HOW LANGUAGE AND CULTURE DISTORT THE MANAGEMENT CONCEPT: AN ATTEMPT TO COMPARE FRENCH AND AMERICAN MANAGEMENT REPRESENTATIONS

Bertrand Agostini

No 1206, Cahiers du CEREFIGE from CEREFIGE (Centre Europeen de Recherche en Economie Financiere et Gestion des Entreprises), Universite de Lorraine

Abstract: Language and culture are inseparable. They feed and influence each other. Therefore depending on its historical evolution, a given word can be filled with several different meanings. Furthermore, being a way to communicate our perception, language is submitted to the 4 functions of consciousness: senses, thought, intuition, feeling. Therefore the fundamental relationship between language and culture is both rational and irrational. The aim of this article is to show through a series of examples that in a management context, beyond the use of a particular terminology, there is a variable preconception of the objects described by words that affect the perception of a given managerial cultural reality or representation. Therefore the words “management”, “organization”, “hierarchy” offer a wide variety of meanings and representations that vary from one culture to another. As Gérard Tiry (1994) puts it, the preconceptions that are in ourselves constantly put us in a comparative state of mind that distorts the situation by imposing a frame, a starting point, a direction and an evaluation.

Keywords: Language; culture; meaning; management; perception. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 22 pages
Date: 2012, Revised 2012
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