organizational models and_culture._a_reflection_from_latin_america

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

Copyright © 2009 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

Organisational models and culture: a reflection from Latin America1

Luis Montaño-Hirose Department of Economics, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana – Unidad Iztapalapa, Av. San Rafael Atlixco No. 186, Col. Vicentina, C.P. 09340, Iztapalapa, México D.F. Email: [email protected]

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

Keywords: Latin America; organisational models; culture; modernity and postmodernity.

Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Montaño-Hirose, L. (2009) ‘Organisational models and culture: a reflection from Latin America’, European J. International Management, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp.146–166.

Biographical note: Luis Montaño-Hirose is a Professor of Organisation Studies at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (UAM), Mexico. He holds a PhD in Organisation Sciences at Université de Paris IX-Dauphine, France, and has been a Visiting Professor at Osaka no Machi Daigaku (Osaka City University), Japan, École Polytéchnique, France, and École des Hautes Études Commerciales, Canada. He has produced several articles and books. He was Director of the Organization Studies Postgraduate Program at UAM and President 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 independence and originality should become a Western aspiration.”

Gabriel García Márquez2

1 Introduction

In this day and age, few academics question the importance of the concept of culture in characterising organisations, nations and even large regions of the world. The ongoing discussion between modernity and culture appears to have been abandoned. However, in Latin 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, instrumental rationality, technological display and the global village; while modernity seems to waver between 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 section discusses the relevance of the concepts of culture and modernity on two levels. First, in what sense can we talk about culture in a modern, globalised world? Second, is culture the most suitable way of referring to a social space that contains as broad a spectrum of modernities as Latin America does? The second section offers a brief reflection on Latin America’s modernisation process and its relationship with culture. Will Latin America’s modernisation support the notion of a culturally globalised world in the future? The third section discusses the history, transfer and re-appropriation of organisational models, and questions their cultural relevance and contribution to organisational and social development. Are such models as transferable as the majority of business schools seem to believe, given their high level of technical and instrumental rationality? This article thus uses two of the most controversial and elusive concepts in the humanities and social sciences, 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 Rouquié (1989) notes, America is the continent of the misunderstood: the New World was discovered while explorers sought the route to the Indies. The first accounts described mermaids, footless birds, hogs with navels on their haunches, and were convinced that of the continent harboured the fountain of eternal youth. Latin America is not an abstract concept, as Henry Kissinger3 once said, but simply an ambiguous one. Broadly speaking, it refers to a part of the American continent in which mainly Romance languages derived from Vulgar Latin – Spanish and Portuguese – are spoken. It is also used to refer to all the countries in the Western hemisphere located south of the United States. The term ‘Latin America’ was first used in 1856, both by the Chilean writer and politician, Francisco Bilbao (1866), at a conference;4 and by the Colombian writer, José María Torres Caicedo, in his poem ‘The Two Americas’.5 It was used shortly afterwards during the French invasion on Mexican territory by Napoleon III in 1862. Seen from a geostrategic and cultural point of view, these first three historical references to Latin America share the need to recognise a certain cultural and geopolitical unity, in order to differentiate the region from a threatening Anglo-Saxon America. Bilbao and Torres 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: Simón Bolívar preferred the name Colombia since he considered Christopher Columbus to be worthier than Américo Vespucio. It has also been argued that the term ‘Latin America’ excludes the indigenous peoples 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 an attempt to depict the region’s diversity, such as Ibero-America, Hispanic America, Indo-America and even, as Carlos Fuentes (1992) proposes, Indo-Afro-Euro-America. The controversy over culture is even more heated, particularly when it comes to the eternal question of whether this great geographical space, characterised by two main languages,

148 L. Montaño-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, but always affirmative: Latin America exists as a cultural reality.

