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The strategic management literature emphasizes the concept of business intelligence (BI) as an essential competitive tool. Yet the sustainability of the firms’ competitive advantage provided by BI capability is not well researched. To fill this gap, this study attempts to develop a model for successful BI deployment and empirically examines the association between BI deployment and sustainable competitive advantage. Taking the telecommunications industry in Malaysia as a case example, the research particularly focuses on the influencing perceptions held by telecommunications decision makers and executives on factors that impact successful BI deployment. The research further investigates the relationship between successful BI deployment and sustainable competitive advantage of the telecommunications organizations. Another important aim of this study is to determine the effect of moderating factors such as organization culture, business strategy, and use of BI tools on BI deployment and the sustainability of firm’s competitive advantage.

This research uses combination of resource-based theory and diffusion of innovation (DOI) theory to examine BI success and its relationship with firm’s sustainability. The research adopts the positivist paradigm and a two-phase sequential mixed method consisting of qualitative and quantitative approaches are employed. A tentative research model is developed first based on extensive literature review. The chapter presents a qualitative field study to fine tune the initial research model. Findings from the qualitative method are also used to develop measures and instruments for the next phase of quantitative method. The study includes a survey study with sample of business analysts and decision makers in telecommunications firms and is analyzed by partial least square-based structural equation modeling.

The findings reveal that some internal resources of the organizations such as BI governance and the perceptions of BI’s characteristics influence the successful deployment of BI. Organizations that practice good BI governance with strong moral and financial support from upper management have an opportunity to realize the dream of having successful BI initiatives in place. The scope of BI governance includes providing sufficient support and commitment in BI funding and implementation, laying out proper BI infrastructure and staffing and establishing a corporate-wide policy and procedures regarding BI. The perceptions about the characteristics of BI such as its relative advantage, complexity, compatibility, and observability are also significant in ensuring BI success. The most important results of this study indicated that with BI successfully deployed, executives would use the knowledge provided for their necessary actions in sustaining the organizations’ competitive advantage in terms of economics, social, and environmental issues.

This study contributes significantly to the existing literature that will assist future BI researchers especially in achieving sustainable competitive advantage. In particular, the model will help practitioners to consider the resources that they are likely to consider when deploying BI. Finally, the applications of this study can be extended through further adaptation in other industries and various geographic contexts.

Purpose: The purpose of the chapter is to determine the connection between organizational culture and specifics of the process of decision making in modern business systems and to determine the directions of managing the organizational culture depending on the set criteria of decision making.

Methodology: A proprietary classification of the types of organizational culture of modern business systems according to the criterion of employees' involvement into decision making is offered. This classification uses two dimensions of employees' involvement into decision making for classification of the types of organizational culture of modern business systems. First dimension: interest of business manager in involvement of employees into the process of decision making. Second dimension: employees' inclination for participation in the process of making of managerial decisions. The factors that influence these dimensions are determined.

Conclusions: Connection between organizational culture and specifics of decision making in modern business systems according to the criterion of employees' involvement in decision making is determined. The minimal level of involvement envisages independent decision making by business manager without participation of employees. In this case, a lot of problems of the business system remain unsolved and possibilities remain unused. Resource intensity of decision making is the highest, and their practical implementation is complicated by employees' dissatisfaction, but this process is conducted very quickly. The medium level of involvement envisages either collective discussion, but decision making by business manager, or collection of feedback by business manager with low interest in it from employees. In this case, resource intensity of decision making is lower, and decisions could be made and implemented faster. The highest level of involvement is connected to collective decision making by employees and business manager. This allows determining problems and using possibilities of the business system with minimal resources. Though the duration of the process of decision making is the highest, solutions are implemented quickly due to employees' support.

Originality/value: The determined specifics show the necessity for considering the influence of the organizational culture on specifics of the process of decision making in modern business systems. It is substantiated that no type of organizational culture of modern business systems according to the criterion of employees' involvement in decision making can provide a guarantee of decisions' optimality. The directions of managing the organizational culture depending on the set criteria (completeness, speed, resource intensity) of decision making are recommended.

