from rural zones in order to survive and their arrival in a highly

discriminatory, chaotic and incomprehensible social space, with high levels of violence,in which their integration is, more often than not, marginal and informal (Garca, 1989;Garca, 1995).

Latin American modernity has other serious problems too. With regard toemployment, a very conservative estimate would be that about 8.5% of the economicallyactive population is unemployed; this translates into 46 million people, the equivalent ofthe total population of Argentina, Panama and Paraguay. Moreover, 55 million people inLatin America are illiterate, of which 38% are Brazilian; while 45% of Haitians cannotread or write. Poverty and extreme poverty are the regions two greatest afflictions.36.5% of the population is in the former situation and 8.6% about 50 million people in the latter; there are a total of 211 million poor people, which is equivalent to the totalpopulation of Mexico, Colombia, Argentina and Chile together. More than 30% of thepopulation of Guatemala, Bolivia, Paraguay and Nicaragua lives in extreme poverty. It isimportant to note that Cecchini and Uthoff (2008) indicate that poverty and extremepoverty have decreased in Latin America, with figures of around 48% and 22.5%respectively in 1990. The country that has achieved the greatest reduction in this area isChile 19.7 percentage points between 1990 and 2003 to just 18.60%. Ecuador, Brazil,Panama and Mexico have also made significant, though insufficient, progress in thisstruggle.

Despite this large social deficit, modernity manifests itself in different ways in theregion. Some of the most developed countries, such as Brazil, Mexico, Argentina andChile, have increased their international investments through a few companies known astrans-Latin corporations. In effect, since the nineties, foreign investment by corporationsfrom emerging countries has achieved unprecedented levels. The Boston ConsultingGroup (2006) estimates that of the 100 top transnational companies from emerging

economies, 41 are Chinese, 22 Latin American and 20 Indian; while among the topLatin American firms, 13 are Brazilian, seven Mexican, one Argentinean and oneChilean. Santiso (2008) estimates that the top ten trans-Latin corporations conduct 43%of their sales abroad and their expansion is no longer exclusively the result of lowerlabour costs or the availability of natural resources, but increasingly makes use of newtechnologies, access to international financial circuits and efficient management systems.In a recent report, the journal Amrica Economa (2008) indicated that the 20 mostglobalised trans-Latin companies conduct 63% of their sales overseas and haveapproximately 313,800 employees abroad (see Table 2).




Table 2 Leading Latin American transnational companies, 2007




Nevertheless, the modernity of Latin American countries is closely related to their

history, in particular, as Ribeiro (1984) so rightly states, the colonisation process.Therefore, Alonso (2007), from the theoretical stance of New Institutional Economics,suggests that institutionality plays a key role in the economic development of everysociety and that the modalities adopted by said institutional development in LatinAmerica are shaped by their colonial past. The author highlights, among other keyfactors, the amount of natural resources and human settlements in each country. Thus, incountries with large amounts of natural resources and local labour, such as Mexico, Peruand Bolivia, exclusive institutions were generated that facilitated the development ofpowerful elites based on coercive recruitment and exploitation systems. In this sense,Bag (1992) indicates that the apparent lack of motivation to improve the labour qualityof indigenous workers can be explained by the fact that Europe was only interested ineconomic and political benefits it could gain from Latin America, which resulted from

two things: quantity and obedience. In other countries, where natural resources werescarce or the population was diminished or had been decimated, such as in Argentina andUruguay, the institutions generated were more collective and democratic, emphasisingthe need for public services.

Approaches based on so-called postcolonial theory can shed some light on the roleof the distant past in the evolution of the said societies and can help us to clarify theconcept of modernity. The main thesis of postcolonial theory, which was promotedoriginally by literary critics and philosophers and later adopted by anthropologists andsociologists, is that colonialism left an indelible mark on the historical evolution of thesesocieties coloniality and that it is, therefore, necessary to rethink these developmentsfrom a more emancipating perspective (Said, 1978). In this context, colonialism is asine qua non for the emergence of modernity and represents, for the most critical, thebackyard of modernity (Mignolo, 2007). This is why Europe, Castro-Gmez (2007)argues, turning to Dussel (2007), should no longer be understood as an independentcomponent that radiates a universal vision of modernity, but as a systemic hub thatimplies both domination and civilising imposition. The first modernity, the discoveryof the New World and its annexation to the geo-imaginary European space, impliedfor many inhabitants the fragmentation of their collective identity that had been forgedover centuries: they were dispatched on a quest to conquer a new sense of culturalidentity. The core-periphery model would later lead to the formulation, in the sixties, ofdependency theory (Cardoso and Faletto, 1969), which criticises the marginal roleassigned to less developed nations in the world system. The economic development ofthe core necessarily implies, according to this theory, the permanent underdevelopmentof a weak, fragmented periphery. This modernity classified itself as peripheral, that is tosay, as an unattainable state in relation to USA or European standards. Moreover, the