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

Huntington proposes the concept of civilisation for recognising cultural spaces in a very broad sense. This author conceives civilisation as the broadest level of cultural expression, providing the individual with his most generic identity. He recognises seven major 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. Although he recognises some specifics of Latin American civilisation, Huntington deals with it too 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 – by considering it the creator of modernity, thus imposing the idea of white supremacy. He also ferociously attacks the multiculturality of his own country, the United States, which he sees as a terrible threat, forgetting the nation’s historical process of development and the important role played by immigrants. The author’s stance is more like that of a politician committed to a particular extremist ideology than that of a scholar interested in understanding and mediation. In this way, he openly scorns certain civilisations that he deems dangerous, such as the Muslim or Chinese civilisations; or lesser, due to their lower profile participation on the global stage, such as Latin America and Africa. In keeping with Spengler (1993), he considers that the United States has entered a phase of marked decadence, which manifests itself in antisocial behaviour, family break up, the deterioration 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 argues that international conflicts are more often a result of clashes of civilisations than of political or economic issues.

The notion of culture does not imply, as is sometimes supposed, total homogeneity or behavioural 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 culture as separate from economic, political and social development. In this vein, Inglehart and Carballo (2008) offer an analysis of the relationship between economic development and cultural change. The authors argue that although the former can profoundly transform certain social practices, many old principles and values are nonetheless jealously preserved. Some of these changes brought about by modernity include the development of education, equal rights for women, the democratisation of society and the desire to achieve a better quality of life. These elements are grouped under the generic heading of self-expression as opposed to the values associated with the simple promotion of economic development for the sake of survival. Another fundamental aspect of modernity, they argue, is the gradual substitution of religious or traditional beliefs by the principles of secular or rational order. Based on these two statistically founded ideas, the authors recognise eight major cultural regions: the Confucian, which includes Japan and China, 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, while less economically developed countries, such as the Islamic and African nations, are characterised by religious and survival values.

According to this study, Latin America is located in a cultural zone in which religious values 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 the United States. Without doubt, the methodological bases of the survey should be analysed in depth in order to identify, in detail, the stratification of the sample and the complete questionnaire. 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 sample consists mainly of urban populations, and includes very few or no representatives from native 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 between economic development and sociocultural dynamics discards the importance of the inverse relationship, that is to say, the way in which values and beliefs, for example, affect economic behaviour, which is the analytical idea privileged in organisational analyses (Hofstede, 1991).

We believe that a more appropriate way of constructing a global configuration that considers cultural aspects is the one formulated by Darcy Ribeiro (1984), who identifies four categories of extra-European societies that have emerged from different historical and cultural processes: the transplanted, the testimony, the new and the emerging. The first 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, of Argentina and Uruguay, the most European countries on the subcontinent. The testimony peoples consist of great civilisations that were not totally assimilated to European models, such as the Japanese or Hindu cultures; or in America countries such as Guatemala, Mexico, Peru and Bolivia, with indigenous populations that preserve many of their original cultural aspects, thus preventing the establishment of a homogenous cultural unity. According to the author, new peoples represent a sui generis cultural project. They consist of nations that have managed to blend ethnic diversity through miscegenation – European, indigenous and black in Latin America, sometimes attaining high 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 include the indigenous communities – Mayas, Aymaras, Incas – among others, who ceaselessly claim their cultural right to self-determination.

The author addresses the concept of civilisation in the context of economic development and proposes that transplanted peoples have achieved the most advanced modernisation processes, while testimony peoples have encountered serious obstacles in this process. As survivors of ancient civilisations, their incorporation into modernity has been incomplete; their encounter with Europe signalled the end of glorious eras but they also 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 always seen as extremely backwards and anchored in their past, and unable to encounter modernity.

