ABSTRACT
Historically, cross-cultural management has been dominated by a concept of culture that first prioritises the national level as a unit of analysis and, second, considers culture as a set of measurable qualities or traits. The concept of ‘native categories’ takes as its basis the idea that managers are unconsciously influenced by social categorisations through which they organise their world, which are independent of empirical data, though people may draw upon such data to support their categorisations. The Taiwanese case has a number of implications for concepts of management and organisation. Applying the native category approach to the Taiwanese management suggests that, for researchers and practitioners, the future of cross-cultural management is to regard culture in a more nuanced, critical fashion, taking multilevel, multifaceted, dynamic and dialogic approaches, which do not reject functionalist or distance-based approaches, but regard these as part of a complex pattern of cross-border social activity rather than as objects in and of themselves.
