ABSTRACT
As former natives who have spent a signifi cant portion of our (as editors) personal lives as being born, brought up, educated and socialised in a range of settings in India, we still feel a lot needs to be understood about India. We can understand how diffi cult it might be for someone who was not born and brought up in India to experience its diversity, paradoxes and multitude of cultural challenges. We believe the cultural fabric of a vast nation such as India changes every 100 kilometres; the dialect, the food, the rituals and social interactions start to take on a different form and shape as one travels through the length and breadth of the nation. Contributing to this diverse cultural fabric, to name a few, important infl uences are aspects such as different political ideologies, coexistence of rich and poor, multiple castes and religion. Such infl uences have a pervasive impact on how employees behave in organisations and how people and cultures should be managed in business organisations. Additionally, with the advent of globalisation there has been an even more pronounced need to manage focus on intercultural management and cultural integration. An increasing incidence of new generation entrepreneurs, work cultures have witnessed transformation. For example, in cities such as Bengaluru, Gurgaon, Noida and Mumbai we have witnessed a new wave of fi rst-generation entrepreneurs in fi elds as diverse as information technology, business process outsourcing, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, telecommunications, retail and more recently infrastructure. Much of this entrepreneurial activity and freedom is associated with high levels of risk-taking ability coupled with market orientation and strong quality management approaches (Malik et al ., 2012) to deliver a sound profi t formula that supports fi rms’ business models (Malik and Rowley, 2015).