Although Ribeiro’s work is highly suggestive, some of his points require clarification, as we shall discuss later on. Nations were not built on the basis of cultural affinities, but according to economic and political criteria. As Carlos Fuentes (1992) so rightly said, borders are the scars of geopolitics. This translates into a high level of cultural heterogeneity for some countries. Therefore, we can observe that there are certain social sectors that are representative of several of the societies proposed by Ribeiro. This is the case, for example, of Mexico, a country in which we see sectors that have reproduced in their own way the mentality and lifestyles of countries from the centre 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, which miscegenation has provided with a particular identity. Finally, as occurred recently in the state of Chiapas in Mexico, we can even find rebellions, like that of the National Liberation Zapatista Army, that demand particular cultural rights and forms of organisation inherited from their indigenous past.6 Although in this case, tradition and modernity paradoxically exist side by side, there are other cases in which tradition and modernity mingle in attempts to imagine a future that is consistent with a people’s past, as in the recent case of the new political constitution approved by Ecuadorians in which they recognise their thousand-year-old roots, exalt Pacha Mama, a female divinity that protects the indigenous world, and declare themselves to be a multinational, intercultural nation, 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 to the countries or regions that preserved their old traditions, strongly rooted in religious beliefs. Their time is said to be circular, forming a sort of vicious circle that is impossible to unfurl and integrate into the linear time of rationality and progress. Modernity was interpreted as Westernisation, i.e. not just as the possibility of political consensus and economic growth based on respect for individual rights, but as a completely new lifestyle. But, what features does modernity assume in Latin America? Table 1 shows two countries that concentrate just over half of the region’s population: Brazil, with 195 million inhabitants, and Mexico, with 107 million. The population differences are extreme. Belize, the smallest of the countries considered in this study, has only 294,000 inhabitants and Uruguay just over 3 million. In other words, Brazil’s population is 600 times larger than that of Belize and Mexico’s population is 32 times larger than that 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 America’s population lives in cities, even though a large number of people (almost 131 million) do live in rural areas. Argentina, Uruguay and Venezuela possess the highest percentages of urban population – nearly 92%, while in countries such as Belize, Haiti and Honduras the figure amounts to less than 50%. Another indicator is the proportion 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% in services. 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 most service-oriented nations are Argentina and Uruguay, with over 70%. Nevertheless, behind these general indicators of modernity lies a social reality that cannot be readily extrapolated from them. Urban life is an outcome, for many Latin American cities, of the departure 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 (García, 1989; García, 1995).

Latin American modernity has other serious problems too. With regard to employment, a very conservative estimate would be that about 8.5% of the economically active population is unemployed; this translates into 46 million people, the equivalent of the total population of Argentina, Panama and Paraguay. Moreover, 55 million people in Latin America are illiterate, of which 38% are Brazilian; while 45% of Haitians cannot read or write. Poverty and extreme poverty are the region’s 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 total population of Mexico, Colombia, Argentina and Chile together. More than 30% of the population of Guatemala, Bolivia, Paraguay and Nicaragua lives in extreme poverty. It is important to note that Cecchini and Uthoff (2008) indicate that poverty and extreme poverty 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 is Chile – 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 this struggle.

Despite this large social deficit, modernity manifests itself in different ways in the region. Some of the most developed countries, such as Brazil, Mexico, Argentina and Chile, have increased their international investments through a few companies known as trans-Latin corporations. In effect, since the nineties, foreign investment by corporations from emerging countries has achieved unprecedented levels. The Boston Consulting Group (2006) estimates that of the 100 top transnational companies from emerging economies, 41 are Chinese, 22 Latin American and 20 Indian; while among the top Latin American firms, 13 are Brazilian, seven Mexican, one Argentinean and one Chilean. 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 lower labour costs or the availability of natural resources, but increasingly makes use of new technologies, access to international financial circuits and efficient management systems. In a recent report, the journal América Economía (2008) indicated that the 20 most globalised trans-Latin companies conduct 63% of their sales overseas and have approximately 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 every society and that the modalities adopted by said institutional development in Latin America are shaped by their colonial past. The author highlights, among other key factors, the amount of natural resources and human settlements in each country. Thus, in countries with large amounts of natural resources and local labour, such as Mexico, Peru and Bolivia, exclusive institutions were generated that facilitated the development of powerful elites based on coercive recruitment and exploitation systems. In this sense, Bagú (1992) indicates that the apparent lack of motivation to improve the labour quality of indigenous workers can be explained by the fact that Europe was only interested in economic and political benefits it could gain from Latin America, which resulted from two things: quantity and obedience. In other countries, where natural resources were scarce or the population was diminished or had been decimated, such as in Argentina and Uruguay, the institutions generated were more collective and democratic, emphasising the need for public services.

