| Abstract: | This conceptual paper addresses a fundamental issue in understanding culture in relation to cross-cultural business relationships between Eastern and Western partners. The proposition is that contemporary cultural investigations have privileged Western lenses mostly involving scientific rationalism and Cartesian dualism. What is largely excluded are Eastern holistic lenses that are more sensitive to embodied context and paradoxical dualities. The paper explores these different epistemes and develops a synergistic or bi-focal approach that aims to benefit from combining Eastern and Western worldviews. The post-Cartesian approach developed subsequently is based upon the idea that ‘yin-yang’ dualities operate at both a general level and within specific contexts. Culture is described as a dynamic duality between situated symbolic activities and more generalized signified meanings. Activities are described as cultural ‘holons’ nested within a holarchy or hierarchy of holons or ‘holarchy’ Consequently, culture is seen as an emergent property from a hierarchy of dualities. In this holarchy of dualities, images create meanings enacted in activities and translated through performative activities where meanings are sustained by becoming accepted as real through axiomatic acceptance. Recursively, the enactment of axiomatically accepted ideas in activities translates back through ‘masked’ performances to legitimize and institutionalize these ideas and images amongst and between actors. As a result, cultural differences identified as emanating from values viewed as independent variables is regarded as an over-simplification. Cultural differences are likely, in the dynamic holarchy described, to come from different activities or cultural practices and/or in the translations through performativities and representations between activities and cultural structures such as values. There are some universal cultural similarities to these complex processes, but we mainly focus upon the principal cultural differences between the Eastern and Western holonic assemblages of symbolic dualities and that, metaphorically, a bi-focal duality approach reflects reality better than monocled dualism. |
