146 European J. International Management, Vol. 3, No.

2, 2009

Copyright 2009 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.











Organisational models and culture: a reflection
from Latin America
1

Luis Montao-Hirose
Department of Economics,
Universidad Autnoma Metropolitana Unidad Iztapalapa,
Av. San Rafael Atlixco No. 186, Col. Vicentina,
C.P. 09340, Iztapalapa, Mxico D.F.
Email: lmh52@prodigy.net.mx
Abstract: This paper offers a cultural analysis of Latin America organisational
models. In order to address this issue, the concepts of culture and modernity
are discussed. Additionally, this paper briefly analyses some key problems
in Latin America, particularly its modernisation process and its relationship
with culture. Finally, organisational models, focusing especially on their social
construction, transfer and re-appropriation, with a view to questioning their
cultural relevance and contribution to organisational and social development
are discussed. This paper concludes with some remarks on modernity, culture
and the future avenues of research on organisational models in Latin America.
Keywords: Latin America; organisational models; culture; modernity and
postmodernity.
Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Montao-Hirose, L. (2009)
Organisational models and culture: a reflection from Latin America,
European J. International Management, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp.146166.
Biographical note: Luis Montao-Hirose is a Professor of Organisation
Studies at the Universidad Autnoma Metropolitana (UAM), Mexico. He holds
a PhD in Organisation Sciences at Universit de Paris IX-Dauphine, France,
and has been a Visiting Professor at Osaka no Machi Daigaku (Osaka City
University), Japan, cole Polytchnique, France, and cole des Hautes tudes
Commerciales, Canada. He has produced several articles and books. He was
Director of the Organization Studies Postgraduate Program at UAM and
President of the Mexican Researchers Network in Organization Studies.

Latin America neither wants,
nor has any reason, to be a pawn without a will of its own;
nor is it merely wishful thinking that its quest for independence
and originality should become a Western aspiration.
Gabriel Garca Mrquez
2

1 Introduction
In this day and age, few academics question the importance of the concept of culture in
characterising organisations, nations and even large regions of the world. The ongoing
discussion between modernity and culture appears to have been abandoned. However, in
Latin America, modernity is broken up into multiple realities: pre-modernity, peripheral









Organisational models and culture 147












or backward modernity, post-modernity, dismodernity. The symbolic world of traditions
sometimes seems to be contained within, and sometimes overflows beyond, instrumental
rationality, technological display and the global village; while modernity seems to waver
between the past and the future, the universal and the local, the literal and the figurative.
This paper is divided into three sections in order to address these issues. The first section
discusses the relevance of the concepts of culture and modernity on two levels. First, in
what sense can we talk about culture in a modern, globalised world? Second, is culture
the most suitable way of referring to a social space that contains as broad a spectrum of
modernities as Latin America does? The second section offers a brief reflection on Latin
Americas modernisation process and its relationship with culture. Will Latin Americas
modernisation support the notion of a culturally globalised world in the future? The third
section discusses the history, transfer and re-appropriation of organisational models,
and questions their cultural relevance and contribution to organisational and social
development. Are such models as transferable as the majority of business schools seem
to believe, given their high level of technical and instrumental rationality? This article
thus uses two of the most controversial and elusive concepts in the humanities and social
sciences, culture and modernity, in order to unpack another concept, Latin America,
that also refers to a highly complex and diverse reality.
2 Does a Latin American culture exist?
As Rouqui (1989) notes, America is the continent of the misunderstood: the New World
was discovered while explorers sought the route to the Indies. The first accounts
described mermaids, footless birds, hogs with navels on their haunches, and were
convinced that of the continent harboured the fountain of eternal youth. Latin America is
not an abstract concept, as Henry Kissinger
3
once said, but simply an ambiguous one.
Broadly speaking, it refers to a part of the American continent in which mainly Romance
languages derived from Vulgar Latin Spanish and Portuguese are spoken. It is also
used to refer to all the countries in the Western hemisphere located south of the United
States. The term Latin America was first used in 1856, both by the Chilean writer and
politician, Francisco Bilbao (1866), at a conference;
4
and by the Colombian writer, Jos
Mara Torres Caicedo, in his poem The Two Americas.
5
It was used shortly afterwards
during the French invasion on Mexican territory by Napoleon III in 1862. Seen from
a geostrategic and cultural point of view, these first three historical references to
Latin America share the need to recognise a certain cultural and geopolitical unity, in
order to differentiate the region from a threatening Anglo-Saxon America. Bilbao and
Torres proposed uniting the Latin American nations to face up to this threat while
Napoleon III sought to justify a military invasion.
The name Latin America has often been criticised: Simn Bolvar preferred the name
Colombia since he considered Christopher Columbus to be worthier than Amrico
Vespucio. It has also been argued that the term Latin America excludes the indigenous
peoples and blacks; and it is also sometimes rejected because of its use as a rhetorical-
military ruse to legitimise the Napoleonic empire. Other terms have emerged in an
attempt to depict the regions diversity, such as Ibero-America, Hispanic America, Indo-
America and even, as Carlos Fuentes (1992) proposes, Indo-Afro-Euro-America. The
controversy over culture is even more heated, particularly when it comes to the eternal
question of whether this great geographical space, characterised by two main languages,