Approaches based on so-called ‘postcolonial theory’ can shed some light on the role of the distant past in the evolution of the said societies and can help us to clarify the concept of modernity. The main thesis of postcolonial theory, which was promoted originally by literary critics and philosophers and later adopted by anthropologists and sociologists, is that colonialism left an indelible mark on the historical evolution of these societies – coloniality – and that it is, therefore, necessary to rethink these developments from a more emancipating perspective (Said, 1978). In this context, colonialism is a sine qua non for the emergence of modernity and represents, for the most critical, the backyard of modernity (Mignolo, 2007). This is why Europe, Castro-Gómez (2007) argues, turning to Dussel (2007), should no longer be understood as an independent component that radiates a universal vision of modernity, but as a systemic hub that implies both domination and civilising imposition. The first modernity, the discovery of the New World and its annexation to the geo-imaginary European space, implied for many inhabitants the fragmentation of their collective identity that had been forged over centuries: they were dispatched on a quest to conquer a new sense of cultural identity. The core-periphery model would later lead to the formulation, in the sixties, of dependency theory (Cardoso and Faletto, 1969), which criticises the marginal role assigned to less developed nations in the world system. The economic development of the core necessarily implies, according to this theory, the permanent underdevelopment of a weak, fragmented periphery. This modernity classified itself as peripheral, that is to say, as an unattainable state in relation to USA or European standards. Moreover, the modern idea of progress, through development theory, generated, in the same time period, the notion of backward modernity. At the beginning of the sixties, Rostov (1961) proposed that every economy should go through five stages, beginning with the traditional stage of personal consumption and ending with the stage of high mass consumption. In this way, some Latin American economies considered that the import substitution model constituted a stage on the path to development and that backwardness was circumstantial, since one day they would be able to access the select field of developed 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 that has 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 the end of the world’s great explanations and the recognition of various institutional crises – family, hospital, school, State – (Dubet and Martuccelli, 1996; Dubet, 2002) that alter the reference points for individuals’ social and personal lives. This led Touraine (1997) to propose the concept of demodernisation, a process characterised by the breakdown of the institutional setting owing to the relaxation or disappearance of codified behavioural standards, which produces, according to the author, a state of a lack of communication between 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, we could say that this process began in the last few years of the 19th century with growing economic and technological rationalisation and the appearance of the first administrative systems. In this sense, the most congruent proposals are those that, instead of adhering to the 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 (Pagès 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 the destructuring of collective identities.

European modernity gradually displaced its centre of gravity towards the United States. The resulting emphasis on the economic environment, at the expense of the political and socio-cultural settings, has produced many negative consequences: the citizen, the European figure par excellence, has faded away in favour of the consumer (García, 1995). Furthermore, as a result of economic over-dimensioning, management studies enjoy a preponderant place in the modern vision of development. This is significant for the rest of the world, but it has had a particularly big impact on Latin 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, which led it to become the world leader in the construction and transfer of organisational models founded on the idea of universal applicability. Instrumental rationality, separated from its original ideal-type methodological nature (Weber, 1970; Aguilar, 1998) and from any subjective assessment – traditional, charismatic or moral – proposed the bureaucratic archetype as the optimal organisational system, which turned out to be the epistemological foundation for the resulting organisational models. This modernity, based mainly on instrumental rationality, promoted an extremely rational, positivist vision that ruled out, in the majority of US specialists, the possibility of any proposal that questioned the rational action of the individual. Therefore, what Touraine (1993) called anti-modernity, such as psychoanalytical proposals that openly questioned rational knowledge of the self and of others, remained taboo (Montaño-Hirose, 2007c).

