I placed a short video above because it is extremely relative to what I am going to be talking about and that is Culture. What is Culture really, we hear it all the time in school, we read about it in books, and see it on TV but what is it really? Culture is the “inherited ideas, beliefs, values, and knowledge, which constitute the shared bases of social action” (Dictionary). Now that we have defined culture we can examine why it is so essential for international businesses to respect common cultures when spreading businesses around the world. International Business has take the world by storm with companies such as McDonalds, Starbucks, Walmart, and many more. It is ever present to understand to effects of globalization and international business on culture for two reasons. One being to keep large businesses in check form overstepping there bonds ethically and culturally and two to understand the importance culture has on people and society.
Culture is inherited ideas, beliefs, and values. These ideas, beliefs, and values are past down from generation to generation. It is important to understand that these core values that distinguish people to a particular group are fundamentally important to societies. Culture is what brings people together, it allows them have a sense of belonging. It also in some cases allows outsiders to understand others better, due to the engagement of the exchange in cultural knowledge.
Now when it comes to International business we can see how this can become a difficulty because when you establish a business take for instance McDonalds in another country, where let’s say they don’t eat beef, such as Iran (A Muslim country). There is a cultural issue here seeing McDonalds sells beef products. For those who live in this country and do not eat meat they would not purchase products form McDonalds due to the cultural back lash. Seeing many native Iranians would not be purchasing any products from this store McDonalds would thus not be making money and the point of a business is to make money. On the other side of the spectrum you would have natives of this country in arms seeing that it goes against their cultural values. It is not right for McDonalds to place a restaurant that sells meet in a country such as this unless it does shift to abide by their cultural values, which in fact is exactly what McDonalds has done in Muslim countries.
International Businesses deal with issues of cultural differences on a daily basis. It is a part of expansion. A problem that still lies here for me is that although McDonalds may have shifted to cultural values in Iranian it has still done damage on cultural traditions. If we look from the transformation of companies spreading throughout the world we can begin to distinguish a common pattern and that is the pattern standardization. Which is in itself a whole other issue but standardization does have a major impact on culture because standardization slow begins to take away from traditional norms and replace them with new ones that are more standardized. Now I am not saying that International Business is a bad thing I am merely just stating that there are major negative effects of International business when it comes to the standardization of culture and societies and this is what need to be evaluated. Evaluated in the since of whether or not international business is an overall positive to societies and cultures or negative.
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