| In numerous ways the "societies" of the world are converging into material and cultural homogeneity. The impact of the "project of modernity" which emerged out of Western Europe--in such forms as increased monetarization, industrial production and energy use, beliefs in universal democratic rights, competitive capitalist efficiency, and organizational (bureaucratic) rationality--is transforming much of the brilliant cultural diversity around the globe into similar patterns of social existence.;Still, strong currents of historical and linguistic cultural formation among the "nations" of the world provide space for disparate forms and functioning even of modern institutions. Thus culture, defined in terms of the constituted practices of agents structuring a system of proper modes of interaction (following Giddens), can be determined to play a decisive role in differentiating the types of modernity found among various societies.;Many of the dominant forms of organization around the globe today can be characterized in terms of bureaucratic efficiency consistent with the early analysis of Max Weber. In the United States--long influenced by individualism, legal/rational forms of organization, and mechanical, utilitarian philosophies--large-scale enterprises such as Ford Motors tend to the extremes of impersonality in management and contractual narrowness in economic relations. In Japan, by way of contrast, even modern, economically-viable institutions like Toyota reflect a long conceptual history of individuals as person-in-context and the shared historical tradition of decision-making in terms of creative "intuition" rather than transcendent "principles.";The workings of these two multinational manufacturing corporations are compared first on the material, historical, and organizational levels by examining the business, management, and (positivist) social science literatures and then on the interpersonal level by use of several philosophical, postmodern interpretive, and linguistic approaches. Only then is the full resplendent power of culture made manifest. |
