Nike corporate culture and its integration in India

Abstract

The topic of intercultural management in Multinational Companies (referred to as MNCs in the rest of this paper) is fascinating. It has brought up a great deal of challenges in several fields and regions of the world over the past decades. The confrontation between a company’s inner corporate culture, values and vision, and the environment in which it decides to internationalize itself is indeed not a new stake. Companies have been facing it since the globalization itself started, and its implications are visible at every level of a company and of the society it settles in. This subject is particularly broad and probably too complex to be analyzed as such. Thus, with a view to provide an accurate analysis in this paper, the focus has been set upon a specific geographical, temporal and thematical frame. When it comes to the geographical frame, one might pay attention to the recent rise of discussions about Indian concepts of management. Owing to the consequences of colonization, most of the management practices in India have been borrowed from the West, as highlighted in the book The Challenges of Indian Management, by B.B. Virmani. Yet the Indian value system is deeply different from the one of western countries, which brings about a potential confrontation between these values and the management concepts usually applied in western companies. This is the reason why this analysis will be restrained to the integration of western MNCs in India. Then, as far as chronology is concerned, it is very hard to try and come back to the historical root of such a challenge. As mentioned earlier, this confrontation originates from the beginning of the internationalization of companies per se, and the challenge has kept growing along with the globalization of what has then become MNCs. This globalization, which started around the 70s with the development of New Information and Communication Technologies (NICT) and is still running now, has brought up lots of theories and concepts about management. This period was also the one where the Indian economy and international trade started booming. This thus makes it a particularly interesting period to study the challenges raised above. Finally, in order to make this analysis more concrete and illustrated, this focus needs to be sharpened around one particular example. A lot of companies have now set foot in India and they do not all face the same challenges – even though some of them are quite common. This paper is meant to put the emphasis on the potential discrepancy between a particularly deeply-rooted western corporate culture and the Indian management concepts. A case-inpoint in this respect would be the example of Nike in India. Nike’s original American culture is indeed particularly fixed in each layer of the company, which makes it a perfect illustration of a successful western MNC trying to find a balance between its core management principles and the Indian cultural features. Yet this ambivalence between Nike’s strong original culture and the Indian management style brings about several issues. These could be summarized into a global one: How does Nike succeed in its “management integration” into the Indian culture? We will try to solve this issue buy getting the answer to the three following questions: * What are the practices that MNCs like Nike follow in their abroad subsidiaries to manage their cultural diversity?. * What is the role of international managers (expatriates) in this cultural integration?. * How does Nike take the best of Indian management style by integrating some of its features in its own practices?.