Many scholars and practitioners in the fields of business and management have recently published theoretical and empirical studies on the subject of business culture and its impact on its growth and effectiveness; yet, there has been a dearth of research on the topic of how organizational culture affects productivity. Moreover, there are hardly any theoretical or empirical research that examines these two concepts within the context of a micro-enterprise. This chapter uses a sample of 279 Ancash Region microenterprises to investigate the effect of local entrepreneurial culture on businesses’ overall performance. Among the four types of entrepreneurial cultures studied, only the Hierarchical culture was shown to have no effect on the degree of performance of the microenterprises. There is evidence of a significant causal relationship between the variables studied, the coefficient of determination was; business performance (r² = 0.796), with an SRMR of 0.037, the confirmatory model is relevant within its range of accuracy, while market culture has the greatest impact on business performance.

This paper aims at advancing research on the identification and the first test of the primary steps companies follow to generate and maintain enablers of long-term marketing relationships in cross-cultural business. To achieve the objective, the authors first identify the communication difficulties in generating and maintaining long-term relationships in bi-cultural or multi-cultural settings. They then develop the building blocks, or enablers, that are needed to form and maintain enduring relationships. They finally illustrate the suggested process by describing the use of enablers in two contrasting cultures, the Anglo-Saxon and the Latin, using samples from the United States and Chile, respectively.

Family businesses must be examined within the cultural contexts in which they are bred, nourished, and grown. According to Chrisman, Chua, and Steier (2003), family businesses are launched for reasons other than the desire for dollars and cents (or rupees and yen). In fact, the authors note, “Family businesses… bring together so starkly the economic and non-economic realities of organizational life…” (2003, p. 442). Calls for family business research that extend beyond traditional geographical boundaries to include global comparisons have been issued by Hoy (2003) and others. Fortunately, recent developments in cultural assessment and measurement methodology have provided tools to enable a better understanding of families and family businesses vis-à-vis the use of regional clusters and comparative lenses (Gupta & Hanges, 2004). Gupta and Hanges (2004) note three clusters of the Catholic ethic: Southern (or Latin) Europe, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. As shown in Table 1, more than three-fourths of the population in these clusters follows the Catholic faith. In this study, we examine the spirit of family business in these three clusters.

This chapter intends to reveal the leading questions regarding doing business in Eastern Europe. The chapter uncovers the most important cultural issues applied to business ethics in order to improve the knowledge concerning business in Eastern Europe. We envisage, also, the nexus between intercultural elements and business ethics issues. This chapter aims at practitioners and management scholars, serving as a starting point for deepening the understanding of cultural and ethical issues in Eastern Europe.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the economic, social and political conditions have changed radically, especially in Europe. During the last two decades, Europeanization has become an attractive research area and an integral part of the study of European Union (EU) politics.

National cultural values provide a context for discussing ethics and ethicality, but not an explanation of why there are differences in ethical values. The organizational culture is quite homogeneous among Eastern and Central Europe (ECE) countries, but the national cultures remained different.

Organizational cultures in ECE are characterized by: highly centralized structures, dislike of uncertainty, preferences for formality and strong collectivist attitudes.

Professional ethics is not a special type of ethics but the application of ethical judgement in professional practice. This application can be difficult in business settings as conflicting demands can arise. In areas where professional practitioners are employed, there is potential for a conflict.

This chapter's objective is to analyze, with a long-term perspective, the formation of an entrepreneurial culture in Mexico's Midwest, specifically in the state of Jalisco, in terms of the geographical environment, the culture in general, and the local economic institutions that, when viewed interconnectedly, will globally impact the practices, representations, and imaginaries of persons who at a given time have made the decision to undertake profitable economic activities – individual and collective entrepreneurs, in other words. To this end, we have divided the text into two sections. In the first, we conceptually review what we understand as entrepreneurial culture; in principle, we deconstruct its terms and then conjugate them from a social science perspective. We also emphasize the importance of studying the milieu as a scenario of action with different arenas, where a variety of agents have been involved. In the second part, without sidelining conceptual analysis, we present concrete empirical evidence of the role played by culture and local economic institutions that shape entrepreneurial culture in Midwestern Mexico over time, specifically in Jalisco. The text ends with some final considerations.