Organizations and national culture

Abstract

The paper deals with the most important contributions in studying cultural influences on organizations. The interest of social scientists in this topic began in the 1960s, based on the belief that it was necessary to overcome the dominant parochialism of US researchers in organizational theory and practice. Increasing internationalization of business activities, especially in the 1970s, imposed the need for large-scale studies and for finding practical solutions to the completely new problems encountered by multicultural organizations whose number was constantly rising. In spite of numerous and serious difficulties in every cross-cultural organizational study, several decades of development in this field have produced important theoretical and empirical contributions, enabling further advances in this scientific and practical discipline.