148 L. Montao-Hirose












a shared colonial past and a major religion, Catholicism, comprises a culture in the broad
sense of the word. The answer is multiple, nuanced and invariably unsatisfactory, but
always affirmative: Latin America exists as a cultural reality.
Let us briefly review three examples of attempts to characterise the cultural
characteristics of this part of the American continent. The first is the geopolitical analysis
conducted by Huntington (2005); the second is the proposal put forward by Inglehart and
Carballo (2008), based on the World Values Survey; and the third was the work of the
Brazilian anthropologist, Ribeiro (1984).
Huntington proposes the concept of civilisation for recognising cultural spaces in a
very broad sense. This author conceives civilisation as the broadest level of cultural
expression, providing the individual with his most generic identity. He recognises seven
major civilisations: two Asian civilisations China and Japan Hindu, Muslim,
Orthodox, African and, finally, Western civilisation in which he distinguishes three
sub-civilisations, the European, the North American and the Latin American. Although
he recognises some specifics of Latin American civilisation, Huntington deals with it
too superficially in our view, treating it as though it were a simple, passive project.
Moreover, he overvalues Western civilisation in particular, the USA and Europe by
considering it the creator of modernity, thus imposing the idea of white supremacy. He
also ferociously attacks the multiculturality of his own country, the United States, which
he sees as a terrible threat, forgetting the nations historical process of development and
the important role played by immigrants. The authors stance is more like that of a
politician committed to a particular extremist ideology than that of a scholar interested
in understanding and mediation. In this way, he openly scorns certain civilisations that
he deems dangerous, such as the Muslim or Chinese civilisations; or lesser, due to their
lower profile participation on the global stage, such as Latin America and Africa. In
keeping with Spengler (1993), he considers that the United States has entered a phase of
marked decadence, which manifests itself in antisocial behaviour, family break up, the
deterioration of work ethics and a lack of interest in intellectual activities. However,
despite all of this, the USA is still an economic and military power. Huntington argues
that international conflicts are more often a result of clashes of civilisations than of
political or economic issues.
The notion of culture does not imply, as is sometimes supposed, total homogeneity or
behavioural determinism. Culture does not constitute an autonomous sphere of social life,
but is part of a broader dynamic social process. In this sense, we cannot think of culture
as separate from economic, political and social development. In this vein, Inglehart and
Carballo (2008) offer an analysis of the relationship between economic development and
cultural change. The authors argue that although the former can profoundly transform
certain social practices, many old principles and values are nonetheless jealously
preserved. Some of these changes brought about by modernity include the development
of education, equal rights for women, the democratisation of society and the desire to
achieve a better quality of life. These elements are grouped under the generic heading
of self-expression as opposed to the values associated with the simple promotion
of economic development for the sake of survival. Another fundamental aspect of
modernity, they argue, is the gradual substitution of religious or traditional beliefs by the
principles of secular or rational order. Based on these two statistically founded ideas, the
authors recognise eight major cultural regions: the Confucian, which includes Japan and
China, amongst other countries, ex-communist, Islamic, African, English-speaking,










Organisational models and culture 149












Catholic Europe, Protestant Europe and, finally, Latin America. Protestant Europe is the
cultural region that is most inclined towards self-expression and rational values, while
less economically developed countries, such as the Islamic and African nations, are
characterised by religious and survival values.
According to this study, Latin America is located in a cultural zone in which religious
values overlap with self-expression values, i.e. in a zone that is adjacent to Africa,
Catholic Europe and the English-speaking countries. Therefore, Guatemala and Peru,
owing to the importance of tradition, are close to African countries such as Nigeria.
Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil are similar to countries such as Spain, Italy and Portugal,
while Mexico is more isolated from the other Latin American countries and from the
United States. Without doubt, the methodological bases of the survey should be analysed
in depth in order to identify, in detail, the stratification of the sample and the complete
questionnaire. However, with the elements available to us, we can argue that the
questions are simplistic and the results presented lead us to believe that the sample
consists mainly of urban populations, and includes very few or no representatives from
native communities.
In any case, the results deserve to be discussed further in the light of other analyses.
Ultimately, the unilateral relationship established in the aforementioned survey between
economic development and sociocultural dynamics discards the importance of the
inverse relationship, that is to say, the way in which values and beliefs, for example,
affect economic behaviour, which is the analytical idea privileged in organisational
analyses (Hofstede, 1991).
We believe that a more appropriate way of constructing a global configuration that
considers cultural aspects is the one formulated by Darcy Ribeiro (1984), who identifies
four categories of extra-European societies that have emerged from different historical
and cultural processes: the transplanted, the testimony, the new and the emerging. The
first try to reproduce the lifestyle of the large European metropolises in other lands;
this is the case, inter alia, of the United States and Canada; and in Latin America, of
Argentina and Uruguay, the most European countries on the subcontinent. The testimony
peoples consist of great civilisations that were not totally assimilated to European
models, such as the Japanese or Hindu cultures; or in America countries such as
Guatemala, Mexico, Peru and Bolivia, with indigenous populations that preserve many of
their original cultural aspects, thus preventing the establishment of a homogenous
cultural unity. According to the author, new peoples represent a sui generis cultural
project. They consist of nations that have managed to blend ethnic diversity through
miscegenation European, indigenous and black in Latin America, sometimes attaining
high levels of solidarity, as has occurred in Brazil, Colombia, Cuba and Venezuela.
Finally, the emerging peoples are characterised by their struggle to preserve their identity
throughout centuries of subjugation and modernising policies. In America, these include
the indigenous communities Mayas, Aymaras, Incas among others, who ceaselessly
claim their cultural right to self-determination.
The author addresses the concept of civilisation in the context of economic
development and proposes that transplanted peoples have achieved the most advanced
modernisation processes, while testimony peoples have encountered serious obstacles in
this process. As survivors of ancient civilisations, their incorporation into modernity has
been incomplete; their encounter with Europe signalled the end of glorious eras but they
also experienced difficulties in gaining access to the new development opportunities.










