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This paper presents an alternative to William Kymlicka’s approach for the integration or accommodation of ethnocultural groups in democratic states. It contends that there are different types of states, and that the differences need to be described before their consequences can be argued. The thicker the ‘national’ culture, the more likely it is that large groups of immigrants will have to be accommodated as national minorities rather than as hyphenated nationals. Or, alternatively, multiculturalism may have to take a more corporatist form when the dominant culture is strongly supported by the state.

As part of the globalization trend experienced by organizations worldwide, the number of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) has been steadily rising. Despite this optimism, many of these ventures end up reporting failure. When seeking for causes behind these high failure rates, the “culture” factor tops the lists time and again, be it in domestic or international M&A. This chapter reviews extant academic literature on culture in M&A. More particularly, our analysis leads us to address the following questions: (1) how is culture defined; (2) how does cultural distance impact the performance of M&A; (3) what is the nature of the cultural encounter in M&A, and how should cultural change in M&A be managed; (4) in what ways do national cultures impact international M&A? Conclusions on the current state of the literature, an identification of key gaps, and opportunities for future research end the chapter.

This chapter reports a spatial analysis of Mexican political forms. Most of the works on Mexican national culture emerged out of concern with the forms in which Mexico was or was not modernizing. The touchy defensiveness that Octavio Paz and Samuel Ramos identified, named, and criticized was the result of the distance and forms of interrelations between intimate cultures in Mexico. By creating new concepts, the conceptual problems involved in understanding regional culture have been emphasized. It mentioned that localist ideologies, including nationalism, cannot be analyzed without understanding their relationship to actual spaces of cultural production. Nationalism cannot be understood without an analysis of culture in the national space. Throughout, this book has shown that the specific characteristics of national ideologies have significant effects throughout the national space. Thus, the study of culture in the national space is fundamental for the discussion of alternative forms of nationalism.

This chapter criticizes Keith Robbins' lecture on the history of Ireland, Scotland and Wales. It argues that Robbins' request for correspondence and dialogue contradicts his previous statement that History and Historians in the Twentieth Century provides no place for British historical writing in the twentieth century which had been written in the United Kingdom outside England. It also questions Robbins' use of a model of national culture which derives from and sustains the structure of English culture as the measure by which other national cultures are to be valued.

This book reviews the study of national culture. The problem covered is both political and conceptual. Its political dimension is associated to the formulation and discussion of alternate national ideologies (or of an antinational ideology). Intellectually, the issue is how to analyze culture in the national space, and how to understand the dynamic relationship between any attempt to describe national culture and the formulation of nationalist ideologies. The first part of this book is a study of cultural production and ideology in Morelos and Huasteca Potosina. The second part develops an interpretation of a few aspects of Mexican national culture and of Mexican ideology. It concentrates on the history of legitimacy and charisma in Mexican politics, and the relationship between the national community and racial ideology. It is hoped that this book could open doors to a critique of cultural practices in Mexico.

Along with market and trade, culture will soon be an important variable in determining the global position of a country. In India's long and uninterrupted cultural history, religion, trade and the State have brought a major role in the promotion of culture and the arts. The leaders of independent India, Jawaharlal Nehru, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Rajendra Prasad, and S. Radhakrishnan realized that a major intervention by the state was necessary in promoting cultural creativity. Various autonomous cultural institutions were set up with government support. A separate Department of Culture was set up. The National Culture Fund was set by the Indian government. The plural character of Indian culture has played a major role in continuity and richness of our culture. This chapter also discusses the recent trend of ethnic groups to gain greater share of income and wealth and hence more state power and thus the importance of harmony and peace.

Guillermo Bonfil's México profundo promotes the idea that there is a “deep” Mexico, a common Mexican culture, which is grounded in Indian culture. This book attempts to grapple with the old and difficult problem of national culture without the aid of a new theoretical perspective. Bonfil has succumbed to the excitement of politics while forfeiting his critical capacity. Another study of national culture is by Enrique Alduncin. His position differs from Bonfil's in that it does not seek to find the underlying structure of Mexico's culture. Roger Bartra's La jaula de la melancolía concludes that the whole project of Mexican national-culture studies has its motivational roots in the romantic melancholia caused by the impact of modernization. The works of Bartra, Bonfil, and Alduncin index the politics of national culture studies. Few key aspects of Mexican culture are elaborated. The ideas developed by the pensadores are internally incommensurable.

It is important to note that human resource managers should consider their organization's institutional environment. This institutional environment is composed of a wide variety of dimensions since institutional influences may include region, locality, and other such important aspects. The nation state proves to be one of the most significant sources of institutional influence on the performance of various practices for HRM, and this is encompassed by what is commonly referred to as ‘national culture’ or the specific set of national institutions. Several literatures on organization have already illustrated evaluations of the cultural peculiarities associated with employment relationships in a nation state. This chapter provides a throrough comparative study of multinational chemical industry companies (MNCs) that are based in Holland and in the USA.