modern idea of progress, through development theory, generated, in the same timeperiod, the notion of backward modernity. At the beginning of the sixties, Rostov (1961)proposed that every economy should go through five stages, beginning with thetraditional stage of personal consumption and ending with the stage of high massconsumption. In this way, some Latin American economies considered that the importsubstitution model constituted a stage on the path to development and that backwardnesswas circumstantial, since one day they would be able to access the select field ofdeveloped countries.




New European observations to analyse the current state of modernity have led to the

emergence of new concepts such as postmodernity. This is considered a new stage thathas succeeded, and is different from modernity. It is characterised, among other things,by the collapse of grand narratives (Lyotard, 1979), which is frequently translated as theend of the worlds great explanations and the recognition of various institutional crises family, hospital, school, State (Dubet and Martuccelli, 1996; Dubet, 2002) that alter thereference points for individuals social and personal lives. This led Touraine (1997) topropose the concept of demodernisation, a process characterised by the breakdown of theinstitutional setting owing to the relaxation or disappearance of codified behaviouralstandards, which produces, according to the author, a state of a lack of communicationbetween the other two components of modernity: rationalisation and moral individualism.In other words, it results in a growing gap between economics and culture. In fact, wecould say that this process began in the last few years of the 19th century with growingeconomic and technological rationalisation and the appearance of the first administrativesystems. In this sense, the most congruent proposals are those that, instead of adhering tothe thesis of the end of modernity, prefer to describe it as a new stage and not as a break-up, such as the cases that refer to advanced modernity (Giddens, 1990; Giddens, 1991),reflexive modernity (Beck, 1994), hypermodernity (Pags et al., 1979) or supermodernity(Balandier, 1994). In general, these names emphasise the exacerbated nature of present-day modernity, the uncertainty, the excesses and the risks that it entails, and thedestructuring of collective identities.

European modernity gradually displaced its centre of gravity towards theUnited States. The resulting emphasis on the economic environment, at the expense ofthe political and socio-cultural settings, has produced many negative consequences: thecitizen, the European figure par excellence, has faded away in favour of the consumer(Garca, 1995). Furthermore, as a result of economic over-dimensioning, management

studies enjoy a preponderant place in the modern vision of development. This issignificant for the rest of the world, but it has had a particularly big impact onLatin America because of its high degree of economic dependence on the United States.After World War II, the United States dominated the world scene in many aspects,notably the hegemony it attained in management and organisational studies, whichled it to become the world leader in the construction and transfer of organisationalmodels founded on the idea of universal applicability. Instrumental rationality, separatedfrom its original ideal-type methodological nature (Weber, 1970; Aguilar, 1998) andfrom any subjective assessment traditional, charismatic or moral proposed thebureaucratic archetype as the optimal organisational system, which turned out to be theepistemological foundation for the resulting organisational models. This modernity,based mainly on instrumental rationality, promoted an extremely rational, positivistvision that ruled out, in the majority of US specialists, the possibility of any proposal thatquestioned the rational action of the individual. Therefore, what Touraine (1993) calledanti-modernity, such as psychoanalytical proposals that openly questioned rationalknowledge of the self and of others, remained taboo (Montao-Hirose, 2007c).

