Rethinking Hybridity in Postcolonial Contexts: What Changes and What Persists? The Tunisian case of Poulina’s managers
通过分析突尼斯Poulina公司管理者的话语,揭示西方管理实践在发展中国家引入时,混合性既包含实践变革也包含文化延续,对理解跨文化管理有参考价值。
Drawing on postcolonial studies of management, this article highlights the importance of adopting a contextualized approach to hybridization processes that, first, takes into account the importance of the historical and cultural contexts from which hybridity emerges and, second, helps to identify the elements that change as well as those that persist when western management practices are imported into developing countries. Using a discursive analysis, this article shows the ambivalent nature of the accounts given by managers (trained in western traditions) of the Tunisian company Poulina as they explain how they modernized their company through the implementation of a US management model. The managers’ ambivalence takes on two distinct forms. First, while they seem to have internalized the rhetoric of modernization in insisting on how they used the US management model to overcome the ‘dysfunctional’ family-based organizational system, they simultaneously express resistance by detaching themselves from the French colonial organizational model. Second, when they describe the implementation of the US management practices and how workers resisted them, it seems that they have implicitly negotiated and reinterpreted these practices via a local cultural framework of meaning. Based on these findings, I argue that hybridity is best understood as an interweaving of two elements – the transformation of practices and cultural continuity – in which identity construction, local power dynamics and cultural frameworks of meaning jointly shape the hybridization process of management practices.