(Positivist view) How does culture influence this situation? Which are the cultural dimensions and values influencing the situation?

(Interpretive view) What does this situation mean to the actors involved? Which meanings do they associate with this issue?

(Critical) What is at stake in this situation? To what extent is this situation the outcome of power struggles, where ‘culture’ is used as a device?

(For more details see Table 5 in this chapter.)

IHRM practices are influenced by cultural dimensions. For example, in a high Power Distance environment, organisations are likely to have a large proportion of supervisory personnel, and privileges and status symbols for managers that are both expected and accepted. Additional examples can be found for instance in Hofstede (2001) or House et al., (2004).

Managers need to be aware of the ways employees make sense of their working environment: what it means to them. For example, detailed and seemingly constraining job descriptions were perceived as emancipatory tools by employees of the Société d’Electricité du Cameroun, since it could protect them from abusive use of power, a current problem they were facing (see Henry, 2007). Additional examples can be found for instance in d’Iribarne (2002) or Primecz et al. (2011).

When organisational members are talking about cultural differences, this could be a rhetorical device used to gain advantage in a power struggle. For example, organisational or national culture differences are shown to be used to explain why a merger failed, thus thereby occluding other problems that may not have been addressed.