4 Organisational models: construction, transfer and appropriation

Organisational models constitute, from the perspective of modernity, a relevantinstrument for progress and social change and can be broadly understood asrepresentations of certain principal components including structures and processes




that supposedly explain the general functioning of an organisation. Modernity

underscores instrumental intentions, while refraining from explaining why they arenecessary. These models are usually constructed by organisations from developedcountries in order to demonstrate the great potential of these social units and to serve asan example to those who wish to attain similar results. New sociological institutionalism(DiMaggio and Powell, 1999) notes a growing trend towards the structural isomorphismof organisations due to the increasing homogeneity of professional training (Mills andHatfield, 1999; Hedmo et al., 2005), as well as great challenges in applying systemsbased on instrumental rationality, that is to say, to establish precise objectives and toadopt means through which to accomplish them, since imposing specific operationalsystems on them involves recognising so-called organised anarchies, and also thedominance of some organisations over others. Even though these organisations appearto be structurally alike formally, they actually operate according to different systems of

meaning shaped by culture, which can result in similar structures but different behavioursor in similar behaviours with different meanings (Iribarne, 2003a; Iribarne, 2003b).The over-emphasis on the economic over the social environment fostered by themodernisation process has, in this way, propitiated the idea of universality, based on themerely formal aspects of organisations. Such models correspond to the imaginaryrepresentation that exists of the core countries great private enterprise, in particular inthe United States, and its representation of the Japanese business experience that itincorporates into its system under the generic term of flexibilisation (Montao-Hirose,2003), giving rise to the term post-bureaucratic or even post-modern models.

The construction of the organisational model is based on the identification of aparticular area of the organisation to which significant amounts of resources will beassigned in order to achieve visible results in the short and medium terms (March andOlsen, 1997). It is, therefore, a limited success presented as a general success, and itserves to conceal the necessary inattention to some areas, such as economic and socialcosts that it generates. In fact, the long-term optimisation of the whole is restricted byseveral aspects. One of them is the result of the organisations very nature; its operationis structurally loosely coupled, which means that it is made up of heteroclite elementsthat seek to preserve, through the use of their relative autonomy, a particular functionaland/or social identity (Weick, 1976; Montao-Hirose, 2007b). Formal organisationalobjectives are not reproduced faithfully in each of the business units nor are they fullyinternalised by all the actors. They construct rationally and culturally their ownstrategies for negotiating their collaboration by means of the creation and maintenance ofzones of uncertainty consisting of organisational problems whose solutions can only beaccessed by a certain type of actors (Crozier and Friedberg, 1977). Moreover, the modelsonly express the positive sides of the action, presenting them superlatively in terms of

effectiveness and efficiency (Figure 1).Another important element is the search for external legitimacy; so that the more

notorious the results, the more the organisations image will be enhanced. Theconcentration of efforts in a line of action is, therefore, more profitable in terms ofcreating greater credibility than their distribution in different actions. Some of the socialbeliefs that predominate at certain times, such as environmental sustainability, genderequality or social responsibility, can be incorporated into diverse organisational internalpolicies to the detriment of others (Meyer and Rowen, 1999).




Figure 1 Construction, transfer and appropriation of organisational models

Neglecting certain areas of the organisation can produce, over time, significant

imbalances, which induce the management to pay attention to these areas, thus changingthe concentration of resources and reducing the time spent on previous actions. There is atendency to analyse problems in a fragmented manner or separately human resources,technology, finances, for example and to think that there is a particular theoreticalinstrument for solving each and every one of them quickly.

Organisational models are normally constructed by means of abstracting the socialelements historical, political and cultural that have contributed directly or indirectlyto the organisations formation and dynamics. This notably increases the perception thatuniversal models are founded on logical elements and therefore that their operation isseparate from the social context in which they originated. This is a highly seductive ideasince it is presented as a simplified linear scheme, with simple recipes that are farremoved from their real complexity. The positive aspects are generally idealised, while

the negative aspects are carefully concealed. For example, the psychological violencefomented by said models within the organisation, the unemployment that they generate,the high levels of stress they produce and the contradictions that result from thesimultaneous use of various models, amongst other things, are ignored (Montao-Hirose,2007a). However, these tend to appear later on and, mediated by cultural aspects,produce various prejudices both in the workers and the organisation itself. Thus,authoritarianism, social distance, gender inequalities, familism, aversion to uncertaintyand short-term direction, amongst other aspects mentioned as characteristics ofLatin American organisations (Dvila and Martnez, 1999), together with deficiencies ineducation and lack of technology, intermingle with other aspects, such as solidarity,




affective expressions, friendship and mutual support, to establish the conditions for

implementing a particular model. Implementation often takes place in the form of anexplicit and implicit negotiation that, taking into account the possible meanings that itsuse involves, allows the members of the organisation to calculate its possible operativeand moral consequences.

