A Study Of Cultural Preparation For Chinese Enterprises' Cross-border Operations

Economic globalization has been an unstoppable trend since 1990s. Faced with this global trend, more and more Chinese enterprises, especially the large-scale ones, embarked on businesses abroad, seeking more rapid development in a broader market. However, cross-border operations are quite subject to fluctuations in the world economy. Compared with domestic operations, they are conducted in a more complicated environment and under more uncertain circumstances. That's why Chinese enterprises have been encountered with many obstacles and setbacks. The obstacle which deserves special attention is the one posed by cultural differences. It has been proven by many cases that a torpid sense of culture and lack of international experience are the major causes of multinational companies' failures in a new cultural environment. This problem is even more severe for Chinese enterprises with relatively scarce experience. Actually, many enterprises have made tremendous efforts in constructing a cross-cultural management mode. However, the results didn't turn out to be that satisfactory, which are largely due to insufficient preparations. Preparedness ensures success and unpreparedness spells failure, which means that Chinese enterprises must make preparations well ahead of time, in order to minimize the negative impacts brought by cultural differences. The subject of this thesis is simply chosen against this background.By reviewing the existent literatures and materials concerning cross-cultural businesses, it's found that this field of study hasn't received enough attention. The concept of cultural preparations hasn't been addressed explicitly, for which reason many literatures with a bearing on it just touch some single aspect of it or discuss in very general terms, instead of studying the issue more microscopically. This thesis raises the concept of cultural preparations in a definite way and proves the necessity of cultural preparation.Considering that a better preparation comes from understanding where you already are, this thesis comes up with several types of criteria to appraise how an enterprise has prepared. The interrelationship between the criteria is explained and appraisal principles and measures are given.The essence of this thesis is the discussion of how Chinese enterprises shall prepare well culturally. The preparations shall be made at corporate level and individual level, covering extracting and processing knowledge and converting them into capabilities and skills, and also with the consideration of building and updating the corporate culture, as well as promoting the cultural image of an enterprise. These preparations are categorized into three types: short-term, long-term and cycles, with all the specific aspects discussed under an organic mechanism of cultural preparation for cross-border operations. The general preparation flow is explained and interactive effects among the preparations are analyzed. Based on an integration of existing achievements in the fields concerned, different aspects of the preparation are discussed respectively, with modes, methods or measures developed for them.Besides the theoretic analysis, this thesis conducts a brief case study of Haier and raises the in-depth orientations to be researched into next under this subject.