Management Development In Europe: A Study In Cultural Contrast

Peter Lawrence is Professor of Comparative Management at Loughborough University and a member of the Human Resource and Change Management Research Unit. He argues that management development is less formalised and explicit in the countries of Continental Europe than it is in the Anglo-Saxon world. Using France and Germany as the main examples, he shows how their very different ways of making managers are shaped by cultural factors. Lawrence goes further by suggesting that these countries have a different conception of what management ‘is all about’. He implies that much of the recent talk of ‘internationalism’ is, in consequence, premature.