Managing in a Changing World: From Multiculturalism to Hybridization–The Production of Hybrid Management Cultures in Israel, Thailand, and Mexico Baruch Shimoni with Harriet Bergmann* Executive Overview Stories of local managers working for global corporations reveal that the standard multicultural approach no longer suffices to describe what is occurring at the borders of the global business system. Local managers retain local managerial culture even as they are indoctrinated into the culture of the corporations. The resulting hybrid forms of management should be studied by corporations. Interviews with Thai, Mexican and Israeli managers of two global corporations headquartered in Sweden and the US exemplify this hybridization. R apid penetration of global corporations’ values and practices into sites at the margins of the global business system requires that researchers in academic journals, instructors in MBA programs, corporations, and consultants doing intercultural training consider the idea of culture itself from a new perspective. Researchers and practitioners must stop seeing cultures solely through the multicultural ap- proach, that is, as separated wholes of fixed belief and world view, and instead develop, or continue to import from social sciences research, perspectives that recognize that cultures flow into one another and hybridize as well (see Bhabha 1994; Clifford 1997; Garcia 1995; Morley & Robins 1997; Werb- ner & Modood 1997). Relying on empirical work, this paper offers a new perspective for the under- standing of management cultures at the margins of the global business system. This paper is part of wider ethnographic field- work conducted in the year 2000, which collected stories of managers in the headquarters and local offices of two global corporations, “Solna” and “Communication.” 1 The first is Swedish and the second American; their offices are in Israel, Thai- land, and Mexico. As the stories show, these local offices have become sites for a change in manage- ment culture. In these offices, Solna and Commu- nication behave in accordance with a multicul- tural perspective that recognizes the local culture and relies on it, through the local managers, to relate to the local environment. Despite this reli- ance, the corporations are still intent on transfer- ring standard Western practices, based on rigid and flexible management ideas, to the local offices (Barley & Kunda 1992). Rigid practices are based on rational systems of rules and regulations and they express themselves in values such as full obedience to common systems of rules and regu- lations, punctuality and planning. Flexible prac- tices are based on participative systems and they express themselves in values such as equity, par- ticipation, openness, innovativeness and creativ- ity. The stories of the local managers show that 1 Names of the corporations and the managers mentioned in this paper have been changed. *Baruch Shimoni (bbo_global@hotmail.com) is with the Sociology and Anthropology Department, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Harriet Bergmann (harreit.bergmann@yale.edu) is with the English Language Institute at Yale University. 76 August Academy of Management Perspectives