Western companies in China have been warned they are failing to get
their CSR policies across to Chinese partners and suppliers because
they take too little account of cultural differences.
Heidi von Weltzien Hoivik, a past president of the European Business
Ethics Network, says her long-term research and consultancy work in
China has shown Western businesses often underestimate cultural
barriers in this field.
In a paper recently presented at the network’s annual conference she
urges more effort to discover how Western principles can be presented
within Chinese cultural frameworks and adapted to take account of local
views.
Von Weltzien Hoivik, a specialist in business ethics at the Norwegian
School of Management in Oslo who has spent many years working with and
studying companies in China, says she has often observed tensions
between locally accepted behaviour and the rigid requirements of
Western companies trying to apply what managers see as ethical business
rules. She gives the example of a pharmaceuticals company that forbids
its sales staff to invite doctors out for dinner – a ban at odds with
Chinese social customs. ‘In China they just think that’s ridiculous and
that it’s natural and polite to take someone out to dinner,’ she said.
‘So they are bypassing it.’
Von Weltzien Hoivik said many Chinese business people are willing to
adopt Western social responsibility tenets but often find companies too
prescriptive, which makes it hard to apply global policies to the local
conditions. ‘The Chinese say, “Yes, give us regular training courses on
these cultural differences, but give us some leeway too”,’ she said.
‘There are major cultural barriers that hinder understanding of, and
compliance with, Western codes of conduct. We need to help the Chinese
understand responsible business practice within their own value systems
and we need to research the voluntary initiatives that have already
been developed there, so we can adopt a new Chinese perspective on CSR
– one in which our Western notions of corporate responsibility find an
equivalent that is suitable for China.’
