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The purpose of this paper is to argue that in cross-cultural and strategic management, we must pay attention to the processes creating and maintaining culture. How can everyday interactions give rise to national, “deep” cultures, recognizable across centuries, or organizational cultures, recognizable across decades?

This is a conceptual paper using the evidence provided by research about cultural patterns, and using sociological status-power theory to explain the causation of these patterns. Emergence, also called self-organization, is introduced as mechanism connecting individual-level causation with resulting system-level patterns. Cases are used to illustrate points.

Simulation gaming and computational social simulation are introduced. These methods allow “growing” a system, thus allowing to experiment with potential interventions and their unanticipated effects.

This essay could have major implications for research, adding new methods to survey-based and case-based studies, and achieving a new synthesis. Strategic management today almost invariably involves cross-cultural elements. As a result, cross-cultural understanding is now strategically important.

The suggestions in this essay could lead to new collaborations in the study of culture and organizational processes. Examples include team formation, negotiation, mergers and acquisitions, trans-national collaboration, incentive systems and job interviews.

The suggestions in this essay could contribute to our ability of proactively steering processes in organizations. In particular, they can provide a check to the notion that a control measure necessarily results in its intended effect.

The synthesis of biological, sociological and cross-cultural psychological viewpoints with design-oriented method, using games or social simulations as research instruments, is original in the field.

Within the globalized commercial context, Japanese business activity in India has increased significantly. The purpose of this paper is to highlight common attitudinal traits that would facilitate orientation of Indian executives towards Japanese management methods through, for instance “reverse adaptation”, using an approach other than cultural dimensions that have emerged in recent decades and consider how these play out in change management contexts.

A literature review was undertaken which found significant parallels between traditional Indian philosophy and modern Japanese management methods, inter alia long-term orientation, equanimity and Nemawashi (pre-arranged participative decision making) and shared spiritual dimensions. The paper employed a methodology of participant observation and semi-structured interview approaches contextualized through lived experience methodology (Van Manen, 2015). These events are described and analysed narratively using a blend of qualitative participant observation and reflexive critical incident review.

The findings, by examining the confluence of Indian and Japanese management, provide an innovative avenue of research and theory for change management.

The research employs an inductive methodology which employs vignettes to examine Indo-Japanese contexts. The limits to generalization are recognized within the study. The paper offers important implications on Indo-Japanese collaboration and change management.

These findings have important practical implications for Indian and Japanese managers who will be able to engage better within the dynamics of the Japanese work environment in Japanese subsidiaries in India. These same insights could also potentially facilitate wider examples of working in Japanese environments, either in Japan or outside Japan. At a more general level, the findings are relevant to all foreign investors in India for enhanced employee engagement by providing insights into spiritual values of Indian managers and their impact on change management situations.

There is emerging research on how traditional Indian philosophy tenets can be found in modern (western) management. This paper provides reasons, based in the extant literature, to believe that modern Japanese methods can trace their origin in Buddhist Indian philosophical thought and offer important implications for managing change.

The paper offers in-depth original insights into Indo-Japanese collaborative contexts.

This paper introduces a contemporary model developed by a Sydney‐based consulting firm, ChangeTracking Research. The model was developed through an initial survey of 146 companies based in 27 countries.

The authors present a change development model which uses Hofstede's work as a foundation for understanding cross‐cultural differences in organizations from across the world and how that affects change management in these cultures. The model is informed by initial surveys of employees from 27 nationalities in 146 companies working in a variety of industries.

The paper presents a model that identifies six key drivers arising from different cultural dimensions that determine success in change management projects.

The model developed in this paper introduces new knowledge of the cross‐cultural dynamics in change management projects which would prove useful to change managers throughout the world.

The paper presents a unique model that presents six key drivers that determine the success of change management. A subset of clusters under each driver presents an in‐depth understanding of the critical issues to be recognized and managed in differing cultural contexts.

