The Study Of Cultural Forgiveness And Concession Phenomena Between Chinese And German Workers In FAW-Volkswagen

Transnational enterprises are playing a more and more important role in the world economy today. They accelerate the trade contacts across countries, use the world resources in a more effective way, convey the advanced science and technology and managing methods to all over the world, besides, they propel the collision,communication and fusion across cultures as well. In recent years, more and more topics come from transnational enterprises are talked about, especially those dealing with the conflicts beween the host culture and the strange culture when the company carry on the transnational actions. How can the companies do to make the host cultures adape to the strange culture more quickly? What kind of conflicts companies will meet in the process of transnational actions? What lead to these conflicts? How to curtail the conflict process? All the questions cast a hot challenge ball to the company leaders and the relative researchers.Based on the deep analysis of the concept of culture,enterprise culture and the cultural differences between Chinese and German companies, this thesis will demonstrate the cultural conflict problems happened in the Chinese-German joint ventures, who are running in China. The cases will deal with the aspects of the differences of value cultures, institution cultures and thinking meathods and habbits. Then the thesis will clarify that the way of cultural forgiveness and concession is the main way to solve the cultural conflicts between the workers from different countries, and form the cultural forgiveness and concession mode later on. At last, advices on how to shorten the cultural forgiveness and concession process between the two sides will be given. Here the content will be introduced further: Thiandis H C, the famouse culture psychological expert, considers that culture to the society is like memory to the person. Memory is the collection of personal experieces, and at the same way, culture is the result of the society history developing process. Truthfully, culture has an indivisible relationship with the society. People can see the independent and self-oriented Americans, the earnest and rigorous Germany and the modest and courteous Japaness. Every nation has its characteristics that can distinguish itself from other nations, while deep behind these superficial phenomina are the value, faith and action rules, which give reasons to people's thinking methods, habbits and other actions.In fact, enterprise culture is the miniature of the society culture, and has an indivisible relationship with it. For instance, American workers can discuss the strategic decision lightly with their leaders; German workers tend to make rigorous rules; and the Japanese companies will put more consideration on the workers' personal needs. But as an independent unit, enterprise culture has its own character, which is the leader's will. This will makes the enterprise culture vary from each other in thousands of ways and the culture merging process in cross countries managing actions more compalicated.Numerous differences exist between China and Germany, dealing with historic culture, society culture and people's thinking methods and habbits. As a reflection of these, in China-Germany joint venture, the differences are obvious. For instance, Chinese workers consider more about face and relationship; they hold multiple-action time concept, which makes them more tact and flexible, and lessly adhere to the plan. While German workers possess single-action time concept, which decises that they stress principles and rules, follow plans and tend to be more serious and conscientious. All the differences make it easy to bring about conflicts when the workers from the two sides come to cooperate together. Considering of this, the author interviewed couple of domestic and foreign workers, and summed up nine cases, dealing with time concept, goal of meeting, level institution, problem-solving method, thinking method, attitude to promise, attitude to quality, effect of relationship and view to teamwork.In the fifth chapter, basing on the front theories and cases, the author comes up with the cultural forgiveness and concession theory, one of the cultural conflict solving methods between nonacculturalation singles. The cultural forgiveness and concession theory is not the kind of relation that one over the other one, but a process the two sides understand and learn from each other. There are .three steps in the process, which are that one feels astonished and doesn't understand firstly; then he tries to find out the hidden reasons, accepts them; finally he will adopt his own way of thoughts and actions according to the strange culture, and try to find a more appropriate way to solve the problem.The last but not the least, during the process, the two sides in the conflict need to remain a tolerant state of mind to learn and comprehend the strange culture. As a result of this, the two cultures will have a part to blend together, which can form a flat for the two sides to communicate. In the final part of the thesis, the author brought up the mode of cultural forgiveness and concession, and further the mode of multi-cultural forgiveness and concession when the former one. is put into multi-culture enterprises. Then some advice is given to the joint ventures to shorten the communication process between the foreign and domestic workers.