Culture and network institutions in Hong Kong: a hierarchy of perspectives. A response to Wilkinson: 'Culture, institutions and business in East Asia.'

Organization Studies, Spring, 1998 by Sid Lowe

Where new institutionalism does concur with Hofstede's work, it is in the recognition that psychological patterns or 'mental programmes' are different for different societies. Hofstede took nations as the principal unit of analysis, as a proxy for culture, and proposed that different value patterns around the world meant that universal theories of management and organization are incoherent, since all such theories are 'culture-bound' by the nationality of their authors and the national cultural context of their construction. Similarly, new institutionalists assume that different institutional domains evoke different cognitive, cathectic, and evaluative patterns that will create fundamentally diverse conceptions of economic, organizational and managerial practise. This implies that, within cultures, societies and nations, conceptions of appropriate economic-activity bases of market order and characteristics of competitive relations are likely to be idiosyncratic.

Wilkinson's error is in failing to see the fallacy of the institutionalists he cites. He regards their approach as having higher face validity, but fails to see that they have assumed culture away as an epiphenomenon. He builds upon the fallacy by critiquing culturists and institutionalists separately and fails to see the potential of integrating institutional and cultural approaches. The proposition here is that such a synthesis is able to answer Wilkinson's criticisms with regard to interests, ideology, socio-cultural determinism, and the neglect of politico-economic forces, and in order to achieve this synthesis, the foundation of a theoretical framework is prescient.

Towards a General Theoretical Framework

The foundations for a theoretical framework have already been developed. Such a framework is not detailed here, but some suggestions as to its outline and constituent elements are proposed. Two schemas which are likely to be most valuable in this regard describe 'culture' in terms of a 'tree' (Lessera and Neubauer 1994) and as a 'diamond' (Griswold 1994).

The first approach is intended to describe a 'layered cultural reality' (Lessem and Neubauer 1994: 11) which shows 'organically connected' (Lessem and Neubauer 1994: 10) cultural levels within systems metaphorically represented as a tree, with the 'leaves' depicting surface behaviour, attributes and attitudes, the 'trunk and branches' portraying institutions and ideas, and the 'roots' representing the deeper cultural influences. The tree metaphor depicts a complex interaction between cultural, institutional and behavioural factors. Ideology can be accommodated in a synthesis of cultural and institutional approaches, and, as a result, political questions, despite the doubts of Wilkinson (1996), can form an integral part of such approaches. The tree metaphor depicts culture as a multi-level phenomenon which exists as values, ideologies, institutions and everyday action. As a result, institutions are seen as a cultural form, just as ideology, politics \ interests, agency and action are also cultural forms. They sustain each other in similar a way to the way in which the leaves, branches, trunk and roots of a tree are interrelated and made interdependent by the same 'DNA'.