A comparison of distributive justice strategies was made between a collectivistic culture, i.e., Mexico, and an individualistic culture, i.e., the United States. This study is the first to include the effect of ingroup/outgroup on the distribution strategies as Fischer and Smith (2003) called for in their extensive meta‐analysis of the topic. Distributive justice was operationalized as the monetary rewards given by Northern Mexicans and Americans in sixteen different allocation vignettes. The results showed that the two groups were significantly different in only one of the allocation vignettes. These results indicate a convergence between the cultures of the northern maquiladora region of Mexico and of the United States. Northern Mexicans and Americans were not significantly different in their distributive justice strategies.

Academic journals still navigate the relatively closed space of academic peer domains, but knowledge production explodes and blows up in a cloud of expanding “gases” of knowledges slowly solidifying into tectonically mobile continents. This paper seeks to address these issues. It also provides an overview of seven published papers.

This paper uses a viewpoint approach as well as introducing the current issue.

The paper finds that “everything in knowledge production and dissemination has changed”, which will have consequences and implications in areas such as research domain independence and the role of the academic journal.

This paper raises the issues of change in knowledge production and dissemination, and of possible redefinition in the areas of change management and cross‐cultural knowledge. It also introduces the seven papers in the current issue.

The purpose of this paper is to explore a successful case of a Chinese state‐owned enterprise (SOE) as it applied western organization development (OD) approaches. Specifically, this study seeks to answer two questions: How has western organization development and change (OD/C) been applied in one Chinese SOE? and What lessons can be learned from this successful case?

The paper employs a single case design to gain an in‐depth understanding. The case study is the methodology when the focus is on a contemporary phenomenon within a real‐life context.

The findings reveal that the organization successfully uses a number of western OD techniques in creating a shared vision, establishing a performance‐based human resource management system, and standardizing budgetary and cost control procedures. The success of the company's change effort is largely attributed to leadership, standardization of management systems, commitment to learning and training, and partnership with an OD expert.

Findings of this paper are limited by the single case study design. Future research is needed to study more cases of success where western OD techniques have been applied. Further research is also warranted to identify indigenous OD approaches used by Chinese organizations. Current research also needs to be expanded to study regions or countries that are undergoing similar economic transitions and have adopted western‐based OD techniques.

By focusing on an under‐explored research territory – China – the paper expands the current knowledge of OD into the international domain and fills in the gap of OD/C research which is lacking in China.

This is a review article on the effectiveness of cross‐cultural managements of multinational companies. Analysis is based on the relationships between national and corporate culture and these corporate cultures vary across nations and how multinational companies can adopt the national differences.

This paper aims to examine primarily the readiness for change at an individual level. Additionally, this study examines the impact of internal change factors on individual readiness for change as well as their effect across nations.

The research relies on a quantitative research approach. A survey was conducted among 241 managers across 33 countries. Covariance-based structural equation modeling (CB-SEM) approach and multigroup analyses have been applied for hypothesis testing.

Our research contributes a novel perspective on individual readiness for change and unveils how employees' perceptions of context, process and intensity as internal change factors influence their readiness for change. The findings give support to the assertion that employees' attitudes toward change are altered by individual perceptions.

Our research explores the moderating effect of nationality used through a grouped variable and finds significant impacts of clusters of nationalities. Thus, nationality may serve as a proxy for culture that might be examined in future research studies in a more deeply focused way to include beliefs, values and societal norms.

The new understanding of the topic “individual readiness for change” opens up new research directions and enriches ongoing discussions about societal change and sustainable project management. This topic creates a link to situational leadership principles, considers cultural factors and, therefore, advocates for a people-centric approach to modern stakeholder management in order to achieve commitment toward change initiatives and consequent project success.

Considering that the path toward the successful implementation of any change project is highly contingent on personal dispositions to change, our research uncovers the potential impact of individual perceptions on employees' readiness for change.

Our major contribution is to highlight the importance of considering individual perceptual drivers of readiness for change and to acknowledge the moderating effect of nationality as a contextual factor altering the relationship between perception of change and individual readiness for change.