Cross-cultural comparison of cultural mythologies and leadership patterns

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore leadership styles and patterns in India, Indonesia, Pakistan, and the USA in order to contribute to a greater understanding of global leadership. Design/methodology/approach – The paper uses cultural mythologies as a lens (Kessler and Wong-MingJi, 2009a) to extract the most favored leadership traits within selected countries. In doing so, the paper explores historical trajectories and core values of each country to identify their distinctive characteristics. Additionally, leadership styles of well-known business leaders in each culture are examined to develop a comparative discussion of global leadership patterns and styles. Findings – The paper finds that leaders may share same characteristics across countries, however, their behavioral expressions tend to unfold differently within each context. The paper argues that without context, meanings embedded in cultural mythologies and behaviors often become lost. The paper concludes that a comparative analysis of selected countries reveals a more complex and rich array of cultural meanings, thus offering support to a contextual view of leadership. Research limitations/implications – Examination of cultural mythologies on leadership makes important theoretical contributions by illustrating that cultural mythologies indeed shape the values, behaviors, and attitudes of global leaders, and provide three important functions that are identified as: cultural bridging, meaning making, and contextual nuancing. Practical implications – Understanding comparative leadership patterns is critical in international business. The paper offers cultural mythologies as a tool for leaders who seek to cross-cultural boundaries in developing long term and high-quality productive international business relationships. Originality/value – The value of the study lies in developing a comparative analysis of leadership patterns in three Southeast Asian countries and the USA with the help of cultural mythologies. The paper urges that scholars to move beyond quantification of cultural dimensions to a more contextualized understanding of leadership.

Between fiction and reality: Transforming the semiotic object

(Commentary on Umberto Eco’s article On the ontology of fictional characters: A semiotic approach in the present issue.)The contrast between real and fictional characters in our thinking needs further elaboration. In this commentary on Eco’s look at the ontology of the semiotic object, I suggest that human semiotic construction entails constant modulation of the relationship between the states of the real and fictional characters in irreversible time. Literary characters are examples of crystallized fictions which function as semiotic anchors in the fluid construction — by the readers — of their understandings of the world. Literary characters are thus fictions that are real in their functions — while the actual reality of meaningmaking consists of ever new fictions of fluid (transitory) nature. Eco’s ontological look at the contrast of the semiotic object with perceptual objects (Gegenstände) in Alexius Meinong’s theorizing needs to be complemented by the semiotic subject. Cultural mythologies of human societies set the stage for such invention and maintenance of such dynamic unity of fictionally real and realistically fictional characters.

Arabic in the Medieval World

Observers of the recent political polarizations of western and Islamic culture might be forgiven for concluding that we are living in a new Middle Ages (Holsinger; Eco). Such narratives as “the clash of civilizations” (Huntington) and “the rise of the modern West” (McNeill; which beguiles with the dangerous fantasy of the fall of the atavistic East) have attained the status of cultural mythologies. Conversely, modern Arab cultures have never forgotten the shock of their first encounters with medieval Europeans in the Levant and al-Andalus: the legacies of crusade, countercrusade, occupation, and re-conquest. Extremists have politicized the orientalist divide described by Edward Said to create their own postcolonial mythologies. We are now in danger of projecting current impasses historically backward until Islam and the West seem always to have been enemies, inimical by nature and throughout history. Doing so would reify East and West and render them monolithic. Most troubling, such mythologies obscure the uneasy, strategic, and often stunningly productive interchanges that enrich what might better be considered as a complex intercultural evolution. The deep roots of the encounter between Islam and Christendom—the influence of Arabic science, literature, and philosophy and of Islamic forms of thought, historiography, economics, and cultural practice—deserve a richer, less politicized examination. It would be useful to try to see medieval Islamic cultures write back, from a time before European hegemony, decentering and defamiliarizing their Western neighbors. What would a medieval world look like if it constructed itself not as a tedious intermission between classical and Renaissance enlightenments, but rather as a heterogeneous fretwork of contact zones, aversions, and transmissions between sophisticated and acquisitive cultures? This medieval world could better serve our own twenty-first-century global culture, whose multiplex networks exceed simple polarization. To this outcome, the study of Arabic writing in the premodern and early modern world is key.