150 L. Montao-Hirose












According to Ribeiro, new peoples adopted patterns of subjugation to the powerful,
limiting their possibilities for development; while the emerging peoples were always
seen as extremely backwards and anchored in their past, and unable to encounter
modernity.
Although Ribeiros work is highly suggestive, some of his points require
clarification, as we shall discuss later on. Nations were not built on the basis of cultural
affinities, but according to economic and political criteria. As Carlos Fuentes (1992) so
rightly said, borders are the scars of geopolitics. This translates into a high level of
cultural heterogeneity for some countries. Therefore, we can observe that there are
certain social sectors that are representative of several of the societies proposed by
Ribeiro. This is the case, for example, of Mexico, a country in which we see sectors that
have reproduced in their own way the mentality and lifestyles of countries from the
centre and that form very few social ties with the emerging peoples who they regard
as folkloric elements; others are more representative of the new peoples, which
miscegenation has provided with a particular identity. Finally, as occurred recently in the
state of Chiapas in Mexico, we can even find rebellions, like that of the National
Liberation Zapatista Army, that demand particular cultural rights and forms of
organisation inherited from their indigenous past.
6
Although in this case, tradition and
modernity paradoxically exist side by side, there are other cases in which tradition and
modernity mingle in attempts to imagine a future that is consistent with a peoples past,
as in the recent case of the new political constitution approved by Ecuadorians in which
they recognise their thousand-year-old roots, exalt Pacha Mama, a female divinity that
protects the indigenous world, and declare themselves to be a multinational, intercultural
nation, committed to Latin American integration.
3 Latin American modernities and post-colonialism
Western modernity arose, at least in part, as a rejection of culture, which was confined to
the countries or regions that preserved their old traditions, strongly rooted in religious
beliefs. Their time is said to be circular, forming a sort of vicious circle that is impossible
to unfurl and integrate into the linear time of rationality and progress. Modernity was
interpreted as Westernisation, i.e. not just as the possibility of political consensus and
economic growth based on respect for individual rights, but as a completely new
lifestyle. But, what features does modernity assume in Latin America? Table 1 shows
two countries that concentrate just over half of the regions population: Brazil, with
195 million inhabitants, and Mexico, with 107 million. The population differences
are extreme. Belize, the smallest of the countries considered in this study, has only
294,000 inhabitants and Uruguay just over 3 million. In other words, Brazils population
is 600 times larger than that of Belize and Mexicos population is 32 times larger than
that of Uruguay.















Organisational models and culture 151












Table 1 Socio-demographic data of Latin America and the Caribbean (in thousands)
(selected countries)










152 L. Montao-Hirose












Table 1 Socio-demographic data of Latin America and the Caribbean (in thousands)
(selected countries) (continued)