The dissemination of these models is mainly the responsibility of consulting offices,business schools and, more recently and increasingly importantly, on websites, many ofwhich are not very reputable. The hegemony achieved by the United States in this settingis unquestionable. The production and commercialisation of these models is an entirebusiness in itself. Consulting offices normally operate as garbage can systems (Marchand Olsen, 1997), offering previously formulated solutions, representative of thelatest trends (Czarniawska, 2005) for a wide variety of problems. The internationalhomogeneity of business plans and programmes is surprising; emphasis is placed, with a

few exceptions, on professional and technical training to the detriment of socialreflection: investment in research in Latin American countries is minimal in comparisonwith the investment made in more advanced countries or with national investment relatedto education, which is normally a party to the reproduction of said models. This isevident in the few research doctorates in business administration and related disciplines,in Latin America, which creates dependence on and the unquestioned transfer ofsuch models.

However, the decoding of these models and their application to social realities, otherthan those in which they originated, produce diverse reactions. This transfer induces inmany directors the belief that a greater incorporation into modernisation might in veryfew cases be possible, while for others it is simply a false illusion. The idea of simpletransfers has been questioned in the last few years, mainly because of the arrival oforganisational culture as an explanatory element of behaviour.

Culture had been interpreted as a barrier to the entrance of modernity, havingbeen confined to mere tradition, or, in the best of cases, to a residual element oforganisational functioning. Strategic determinism, characteristic of modernity,emphasised, as mentioned beforehand, the increasingly rational nature of the actors.Nevertheless, the boom in Japan and its rapid access to global economic circuits in thesixties made US researchers aware of the extremely interwoven relationship betweenculture and productivity. The proposal stemming from this analysis was not toreconstruct the national culture, which would be impossible to achieve in a system thatprioritises productivity as a core variable, but rather to shape a new organisational culture(Ouchi, 1981; Pascale and Athos, 1981). In this way, US modernity was forced to turntowards the vision that it had created of the Far East of yesteryear, highlighting itsoriginal tendency towards low-cost and low-quality production owing to its cultural

particularities that prevented it from fully assuming Western rationality (Montao-Hirose, 2003). Subsequently, US researchers and consultants reformulated theserepresentations and incorporated concepts such as productive and structural flexibilityinto their own vision of modernity, thus making it seem easy to transfer the Japanesemodel to Western business proactively (Abegglen and Stalk, 1987).

Recent, though not yet very elaborate analyses, of the transfer of organisationalmodels have been inspired by postcolonial theories, which, in general terms, emphasisethe crucial relationship between a modern core and a peripheral modernity. Thus, forexample, Ibarra (2006) considers that the concept of organisation is an artifice thatseeks to homogenise diverse realities, resulting in the reinforcement of the notion of the




periphery as the imperfect expression of the core. Cals and Smircich (1999) argue that

colonised countries have been silenced as a result of their traditional, less developedor primitive nature. This representation is simultaneously double: it defines modernityand periphery at the same time, though the latter is a product of the necessaryhybridisation produced by coloniality, which makes both the local and the coreexpressions possible. In this sense, Frenkel and Shenhav (2003, 2006) indicate that thevery concept of hybridity is extremely useful for discerning the postcolonial content ofAmericanisation, particularly with reference to models exported from the United Statesand of the new realities that they generate both when they are accepted and when they arerejected. Although the discussion on the Latin American reality, from the theoreticalviewpoint of post-coloniality, has made some progress (Juregui and Moraa, 2007),so far organisational reflection has only produced very little work in this direction.We believe that extreme approaches should be avoided since they would surely lead to

simplifying systems that explain organisational behaviour in Latin American countriesunder the premise that since these countries were former colonial possessions, theirdestiny has been structurally defined once and for all. It is important to consider,therefore, not only national historical particularities, but also those of the region as awhole, together with what this implies in terms of encounters and disencounters.

