Editorial: Is there a European style of management?

• Author: D. E. Hussey
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/jsc.4240010502
• Published date: 01 September 1992
• Date: 01 September 1992

Journal

of

Strategic Change,

Vol.

1,

257-258

(1992)

EditoriaZ

Is

there

a

European style

of

management?

I

recently attended the annual conference of the European

Foundation for Management Development, which is always a

good occasion for meeting people who are more concerned with

the people aspects

of

change than the analytical.

A

typical

conference is attended by senior personnel from the business,

academic and consultancy world, who have in common a role

in management education

or

development. This time the theme

was a European style

of

management, and the question was

whether such a style existed as distinct from a French, German,

English, etc style.

At

the start participants voted using modern computer tech-

nology, and were split roughly equally between those who

believed there was such a style, those who said there was not,

and those who did not know.

At

the end of the conference there

was a large majority in favour

of

the contention, and only a

minority against. As a consistent

no

sayer,

I

found this fascinating,

as

I

had heard

no

intellectual arguments during the conference

that would support the contention, and many that showed a lack

of

international awareness in the contrasts made with other parts

of

the world.

Professor Gordon Shenton, the conference chairman, sug-

gested that the conference should be seeking

‘.

.

.

to

nail down

a specific style of management which can be called European

because it is an approach which Europeans have

in

common and

which is different from Japanese management or American

management’. He further argued that the European style was

different from an international style, which he believed was

nearly always synonymous with an American style. The root

of

the argument was that European management is tied

to

cultural

diversity. ‘An American manager must be able to function across

the whole

of

the United States, but he expects the cultural

assumptions

to

be the same everywhere.

A

European manager

is increasingly obliged to function across the entire Community,

but he knows that cultural assumptions will differ wherever

he goes. Because

of

the peculiar nature of the European

environment, he has to develop an ability

to

work across

different cultural systems. This ability should, in itself, give a

considerable competitive edge

to

the best European management

in the global field because

it

is not

a

skill which the Japanese

or the Americans acquire easily.’