Organisational models and culture 153












One of the most generalised indicators of modernity is urban concentration. At present,
77% of Latin Americas population lives in cities, even though a large number of people
(almost 131 million) do live in rural areas. Argentina, Uruguay and Venezuela possess
the highest percentages of urban population nearly 92%, while in countries such as
Belize, Haiti and Honduras the figure amounts to less than 50%. Another indicator is the
proportion of the population that works in the three major economic sectors. On average,
19% 113 million people work mainly in agriculture, 22% in industry and 59% in
services. Peru and Honduras devote more than 35% of their activities to agriculture,
while the most industrialised countries are Chile and Mexico, with over 50%; the most
service-oriented nations are Argentina and Uruguay, with over 70%. Nevertheless,
behind these general indicators of modernity lies a social reality that cannot be readily
extrapolated from them. Urban life is an outcome, for many Latin American cities, of the
departure of farmers from rural zones in order to survive and their arrival in a highly
discriminatory, chaotic and incomprehensible social space, with high levels of violence,
in which their integration is, more often than not, marginal and informal (Garca, 1989;
Garca, 1995).
Latin American modernity has other serious problems too. With regard to
employment, a very conservative estimate would be that about 8.5% of the economically
active population is unemployed; this translates into 46 million people, the equivalent of
the total population of Argentina, Panama and Paraguay. Moreover, 55 million people in
Latin America are illiterate, of which 38% are Brazilian; while 45% of Haitians cannot
read or write. Poverty and extreme poverty are the regions two greatest afflictions.
36.5% of the population is in the former situation and 8.6% about 50 million people
in the latter; there are a total of 211 million poor people, which is equivalent to the total
population of Mexico, Colombia, Argentina and Chile together. More than 30% of the
population of Guatemala, Bolivia, Paraguay and Nicaragua lives in extreme poverty. It is
important to note that Cecchini and Uthoff (2008) indicate that poverty and extreme
poverty have decreased in Latin America, with figures of around 48% and 22.5%
respectively in 1990. The country that has achieved the greatest reduction in this area is
Chile 19.7 percentage points between 1990 and 2003 to just 18.60%. Ecuador, Brazil,
Panama and Mexico have also made significant, though insufficient, progress in this
struggle.
Despite this large social deficit, modernity manifests itself in different ways in the
region. Some of the most developed countries, such as Brazil, Mexico, Argentina and
Chile, have increased their international investments through a few companies known as
trans-Latin corporations. In effect, since the nineties, foreign investment by corporations
from emerging countries has achieved unprecedented levels. The Boston Consulting
Group (2006) estimates that of the 100 top transnational companies from emerging
economies, 41 are Chinese, 22 Latin American and 20 Indian; while among the top
Latin American firms, 13 are Brazilian, seven Mexican, one Argentinean and one
Chilean. Santiso (2008) estimates that the top ten trans-Latin corporations conduct 43%
of their sales abroad and their expansion is no longer exclusively the result of lower
labour costs or the availability of natural resources, but increasingly makes use of new
technologies, access to international financial circuits and efficient management systems.
In a recent report, the journal Amrica Economa (2008) indicated that the 20 most
globalised trans-Latin companies conduct 63% of their sales overseas and have
approximately 313,800 employees abroad (see Table 2).










154 L. Montao-Hirose












Table 2 Leading Latin American transnational companies, 2007










Organisational models and culture 155












Nevertheless, the modernity of Latin American countries is closely related to their
history, in particular, as Ribeiro (1984) so rightly states, the colonisation process.
Therefore, Alonso (2007), from the theoretical stance of New Institutional Economics,
suggests that institutionality plays a key role in the economic development of every
society and that the modalities adopted by said institutional development in Latin
America are shaped by their colonial past. The author highlights, among other key
factors, the amount of natural resources and human settlements in each country. Thus, in
countries with large amounts of natural resources and local labour, such as Mexico, Peru
and Bolivia, exclusive institutions were generated that facilitated the development of
powerful elites based on coercive recruitment and exploitation systems. In this sense,
Bag (1992) indicates that the apparent lack of motivation to improve the labour quality
of indigenous workers can be explained by the fact that Europe was only interested in
economic and political benefits it could gain from Latin America, which resulted from
two things: quantity and obedience. In other countries, where natural resources were
scarce or the population was diminished or had been decimated, such as in Argentina and
Uruguay, the institutions generated were more collective and democratic, emphasising
the need for public services.
Approaches based on so-called postcolonial theory can shed some light on the role
of the distant past in the evolution of the said societies and can help us to clarify the
concept of modernity. The main thesis of postcolonial theory, which was promoted
originally by literary critics and philosophers and later adopted by anthropologists and
sociologists, is that colonialism left an indelible mark on the historical evolution of these
societies coloniality and that it is, therefore, necessary to rethink these developments
from a more emancipating perspective (Said, 1978). In this context, colonialism is a
sine qua non for the emergence of modernity and represents, for the most critical, the
backyard of modernity (Mignolo, 2007). This is why Europe, Castro-Gmez (2007)
argues, turning to Dussel (2007), should no longer be understood as an independent
component that radiates a universal vision of modernity, but as a systemic hub that
implies both domination and civilising imposition. The first modernity, the discovery
of the New World and its annexation to the geo-imaginary European space, implied
for many inhabitants the fragmentation of their collective identity that had been forged
over centuries: they were dispatched on a quest to conquer a new sense of cultural
identity. The core-periphery model would later lead to the formulation, in the sixties, of
dependency theory (Cardoso and Faletto, 1969), which criticises the marginal role
assigned to less developed nations in the world system. The economic development of
the core necessarily implies, according to this theory, the permanent underdevelopment
of a weak, fragmented periphery. This modernity classified itself as peripheral, that is to
say, as an unattainable state in relation to USA or European standards. Moreover, the
modern idea of progress, through development theory, generated, in the same time
period, the notion of backward modernity. At the beginning of the sixties, Rostov (1961)
proposed that every economy should go through five stages, beginning with the
traditional stage of personal consumption and ending with the stage of high mass
consumption. In this way, some Latin American economies considered that the import
substitution model constituted a stage on the path to development and that backwardness
was circumstantial, since one day they would be able to access the select field of
developed countries.