5 Final questions

Instead of conclusions, it would be more relevant to end this reflection with a series ofquestions rather than a set of affirmations. Culture, modernity and Latin America are, asmentioned at the beginning, complex concepts. Each of them alludes to different levels ofreality and they are constantly reformulated according to the social space and time inwhich they exist. They are also concomitant and opposite to other series of concepts withwhich they both complement and clash, thus expressing the complexity and dynamics ofsocial action.

5.1 Towards a new paradigm?

Touraine (2005) provocatively suggests the need for a paradigmatic change in our way ofthinking about social action. He points out that following the political and economic-social paradigms of the social actor, we should now begin to use a cultural paradigm inconceptualising social actors. The first great paradigm, the political, highlighted the studyof social reality in terms of the State the nation, sovereignty, revolution, or the publicservices. This perspective was gradually replaced by the economic-social paradigm,

emphasising the study of social classes, conflict, trade unions, industrial technology,social mobility and the distribution of wealth, amongst others. Nowadays, states theauthor, the principal social issues are of a cultural nature, and stem from questionsabout new expressions of identity and violence. Demodernisation, that is to say thegrowing loss of institutional reference points, blurs the modern idea of society. Thisdisinstitutionalisation entails the possibility of generating a new relationship of theindividual with him or herself, liberating a certain potential for freedom andresponsibility.




Nevertheless, although it is important to highlight the cultural aspects that have been

relegated in the present-day Western hemisphere and that are re-emerging in an untimelymanner in globalisation, in order to understand the current social situation it is alsonecessary to desist from contemplating the past exclusively in terms of the othertwo paradigms. In effect, culture should not be understood as an environment that iscompletely independent from society, since historically it is shaped in close relationto political and socio-economic aspects. Although, as Touraine7 points out, eminentlycultural conflicts do exist, such as the case of Bosnia, and we cannot ignore their politicalcontent. Neither, in the case of apparently economic conflicts like oil, can we permitan analysis that does not include the cultural details of Islam.

Thus, culture does not represent an autonomous environment, but is alwaysclosely interwoven in other social settings and gradually constructs and reformulates itssignificance in the historical development of a particular society or region. Therefore,

studies of the past are an invaluable source for understanding the present. In this way,Latin America cannot be understood without first analysing its colonial legacy and itspath to becoming a major modern society. Moreover, as stated by Weckmann (1994),the medieval institutional forms introduced by Spain in the 16th century with a view toestablishing the basis for colonial occupation have infiltrated various aspects of economicand political development of the Latin American nations.

In the case of Latin America, we are currently witnessing a kind of great historicalreturn. For years, culture has been an excellent analytical element for explaining theregions social structure, its high level of heterogeneity, its fusion of the past with thepresent, in addition to the intricacies of its identity, and many other phenomena. It isnot surprising that history and anthropology, as well as literature have constitutedessential, prestigious academic disciplines in these countries search for specificity.Without discrediting this, it is also true that the regions modern environments have beenaddressed from sociology, economics and political science. The current state of thesubcontinent calls for a more integral vision in which culture acquires a more prominentrole that provides a more coherent vision of the regions complexity, that is to say, abroad cultural paradigm in which modernity and tradition, the core and the periphery,economics and politics do not represent more exclusive binary options, but shape a greatreflexive system.

5.2 How many modernities exist in Latin America?

A broad range of modalities related to modernity exist in Latin American society.Fragmented modernities and secular pre-modernities, peripheral modernities andadministrative post-modernities, backwards political modernities that lead to neglect,

outstanding delimited economic modernities with a highly technological content thatco-exist closely with pre-modern forms based on barter, and dismodernities resultingfrom disenchantment with improper institutional operations, all form the broad spectrumof the complexity of social action and meaning. Therefore, the conquest of a commoncultural space that provides this extremely heterogeneous subcontinent with an identity,recovering its common past and respecting the particularities of its development, wouldbe useful in establishing the possible basis for collaboration between these countries ifthey have to build economic and political development on similar needs and relatedcultural backgrounds.




