Paul S. Kirkbride

Chinese Conflict Preferences and Negotiating Behaviour: Cultural and Psychological Influences:

This paper analyzes the extent to which both traditional Chinese cultural values and Chinese psychology influence Chinese perceptions and approaches to conflict resolution and thus affect Chinese negotiating behaviour. An attempt is made to illustrate salient cultural values and orientations, and empirical data is used to identify Chinese conflict preferences. The extent to which both these cultural values and conflict preferences have shaped a distinctive Chinese negotiation style is then examined.

International strategies of corporate culture change: emulation, consumption and hybridity

The paper describes the symbolic representation of corporate culture within the context of a Hong Kong Chinese company in the broader context of strategic responses to the international intersection of organisation and management systems. This symbolic representation incorporates and indexes aspects of a Western culturally constituted world that is largely alien to one important stakeholder group, namely, the Chinese organisation membership. Such a disjuncture engenders an inhibition to an effective reading of the corporate culture message, so weakening the effect of the intended change. The paper discusses three interlocking themes. First, the issue of the emulation of the corporate culture notion, as conceived and formulated in the USA, in other cultural settings. Second, a consideration of a multi‐stakeholder perspective on corporate culture, in which it is considered as a strategic move with respect to externalities rather than the internal system. Third, the intersection of management systems which results in mutual inter‐penetrations, thus engendering responses of appropriation, adaptation and hybridity rather than merely imposition or assimilation. The author feels such interactive aspects of international business and the associated responses are in need of greater attention.

Power and the bargaining process. Comment. See "A conceptualization of collective bargaining power," by Terry L. Leap and David W. Grigsby (39:2, Jan. 1986, p. 202)

A RECENT article by Leap and Grigsby (L&G) in this journal reviews some of the American literature on power, outlines a general model of power in the context of the organized collective bargaining relationship, and proposes a research agenda. Although we sympathize with many of L&Gs observations (such as those concerning the cursory treatment of the concept of bargaining in the industrial relations literature), we feel that the model they propose has serious flaws. These flaws, which are exacerbated by an overconcentration on a particular form of collective bargaining in a specific national context, weaken their model and cast doubt on the wisdom of the research agenda they propose. L&G posit a range of sources of potential collective bargaining power, which, in the right conditions, can be transformed into enacted collective bargaining power, manifested by tactical actions. Those actions produce collective bargaining outcomes. The transformational fac-