156 L. Montao-Hirose












New European observations to analyse the current state of modernity have led to the
emergence of new concepts such as postmodernity. This is considered a new stage that
has succeeded, and is different from modernity. It is characterised, among other things,
by the collapse of grand narratives (Lyotard, 1979), which is frequently translated as the
end of the worlds great explanations and the recognition of various institutional crises
family, hospital, school, State (Dubet and Martuccelli, 1996; Dubet, 2002) that alter the
reference points for individuals social and personal lives. This led Touraine (1997) to
propose the concept of demodernisation, a process characterised by the breakdown of the
institutional setting owing to the relaxation or disappearance of codified behavioural
standards, which produces, according to the author, a state of a lack of communication
between the other two components of modernity: rationalisation and moral individualism.
In other words, it results in a growing gap between economics and culture. In fact, we
could say that this process began in the last few years of the 19th century with growing
economic and technological rationalisation and the appearance of the first administrative
systems. In this sense, the most congruent proposals are those that, instead of adhering to
the thesis of the end of modernity, prefer to describe it as a new stage and not as a break-
up, such as the cases that refer to advanced modernity (Giddens, 1990; Giddens, 1991),
reflexive modernity (Beck, 1994), hypermodernity (Pags et al., 1979) or supermodernity
(Balandier, 1994). In general, these names emphasise the exacerbated nature of present-
day modernity, the uncertainty, the excesses and the risks that it entails, and the
destructuring of collective identities.
European modernity gradually displaced its centre of gravity towards the
United States. The resulting emphasis on the economic environment, at the expense of
the political and socio-cultural settings, has produced many negative consequences: the
citizen, the European figure par excellence, has faded away in favour of the consumer
(Garca, 1995). Furthermore, as a result of economic over-dimensioning, management
studies enjoy a preponderant place in the modern vision of development. This is
significant for the rest of the world, but it has had a particularly big impact on
Latin America because of its high degree of economic dependence on the United States.
After World War II, the United States dominated the world scene in many aspects,
notably the hegemony it attained in management and organisational studies, which
led it to become the world leader in the construction and transfer of organisational
models founded on the idea of universal applicability. Instrumental rationality, separated
from its original ideal-type methodological nature (Weber, 1970; Aguilar, 1998) and
from any subjective assessment traditional, charismatic or moral proposed the
bureaucratic archetype as the optimal organisational system, which turned out to be the
epistemological foundation for the resulting organisational models. This modernity,
based mainly on instrumental rationality, promoted an extremely rational, positivist
vision that ruled out, in the majority of US specialists, the possibility of any proposal that
questioned the rational action of the individual. Therefore, what Touraine (1993) called
anti-modernity, such as psychoanalytical proposals that openly questioned rational
knowledge of the self and of others, remained taboo (Montao-Hirose, 2007c).
4 Organisational models: construction, transfer and appropriation
Organisational models constitute, from the perspective of modernity, a relevant
instrument for progress and social change and can be broadly understood as
representations of certain principal components including structures and processes









Organisational models and culture 157












that supposedly explain the general functioning of an organisation. Modernity
underscores instrumental intentions, while refraining from explaining why they are
necessary. These models are usually constructed by organisations from developed
countries in order to demonstrate the great potential of these social units and to serve as
an example to those who wish to attain similar results. New sociological institutionalism
(DiMaggio and Powell, 1999) notes a growing trend towards the structural isomorphism
of organisations due to the increasing homogeneity of professional training (Mills and
Hatfield, 1999; Hedmo et al., 2005), as well as great challenges in applying systems
based on instrumental rationality, that is to say, to establish precise objectives and to
adopt means through which to accomplish them, since imposing specific operational
systems on them involves recognising so-called organised anarchies, and also the
dominance of some organisations over others. Even though these organisations appear
to be structurally alike formally, they actually operate according to different systems of
meaning shaped by culture, which can result in similar structures but different behaviours
or in similar behaviours with different meanings (Iribarne, 2003a; Iribarne, 2003b).
The over-emphasis on the economic over the social environment fostered by the
modernisation process has, in this way, propitiated the idea of universality, based on the
merely formal aspects of organisations. Such models correspond to the imaginary
representation that exists of the core countries great private enterprise, in particular in
the United States, and its representation of the Japanese business experience that it
incorporates into its system under the generic term of flexibilisation (Montao-Hirose,
2003), giving rise to the term post-bureaucratic or even post-modern models.
The construction of the organisational model is based on the identification of a
particular area of the organisation to which significant amounts of resources will be
assigned in order to achieve visible results in the short and medium terms (March and
Olsen, 1997). It is, therefore, a limited success presented as a general success, and it
serves to conceal the necessary inattention to some areas, such as economic and social
costs that it generates. In fact, the long-term optimisation of the whole is restricted by
several aspects. One of them is the result of the organisations very nature; its operation
is structurally loosely coupled, which means that it is made up of heteroclite elements
that seek to preserve, through the use of their relative autonomy, a particular functional
and/or social identity (Weick, 1976; Montao-Hirose, 2007b). Formal organisational
objectives are not reproduced faithfully in each of the business units nor are they fully
internalised by all the actors. They construct rationally and culturally their own
strategies for negotiating their collaboration by means of the creation and maintenance of
zones of uncertainty consisting of organisational problems whose solutions can only be
accessed by a certain type of actors (Crozier and Friedberg, 1977). Moreover, the models
only express the positive sides of the action, presenting them superlatively in terms of
effectiveness and efficiency (Figure 1).
Another important element is the search for external legitimacy; so that the more
notorious the results, the more the organisations image will be enhanced. The
concentration of efforts in a line of action is, therefore, more profitable in terms of
creating greater credibility than their distribution in different actions. Some of the social
beliefs that predominate at certain times, such as environmental sustainability, gender
equality or social responsibility, can be incorporated into diverse organisational internal
policies to the detriment of others (Meyer and Rowen, 1999).