This chapter looks first at how the logic of corporatism has deeply penetrated transnational media culture flows and how states are also joining the game of corporate branding of the nation in ways in which the publicness of media culture and the possibility of transborder dialogue are severely hampered by the logic of market profit and national interests. It focuses on three issues: decentering and recentering of transnational media cultural power, the increasingly systematized connections of national dominant cultures, and the development of state policies to brand national cultures. Since these developments are closely related to the prevalent discourses on the pragmatic uses of culture in neoliberal terms, they inevitably compel one to reconsider the meaning of usefulness and practicality in regard to critical research, to pursue effective ways, not just theoretically, of intervention in the realpolitik.

This concluding chapter reviews the discussions of the previous chapters, looking at the conservationist ethnic movements that challenged the idea of common national cultures in the United States and the United Kingdom. It determines that Matthew Arnold and William Dean Howells's writings contain the resources for the renegotiation of the conception of ‘culture’ found in the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois and W. B. Yeats.

As advertising increasingly entered daily life, writers and commentators grappled with the meaning of the new advertising discourse. This chapter examines the more diffuse movement of advertising into national culture. Brand names and ad slogans were useful as a common frame of reference in an increasingly heterogeneous country. As the national distribution and advertising of goods by brand name shaped a national vocabulary, the cultural shorthand they created enabled people across the United States to understand a reference to a brand of soap or a joke about an advertising slogan. One arguably elite setting in which advertising references began to appear was fiction. Often such references were satiric, but in a popular novel of 1888, Amelie Rives's The Quick or the Dead?, brand-name references appear more central. Rives's novel embodied questions about the individuality of people and relationships, and the duplicability and replaceability of relationships, in part through references to brand-named items associated with characters. It is argued that the novel attempted to reconcile the idea of individuality and irreplaceability with the system of mass production in which all duplicated articles are equally authentic.

This chapter tells the story of the 1920 Alexandria serial murders, the “Raya and Sakina” murders, and argues that they played an important role in constructing the notion of an Egyptian national culture in 1920s. The discovery of seventeen bodies buried under the floors of houses in Alexandria's al-Liban neighborhood engendered the first major media sensation in modern Egyptian history, and literally hundreds, if not thousands, of chapters related to the case appeared in the press in the months after the discovery of the first bodies. The Raya and Sakina serial murders attracted national attention, and the great number of Egyptians who followed press coverage of the murders underwent a re-examination of gender, class, and national identifications. Though usually discussed in the post-1952 context, as early as 1920 the beginnings of a “mass-mediated” popular culture began to percolate through Egypt based on notions of acceptable public behavior.

This chapter presents an essay on the efforts of Joseph II to gain uniform and absolute control of Central Europe in the 1780s. He made two such attempts, which helped generate or catalyse forces of opposition that would reassert regional and provincial autonomies on an increasingly nationalist basis. This chapter also explores the role of Josephinism in intensifying the sense of local and ethnic identity and reveals that most of the supporters of Joseph II were early leaders of movements committed to the propagation of national cultures.

Thomas Jefferson's view of the city, as embodying forces which were foreign, unnatural, and corrupting to the morals of his fellow-citizens, was one to which he would hold throughout the remainder of his life. Jefferson was a liberal idealist, which is what has made him so perennially attractive a figure in American culture. It has been suggested that Jefferson's yeoman republic was simply Virginia writ large. The implications for the national culture would be deferred during the decade in which the national government resided in Philadelphia. That city, during this period, was plausibly as good a choice as New York, and for all anyone knew perhaps a better one. Jefferson would continue to believe in the pernicious effects of cities and to deplore what he saw of their commercial character. He would nonetheless be tolerably compensated by the varied amenities of Philadelphia life.

This chapter is a historical and critical overview of the distinctive phases and categories of postcolonial rewriting. It examines in particular the departures from the nationalist focus of the earlier phases of postcolonial canon revision. The chapter elaborates on reconstitutions of European genres in postcolonial literature and their redeployment in charged contexts of gender, race, and class.

This chapter addresses the perceived ingenuity of contemporary branding strategy in order to expose other trajectories, particularly the global forces that networked production over time, along which franchising like Transformers has developed. Instead of conceptualizing franchising in terms of its most successful moments, one can assess it in terms of a constant production cycle that constitutes reorganization, management and experimentation, as well as decline across multiple global contexts. The chapter uses the Transformers property in exploring the cultural tensions that emerge when national frames persist in making sense of franchised production. It draws upon samples of press articles and reviews in which critics sought to make sense of this vast system of toys, television, film, comics, and video games in relation to the national cultures of the United States, Japan, United Kingdom, Singapore, Malaysia, China, and Australia.

With this chapter the book shifts from the contextualisation of the original study to the close examination of that study and its data. It presents ethnographic data on the discourses in the Bank relating to the ideas of national and organisational cultures. It examines how staff members compared and contrasted the cultures of the two merging organisations, Halifax and Bank of Scotland, and how they construed the differences between Scottishness and Englishness, especially in terms of culturally encoded notions of ‘diffidence’ and ‘confidence’. It shows how all these notions of culture became bound up with the making sense of the tensions engendered by the merger and the general direction of organisational change. A ‘conceptual interlude’ in the middle of the chapter explores the social science concept of culture, arguing that this tends to be too narrow and ideational, and insufficiently attuned to the organisation of power in the generation of culture.