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Joint Venture of the France Based Company Alcatel and the U.S. Based Company Lucent Technologies

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Introduction
A joint venture, according to Adler and Graham (1989),along with mergers and acquisitions, licensing and distribution agreements, and sales of products and services – critical aspects of all such interorganizational relationships, are face-to-face negotiations. This would mean the interaction between people. In today’s society, as the world becomes much more globalized than we could ever think of, with the fast growth of the internet industry, we are connected with people from another country at an instant. However, business to business deals and negotiations are still at a stage where face-to-face communication is still required. As interpersonal communication is brought onto the table, with the clash of different …show more content…

However, more importantly, it was the cultural clash that brought the JV into a poor state initially. As Adler, Doktor, and Redding (1986) wrote in their article, with the growing shift of business from the Atlantic to the Pacific Basin, East-West cultural differences are becoming increasingly significant. Research in developmental psychology, sociology, and anthropology shows that there are major differences among the cognitive processes of people from different cultures. In the era of the global corporation, cultural diversity has to be recognized, understood, and appropriately used in organizations. It is suggested that cross-cultural management would greatly benefit from comparative studies considering the impact of the cognitive aspects of culture on managerial practice.
Moving forward as a combined company, the JV faces great competition from low-cost Chinese rivals, and as the internet technology is increasingly changing the industry, Alcatel-Lucent is faced with much deeper challenges as demand in the entire industry is decreasing tremendously. Yet one challenge would also be the challenge to integrate the French culture with that of the American Culture. As Shenkar (2001) pointed out, establishing a measure gauging the “distance” between cultures has understandably presented an even greater challenge. With the globalization of

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