158 L. Montao-Hirose












Figure 1 Construction, transfer and appropriation of organisational models

Neglecting certain areas of the organisation can produce, over time, significant
imbalances, which induce the management to pay attention to these areas, thus changing
the concentration of resources and reducing the time spent on previous actions. There is a
tendency to analyse problems in a fragmented manner or separately human resources,
technology, finances, for example and to think that there is a particular theoretical
instrument for solving each and every one of them quickly.
Organisational models are normally constructed by means of abstracting the social
elements historical, political and cultural that have contributed directly or indirectly
to the organisations formation and dynamics. This notably increases the perception that
universal models are founded on logical elements and therefore that their operation is
separate from the social context in which they originated. This is a highly seductive idea
since it is presented as a simplified linear scheme, with simple recipes that are far
removed from their real complexity. The positive aspects are generally idealised, while
the negative aspects are carefully concealed. For example, the psychological violence
fomented by said models within the organisation, the unemployment that they generate,
the high levels of stress they produce and the contradictions that result from the
simultaneous use of various models, amongst other things, are ignored (Montao-Hirose,
2007a). However, these tend to appear later on and, mediated by cultural aspects,
produce various prejudices both in the workers and the organisation itself. Thus,
authoritarianism, social distance, gender inequalities, familism, aversion to uncertainty
and short-term direction, amongst other aspects mentioned as characteristics of
Latin American organisations (Dvila and Martnez, 1999), together with deficiencies in
education and lack of technology, intermingle with other aspects, such as solidarity,









Organisational models and culture 159












affective expressions, friendship and mutual support, to establish the conditions for
implementing a particular model. Implementation often takes place in the form of an
explicit and implicit negotiation that, taking into account the possible meanings that its
use involves, allows the members of the organisation to calculate its possible operative
and moral consequences.
The dissemination of these models is mainly the responsibility of consulting offices,
business schools and, more recently and increasingly importantly, on websites, many of
which are not very reputable. The hegemony achieved by the United States in this setting
is unquestionable. The production and commercialisation of these models is an entire
business in itself. Consulting offices normally operate as garbage can systems (March
and Olsen, 1997), offering previously formulated solutions, representative of the
latest trends (Czarniawska, 2005) for a wide variety of problems. The international
homogeneity of business plans and programmes is surprising; emphasis is placed, with a
few exceptions, on professional and technical training to the detriment of social
reflection: investment in research in Latin American countries is minimal in comparison
with the investment made in more advanced countries or with national investment related
to education, which is normally a party to the reproduction of said models. This is
evident in the few research doctorates in business administration and related disciplines,
in Latin America, which creates dependence on and the unquestioned transfer of
such models.
However, the decoding of these models and their application to social realities, other
than those in which they originated, produce diverse reactions. This transfer induces in
many directors the belief that a greater incorporation into modernisation might in very
few cases be possible, while for others it is simply a false illusion. The idea of simple
transfers has been questioned in the last few years, mainly because of the arrival of
organisational culture as an explanatory element of behaviour.
Culture had been interpreted as a barrier to the entrance of modernity, having
been confined to mere tradition, or, in the best of cases, to a residual element of
organisational functioning. Strategic determinism, characteristic of modernity,
emphasised, as mentioned beforehand, the increasingly rational nature of the actors.
Nevertheless, the boom in Japan and its rapid access to global economic circuits in the
sixties made US researchers aware of the extremely interwoven relationship between
culture and productivity. The proposal stemming from this analysis was not to
reconstruct the national culture, which would be impossible to achieve in a system that
prioritises productivity as a core variable, but rather to shape a new organisational culture
(Ouchi, 1981; Pascale and Athos, 1981). In this way, US modernity was forced to turn
towards the vision that it had created of the Far East of yesteryear, highlighting its
original tendency towards low-cost and low-quality production owing to its cultural
particularities that prevented it from fully assuming Western rationality (Montao-
Hirose, 2003). Subsequently, US researchers and consultants reformulated these
representations and incorporated concepts such as productive and structural flexibility
into their own vision of modernity, thus making it seem easy to transfer the Japanese
model to Western business proactively (Abegglen and Stalk, 1987).
Recent, though not yet very elaborate analyses, of the transfer of organisational
models have been inspired by postcolonial theories, which, in general terms, emphasise
the crucial relationship between a modern core and a peripheral modernity. Thus, for
example, Ibarra (2006) considers that the concept of organisation is an artifice that
seeks to homogenise diverse realities, resulting in the reinforcement of the notion of the









