Re-thinking culture's consequences on relationship creation and network formation in Asian markets

![CDATA[The increasing importance of Asian markets for future global economy and international business has been emphasized by business leaders and management gurus (Drucker & Nakauchi 1997). China, in particular, has become “the workshop of the world” (Roberts & Kynge 2003) and “the engine behind global trade growth” (Pfanner 2004). The pervasive influence of culture on Asia management systems and business behaviours warrant more dedicated academic attention (Chen 1995). So far, most studies on the impact of culture on the development of relationships and formation of networks in Asian country markets have been based on the etic (culture-general) approach which depends on evaluating markets by applying a set of underlying cultural dimensions as represented by Hofstede’s (1980, 1991, 2001) theory. For the most part these dimensions are ‘western’ concepts and research instruments which rest on the notion that different cultures are separated by politically defined and artificially created national boundaries. These studies are likely to be unsuitable for Asian markets where regional and ethnic boundaries are more likely to be different to political boundaries and where a number of culturally different regions and ethnic groups are to be found within the same political boundary.Furthermore, the reliance on ‘western’ based cultural dimensions ignores the existence of indigenous cultural traits that are unique to Asian markets. For example, whereas Hofstede (1980, 1991, 2001) bipolarizes national cultures in terms of ‘either/or’ dimensions such as femininity vs. masculinity, the Asian worldview and life style is intrinsically ‘both/and’ and paradoxical which is represented in the image of Yin Yang (Chen, 2001, 2002, Fang, 1999, 2003). In addition, the widely used cultural dimensions that have so far prevailed in the academic literature were derived either in the Cold War era or before the advent of the unprecedented globalization and Internet revolution. The changing nature of national culture given the free flow of information, capital, technology, and human resources, has been fundamentally missed in the current etic paradigm. It is timely to study the emergent global culture and its interactions with the core national culture (Bird & Stevens 2003). Because of these arguments, this paper proposes that an emic approach of assessing cultural drivers specific to Asian markets be used and then these markets will be clustered on the basis of cultural commonalities. The purpose of this paper is to develop an alternative approach to researching the impact of culture on relationship creation and network formation in Asian markets. We argue that the proposed approach is likely to provide a more comprehensive means of assessing culture’s consequence on predicting relationship creation and network formation in Asian markets.]]