5.3 From cultures to macrocultures?

In this paper, we have assumed the existence of Latin America as a specific geoculturalspace, with all its particularities, as the European Union proposes. Macroculture does notin any way deny the particularities of countries and regions assume and which theyvehemently defend, and by rejecting the idea of environmental determinism, we shouldextend the notion of limited autonomy not only to countries and regions, but also toorganisations and individuals themselves. In this framework of unity, diversity andrelative autonomy, would it perhaps be possible to establish political and economiccollaborative relations founded on solid cultural bases of mutual respect and appreciationbetween macrocultures, for example between Latin America and Europe? Is it possibleto form bi-regional relations that consider sociocultural development as somethingapart from economic and political interests? The progress gained to date represents an

important achievement, though it is limited to the economic and political environments.The European Union represents a sui generis social project with formally established,supranational organisations, with the free transit of goods and people, a single currency,a flag and an anthem, while its counterpart in these relations has basically been theRo Group, successor of the Contadora Group, which is an informal organisation whoseorigins date back to the resolution of the armed conflicts in Central America. Despite allof this, in a world that has been characterised by the clash of cultures, there are stillglobal regions in which social collaboration might be a reality.

5.4 What is Latin Americas agenda?

The environments for and levels of action are very diverse, ranging from diplomaticrelations to the establishment of economic agreements and the reinforcement of

collaborative actions in the areas of migration and education among Latin Americancountries and among these countries and other global regions. I believe that it is crucialto reinforce the political, family and educational institutional settings in the face of thepreponderance that economics has acquired in our social lives. Given the limitations ofthis document, I will only refer to the latter with regard to organisational studies. Studieson the Latin American reality involve a multiple effort, both in disciplinary andinternational terms. In the first case, bridges should not only be built between businessadministration and the rest of the social sciences, but also and this is far more difficult between business administration and the humanities. In effect, we must turn not only tothe sociology of work or political economics, but also to history, philosophy andanthropology. These academic traditions have different epistemologies that are difficultto reconcile. A higher level of paradigmatic plurality is needed, as well as a reappraisal of

the limitations of the positivist approaches and the advantages of interpretive proposals.A critical, reflexive rather than a technical and passive orientation is indispensable inorder to avoid the simple import of organisational models by countries with the highestlevels of economic development. Autonomy can only be achieved by increasingresearch activities. In the field of business administration, these activities are limited inLatin America, which has very few doctoral programmes. The creation of national andinternational research networks that also support the establishment and reinforcement ofjoint doctorates and research projects is one of the main actions to undertake. Our fellowLatin American countries are not part of any domination scheme that reproduces thecore-periphery model, and undertaking collaboration actions with them will undoubtedly




yield greater recognition of the similarities and differences that, within a context of

support and respect, will reinforce Latin Americas identity. This does not rule outincreasing participation with European universities in which organisational studies oftenhave a high level of social content, given their rich intellectual background in socialanalysis and with universities from other countries that share related projects andinterests.

Although the knowledge society, a parallel project that to a large extent supportsglobalisation, is based on science, it mainly advocates technological applications withessentially financial objectives. In many aspects, the knowledge society is not onlyexclusive in as much as it increases inequality among individuals and nations, but italso seems to be increasingly ignoring some very essential issues. Latin Americanorganisations must assume not only an economic or political, but also an environmental,social and cultural responsibility in which workers and users, and the community as a

whole, can find common directions that channel their freedom in these areas.

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Notes

1 A first version of this paper was presented at the First European-Latin American CaribbeanInternational Management Conference, Monterrey, Mexico, 1517 October 2008.

2 The Solitude of Latin America, Nobel lecture for the Nobel Prize in Literature, 1982.

3 North American Politician.




4 Years later, the author would write: We must become independent, preserve the natural and

moral borders of our homeland, we must perpetuate our American and Latin race, develop theRepublic, dispel the national trivialities to elevate the great American nation, the SouthernConfederation (Bilbao, 1866).

5 Ms aislados se encuentran, desunidos, esos pueblos nacidos para aliarse: La unin es sudeber, su ley amarse: Igual origen tienen y misin; la raza de la Amrica latina, al frentetiene la sajona raza, enemiga mortal que ya amenaza Su libertad destruir y su pendn.Las dos Amricas, Jos Mara Torres Caicedo (1856).

6 The EZLN first made itself known on 1 January 1994, the same day that the North AmericanFree Trade Agreement came into force.

7 French sociologist.

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