Time Concepts in Intercultural Business. India and Germany in Comparison

Seminar paper from the year 2014 in the subject Business economics - Miscellaneous grade: 13 http: //uni-jena.de/ (Fachbereich Interkulturelle Wirtschaftskommunikation) course: Seminar Wirtschaftsbezogene Kulturgeschichte Indiens language: English abstract: Time is inseparably intertwined with our lives. We seldom stop to think about it because it appears to be a natural constant which has always been and always will be. Most people are oblivious to the fact that our perception of time and our ways to handle it are not uniform but culturally shaped. To say it with the words of the US-American anthropologist Edward T. Hall who is one of the leading theoreticians in the field: Time is a core system of cultural social and personal life. In fact nothing occurs except in some kind of time frame. A complicating factor in intercultural relations is that each culture has its own time frames in which the patterns are unique. This means that to function effectively abroad it is just as necessary to learn the language of time as it is to learn the spoken language. (Hall 1983 p. 3). Consequently different time frames might explain many misunderstandings in intercultural collaboration. Due to globalization companies invest all around the world and it becomes more and more relevant for them to understand why the attempt to implement their management approaches in culturally different contexts often fail. It is not enough to look at the surface only - time matters as well. Accordingly Sahay emphasizes that taking time and space into account will lead to a more holistic understanding of implementation problems by going beyond the search for the elusive dependent variable that determines success or failure (Sahay 1998 p. 149). It is my ambition to strive for a deeper understanding as well. The underlying questions of this paper are: what kind of time related misunderstandings can occur in intercultural collaboration of Indians and Germans? And correspondingl