160 L. Montao-Hirose












periphery as the imperfect expression of the core. Cals and Smircich (1999) argue that
colonised countries have been silenced as a result of their traditional, less developed
or primitive nature. This representation is simultaneously double: it defines modernity
and periphery at the same time, though the latter is a product of the necessary
hybridisation produced by coloniality, which makes both the local and the core
expressions possible. In this sense, Frenkel and Shenhav (2003, 2006) indicate that the
very concept of hybridity is extremely useful for discerning the postcolonial content of
Americanisation, particularly with reference to models exported from the United States
and of the new realities that they generate both when they are accepted and when they are
rejected. Although the discussion on the Latin American reality, from the theoretical
viewpoint of post-coloniality, has made some progress (Juregui and Moraa, 2007),
so far organisational reflection has only produced very little work in this direction.
We believe that extreme approaches should be avoided since they would surely lead to
simplifying systems that explain organisational behaviour in Latin American countries
under the premise that since these countries were former colonial possessions, their
destiny has been structurally defined once and for all. It is important to consider,
therefore, not only national historical particularities, but also those of the region as a
whole, together with what this implies in terms of encounters and disencounters.
5 Final questions
Instead of conclusions, it would be more relevant to end this reflection with a series of
questions rather than a set of affirmations. Culture, modernity and Latin America are, as
mentioned at the beginning, complex concepts. Each of them alludes to different levels of
reality and they are constantly reformulated according to the social space and time in
which they exist. They are also concomitant and opposite to other series of concepts with
which they both complement and clash, thus expressing the complexity and dynamics of
social action.
5.1 Towards a new paradigm?
Touraine (2005) provocatively suggests the need for a paradigmatic change in our way of
thinking about social action. He points out that following the political and economic-
social paradigms of the social actor, we should now begin to use a cultural paradigm in
conceptualising social actors. The first great paradigm, the political, highlighted the study
of social reality in terms of the State the nation, sovereignty, revolution, or the public
services. This perspective was gradually replaced by the economic-social paradigm,
emphasising the study of social classes, conflict, trade unions, industrial technology,
social mobility and the distribution of wealth, amongst others. Nowadays, states the
author, the principal social issues are of a cultural nature, and stem from questions
about new expressions of identity and violence. Demodernisation, that is to say the
growing loss of institutional reference points, blurs the modern idea of society. This
disinstitutionalisation entails the possibility of generating a new relationship of the
individual with him or herself, liberating a certain potential for freedom and
responsibility.










Organisational models and culture 161












Nevertheless, although it is important to highlight the cultural aspects that have been
relegated in the present-day Western hemisphere and that are re-emerging in an untimely
manner in globalisation, in order to understand the current social situation it is also
necessary to desist from contemplating the past exclusively in terms of the other
two paradigms. In effect, culture should not be understood as an environment that is
completely independent from society, since historically it is shaped in close relation
to political and socio-economic aspects. Although, as Touraine
7
points out, eminently
cultural conflicts do exist, such as the case of Bosnia, and we cannot ignore their political
content. Neither, in the case of apparently economic conflicts like oil, can we permit
an analysis that does not include the cultural details of Islam.
Thus, culture does not represent an autonomous environment, but is always
closely interwoven in other social settings and gradually constructs and reformulates its
significance in the historical development of a particular society or region. Therefore,
studies of the past are an invaluable source for understanding the present. In this way,
Latin America cannot be understood without first analysing its colonial legacy and its
path to becoming a major modern society. Moreover, as stated by Weckmann (1994),
the medieval institutional forms introduced by Spain in the 16th century with a view to
establishing the basis for colonial occupation have infiltrated various aspects of economic
and political development of the Latin American nations.
In the case of Latin America, we are currently witnessing a kind of great historical
return. For years, culture has been an excellent analytical element for explaining the
regions social structure, its high level of heterogeneity, its fusion of the past with the
present, in addition to the intricacies of its identity, and many other phenomena. It is
not surprising that history and anthropology, as well as literature have constituted
essential, prestigious academic disciplines in these countries search for specificity.
Without discrediting this, it is also true that the regions modern environments have been
addressed from sociology, economics and political science. The current state of the
subcontinent calls for a more integral vision in which culture acquires a more prominent
role that provides a more coherent vision of the regions complexity, that is to say, a
broad cultural paradigm in which modernity and tradition, the core and the periphery,
economics and politics do not represent more exclusive binary options, but shape a great
reflexive system.
5.2 How many modernities exist in Latin America?
A broad range of modalities related to modernity exist in Latin American society.
Fragmented modernities and secular pre-modernities, peripheral modernities and
administrative post-modernities, backwards political modernities that lead to neglect,
outstanding delimited economic modernities with a highly technological content that
co-exist closely with pre-modern forms based on barter, and dismodernities resulting
from disenchantment with improper institutional operations, all form the broad spectrum
of the complexity of social action and meaning. Therefore, the conquest of a common
cultural space that provides this extremely heterogeneous subcontinent with an identity,
recovering its common past and respecting the particularities of its development, would
be useful in establishing the possible basis for collaboration between these countries if
they have to build economic and political development on similar needs and related
cultural backgrounds.