4 Organisational models: construction, transfer and appropriation

Organisational models constitute, from the perspective of modernity, a relevant instrument for progress and social change and can be broadly understood as representations 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 are necessary. These models are usually constructed by organisations from developed countries in order to demonstrate the great potential of these social units and to serve as an example to those who wish to attain similar results. New sociological institutionalism (DiMaggio and Powell, 1999) notes a growing trend towards the structural isomorphism of organisations due to the increasing homogeneity of professional training (Mills and Hatfield, 1999; Hedmo et al., 2005), as well as great challenges in applying systems based on instrumental rationality, that is to say, to establish precise objectives and to adopt means through which to accomplish them, since imposing specific operational systems on them involves recognising so-called organised anarchies, and also the dominance of some organisations over others. Even though these organisations appear to be structurally alike formally, they actually operate according to different systems of meaning shaped by culture, which can result in similar structures but different behaviours or in similar behaviours with different meanings (Iribarne, 2003a; Iribarne, 2003b). The over-emphasis on the economic over the social environment fostered by the modernisation process has, in this way, propitiated the idea of universality, based on the merely formal aspects of organisations. Such models correspond to the imaginary representation that exists of the core countries’ great private enterprise, in particular in the United States, and its representation of the Japanese business experience that it incorporates into its system under the generic term of flexibilisation (Montaño-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 a particular area of the organisation to which significant amounts of resources will be assigned in order to achieve visible results in the short and medium terms (March and Olsen, 1997). It is, therefore, a limited success presented as a general success, and it serves to conceal the necessary inattention to some areas, such as economic and social costs that it generates. In fact, the long-term optimisation of the whole is restricted by several aspects. One of them is the result of the organisation’s very nature; its operation is structurally loosely coupled, which means that it is made up of heteroclite elements that seek to preserve, through the use of their relative autonomy, a particular functional and/or social identity (Weick, 1976; Montaño-Hirose, 2007b). Formal organisational objectives are not reproduced faithfully in each of the business units nor are they fully internalised by all the actors. They construct – rationally and culturally – their own strategies for negotiating their collaboration by means of the creation and maintenance of zones of uncertainty consisting of organisational problems whose solutions can only be accessed by a certain type of actors (Crozier and Friedberg, 1977). Moreover, the models only 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 organisation’s image will be enhanced. The concentration of efforts in a line of action is, therefore, more profitable in terms of creating greater credibility than their distribution in different actions. Some of the social beliefs that predominate at certain times, such as environmental sustainability, gender equality or social responsibility, can be incorporated into diverse organisational internal policies 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 changing the concentration of resources and reducing the time spent on previous actions. There is a tendency to analyse problems in a fragmented manner or separately – human resources, technology, finances, for example – and to think that there is a particular theoretical instrument for solving each and every one of them quickly.

Organisational models are normally constructed by means of abstracting the social elements – historical, political and cultural – that have contributed directly or indirectly to the organisation’s formation and dynamics. This notably increases the perception that universal models are founded on logical elements and therefore that their operation is separate from the social context in which they originated. This is a highly seductive idea since it is presented as a simplified linear scheme, with simple recipes that are far removed from their real complexity. The positive aspects are generally idealised, while the negative aspects are carefully concealed. For example, the psychological violence fomented by said models within the organisation, the unemployment that they generate, the high levels of stress they produce and the contradictions that result from the simultaneous use of various models, amongst other things, are ignored (Montaño-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 uncertainty and short-term direction, amongst other aspects mentioned as characteristics of Latin American organisations (Dávila and Martínez, 1999), together with deficiencies in education 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 an explicit and implicit negotiation that, taking into account the possible meanings that its use involves, allows the members of the organisation to ‘calculate’ its possible operative and 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 of which are not very reputable. The hegemony achieved by the United States in this setting is unquestionable. The production and commercialisation of these models is an entire business in itself. Consulting offices normally operate as ‘garbage can’ systems (March and Olsen, 1997), offering previously formulated solutions, representative of the latest trends (Czarniawska, 2005) for a wide variety of problems. The international homogeneity of business plans and programmes is surprising; emphasis is placed, with a few exceptions, on professional and technical training to the detriment of social reflection: investment in research in Latin American countries is minimal in comparison with the investment made in more advanced countries or with national investment related to education, which is normally a party to the reproduction of said models. This is evident in the few research doctorates in business administration and related disciplines, in Latin America, which creates dependence on and the unquestioned transfer of such models.

