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Intersecting cultures and eCommerce: a case study

Published: 13 April 2006 Publication History

Abstract

How do managers of global eCommerce services accommodate to the structural conditions and unique situated cultures in different locations where they do business, as they attempt to control business processes and shape organizational culture? This paper reports on a case study of an eCommerce company, "EmergeInc," that operated from offices in several different countries, selling online information services to customers in many different countries.The case illustrates management's role in attempting to accommodate to cultural and structural influences, while actively shaping organizational norms and practices and encouraging conformance to them. Three main techniques were used by the management team to shape norms and practices: using the Internet to disseminate stories, transferring employees, and creating new integrative roles and reporting relationships.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    SIGMIS CPR '06: Proceedings of the 2006 ACM SIGMIS CPR conference on computer personnel research: Forty four years of computer personnel research: achievements, challenges & the future
    April 2006
    368 pages
    ISBN:1595933492
    DOI:10.1145/1125170
    • General Chair:
    • Conrad Shayo,
    • Program Chairs:
    • Kate Kaiser,
    • Terry Ryan
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 13 April 2006

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    Author Tags

    1. culture
    2. eCommerce
    3. global management
    4. internet
    5. situated culture
    6. structural features

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