162 L. Montao-Hirose












5.3 From cultures to macrocultures?
In this paper, we have assumed the existence of Latin America as a specific geocultural
space, with all its particularities, as the European Union proposes. Macroculture does not
in any way deny the particularities of countries and regions assume and which they
vehemently defend, and by rejecting the idea of environmental determinism, we should
extend the notion of limited autonomy not only to countries and regions, but also to
organisations and individuals themselves. In this framework of unity, diversity and
relative autonomy, would it perhaps be possible to establish political and economic
collaborative relations founded on solid cultural bases of mutual respect and appreciation
between macrocultures, for example between Latin America and Europe? Is it possible
to form bi-regional relations that consider sociocultural development as something
apart from economic and political interests? The progress gained to date represents an
important achievement, though it is limited to the economic and political environments.
The European Union represents a sui generis social project with formally established,
supranational organisations, with the free transit of goods and people, a single currency,
a flag and an anthem, while its counterpart in these relations has basically been the
Ro Group, successor of the Contadora Group, which is an informal organisation whose
origins date back to the resolution of the armed conflicts in Central America. Despite all
of this, in a world that has been characterised by the clash of cultures, there are still
global regions in which social collaboration might be a reality.
5.4 What is Latin Americas agenda?
The environments for and levels of action are very diverse, ranging from diplomatic
relations to the establishment of economic agreements and the reinforcement of
collaborative actions in the areas of migration and education among Latin American
countries and among these countries and other global regions. I believe that it is crucial
to reinforce the political, family and educational institutional settings in the face of the
preponderance that economics has acquired in our social lives. Given the limitations of
this document, I will only refer to the latter with regard to organisational studies. Studies
on the Latin American reality involve a multiple effort, both in disciplinary and
international terms. In the first case, bridges should not only be built between business
administration and the rest of the social sciences, but also and this is far more difficult
between business administration and the humanities. In effect, we must turn not only to
the sociology of work or political economics, but also to history, philosophy and
anthropology. These academic traditions have different epistemologies that are difficult
to reconcile. A higher level of paradigmatic plurality is needed, as well as a reappraisal of
the limitations of the positivist approaches and the advantages of interpretive proposals.
A critical, reflexive rather than a technical and passive orientation is indispensable in
order to avoid the simple import of organisational models by countries with the highest
levels of economic development. Autonomy can only be achieved by increasing
research activities. In the field of business administration, these activities are limited in
Latin America, which has very few doctoral programmes. The creation of national and
international research networks that also support the establishment and reinforcement of
joint doctorates and research projects is one of the main actions to undertake. Our fellow
Latin American countries are not part of any domination scheme that reproduces the
core-periphery model, and undertaking collaboration actions with them will undoubtedly









Organisational models and culture 163












yield greater recognition of the similarities and differences that, within a context of
support and respect, will reinforce Latin Americas identity. This does not rule out
increasing participation with European universities in which organisational studies often
have a high level of social content, given their rich intellectual background in social
analysis and with universities from other countries that share related projects and
interests.
Although the knowledge society, a parallel project that to a large extent supports
globalisation, is based on science, it mainly advocates technological applications with
essentially financial objectives. In many aspects, the knowledge society is not only
exclusive in as much as it increases inequality among individuals and nations, but it
also seems to be increasingly ignoring some very essential issues. Latin American
organisations must assume not only an economic or political, but also an environmental,
social and cultural responsibility in which workers and users, and the community as a
whole, can find common directions that channel their freedom in these areas.
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Notes
1 A first version of this paper was presented at the First European-Latin American Caribbean
International Management Conference, Monterrey, Mexico, 1517 October 2008.
2 The Solitude of Latin America, Nobel lecture for the Nobel Prize in Literature, 1982.
3 North American Politician.









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4 Years later, the author would write: We must become independent, preserve the natural and
moral borders of our homeland, we must perpetuate our American and Latin race, develop the
Republic, dispel the national trivialities to elevate the great American nation, the Southern
Confederation (Bilbao, 1866).
5 Ms aislados se encuentran, desunidos, esos pueblos nacidos para aliarse: La unin es su
deber, su ley amarse: Igual origen tienen y misin; la raza de la Amrica latina, al frente
tiene la sajona raza, enemiga mortal que ya amenaza Su libertad destruir y su pendn.
Las dos Amricas, Jos Mara Torres Caicedo (1856).
6 The EZLN first made itself known on 1 January 1994, the same day that the North American
Free Trade Agreement came into force.
7 French sociologist.