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

Culture had been interpreted as a barrier to the entrance of modernity, having been confined to mere tradition, or, in the best of cases, to a residual element of organisational 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 the sixties made US researchers aware of the extremely interwoven relationship between culture and productivity. The proposal stemming from this analysis was not to reconstruct the national culture, which would be impossible to achieve in a system that prioritises 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 turn towards the vision that it had created of the Far East of yesteryear, highlighting its original tendency towards low-cost and low-quality production owing to its cultural particularities that prevented it from fully assuming Western rationality (Montaño-Hirose, 2003). Subsequently, US researchers and consultants reformulated these representations and incorporated concepts such as productive and structural flexibility into their own vision of modernity, thus making it seem easy to transfer the Japanese model to Western business proactively (Abegglen and Stalk, 1987).

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


periphery as the imperfect expression of the core. Calás and Smircich (1999) argue that colonised countries have been silenced as a result of their ‘traditional’, ‘less developed’ or ‘primitive’ nature. This representation is simultaneously double: it defines modernity and periphery at the same time, though the latter is a product of the necessary hybridisation produced by coloniality, which makes both the local and the core expressions possible. In this sense, Frenkel and Shenhav (2003, 2006) indicate that the very concept of hybridity is extremely useful for discerning the postcolonial content of Americanisation, particularly with reference to models exported from the United States and of the new realities that they generate both when they are accepted and when they are rejected. Although the discussion on the Latin American reality, from the theoretical viewpoint of post-coloniality, has made some progress (Jáuregui and Moraña, 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 countries under the premise that since these countries were former colonial possessions, their destiny 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 a whole, 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 of questions rather than a set of affirmations. Culture, modernity and Latin America are, as mentioned at the beginning, complex concepts. Each of them alludes to different levels of reality and they are constantly reformulated according to the social space and time in which they exist. They are also concomitant and opposite to other series of concepts with which they both complement and clash, thus expressing the complexity and dynamics of social action.

5.1 Towards a new paradigm?

Touraine (2005) provocatively suggests the need for a paradigmatic change in our way of thinking 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 in conceptualising social actors. The first great paradigm, the political, highlighted the study of social reality in terms of the State – the nation, sovereignty, revolution, or the public services. 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 the author, the principal social issues are of a cultural nature, and stem from questions about new expressions of identity and violence. Demodernisation, that is to say the growing loss of institutional reference points, blurs the modern idea of society. This disinstitutionalisation entails the possibility of generating a new relationship of the individual with him or herself, liberating a certain potential for freedom and responsibility.


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 untimely manner in globalisation, in order to understand the current social situation it is also necessary to desist from contemplating the past exclusively in terms of the other two paradigms. In effect, culture should not be understood as an environment that is completely independent from society, since historically it is shaped in close relation to political and socio-economic aspects. Although, as Touraine7 points out, eminently cultural conflicts do exist, such as the case of Bosnia, and we cannot ignore their political content. Neither, in the case of apparently economic conflicts like oil, can we permit an analysis that does not include the cultural details of Islam.

Thus, culture does not represent an autonomous environment, but is always closely interwoven in other social settings and gradually constructs and reformulates its significance 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 its path 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 to establishing the basis for colonial occupation have infiltrated various aspects of economic and political development of the Latin American nations.

In the case of Latin America, we are currently witnessing a kind of great historical return. For years, culture has been an excellent analytical element for explaining the region’s social structure, its high level of heterogeneity, its fusion of the past with the present, in addition to the intricacies of its identity, and many other phenomena. It is not surprising that history and anthropology, as well as literature have constituted essential, prestigious academic disciplines in these countries’ search for specificity. Without discrediting this, it is also true that the region’s modern environments have been addressed from sociology, economics and political science. The current state of the subcontinent calls for a more integral vision in which culture acquires a more prominent role that provides a more coherent vision of the region’s complexity, that is to say, a broad 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 great reflexive 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 and administrative post-modernities, backwards political modernities that lead to neglect, outstanding delimited economic modernities with a highly technological content that co-exist closely with pre-modern forms based on barter, and dismodernities resulting from disenchantment with improper institutional operations, all form the broad spectrum of the complexity of social action and meaning. Therefore, the conquest of a common cultural space that provides this extremely heterogeneous subcontinent with an identity, recovering its common past and respecting the particularities of its development, would be useful in establishing the possible basis for collaboration between these countries if they have to build economic and political development on similar needs and related cultural backgrounds.


5.3 From cultures to macrocultures?

In this paper, we have assumed the existence of Latin America as a specific geocultural space, with all its particularities, as the European Union proposes. Macroculture does not in any way deny the particularities of countries and regions assume and which they vehemently defend, and by rejecting the idea of environmental determinism, we should extend the notion of limited autonomy not only to countries and regions, but also to organisations and individuals themselves. In this framework of unity, diversity and relative autonomy, would it perhaps be possible to establish political and economic collaborative relations founded on solid cultural bases of mutual respect and appreciation between macrocultures, for example between Latin America and Europe? Is it possible to form bi-regional relations that consider sociocultural development as something apart 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 the Río Group, successor of the Contadora Group, which is an informal organisation whose origins date back to the resolution of the armed conflicts in Central America. Despite all of this, in a world that has been characterised by the clash of cultures, there are still global regions in which social collaboration might be a reality.

5.4 What is Latin America’s agenda?

The environments for and levels of action are very diverse, ranging from diplomatic relations to the establishment of economic agreements and the reinforcement of collaborative actions in the areas of migration and education among Latin American countries and among these countries and other global regions. I believe that it is crucial to reinforce the political, family and educational institutional settings in the face of the preponderance that economics has acquired in our social lives. Given the limitations of this document, I will only refer to the latter with regard to organisational studies. Studies on the Latin American reality involve a multiple effort, both in disciplinary and international terms. In the first case, bridges should not only be built between business administration 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 to the sociology of work or political economics, but also to history, philosophy and anthropology. These academic traditions have different epistemologies that are difficult to 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 in order to avoid the simple import of organisational models by countries with the highest levels of economic development. Autonomy can only be achieved by increasing research activities. In the field of business administration, these activities are limited in Latin America, which has very few doctoral programmes. The creation of national and international research networks that also support the establishment and reinforcement of joint doctorates and research projects is one of the main actions to undertake. Our fellow Latin American countries are not part of any domination scheme that reproduces the core-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 America’s identity. This does not rule out increasing participation with European universities in which organisational studies often have a high level of social content, given their rich intellectual background in social analysis and with universities from other countries that share related projects and interests.

Although the knowledge society, a parallel project that to a large extent supports globalisation, is based on science, it mainly advocates technological applications with essentially financial objectives. In many aspects, the knowledge society is not only exclusive in as much as it increases inequality among individuals and nations, but it also seems to be increasingly ignoring some very essential issues. Latin American organisations 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 Caribbean

International Management Conference, Monterrey, Mexico, 15–17 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 the Republic, dispel the national trivialities to elevate the great American nation, the Southern Confederation” (Bilbao, 1866).

5 “Más aislados se encuentran, desunidos, esos pueblos nacidos para aliarse: La unión es su deber, su ley amarse: Igual origen tienen y misión; la raza de la América latina, al frente tiene la sajona raza, enemiga mortal que ya amenaza Su libertad destruir y su pendón”. Las dos Américas, José María Torres Caicedo (1856).

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

7 French sociologist.