Page 101 - Crossing Cultural Boundaries - Cees den Teuling

by expenditures in training facilities, total assets, the number of employees, dividend pay-out and investments, as the drivers of intellectual enterprise value.
Concluding, it can be said that the role of business networks for the exchange of knowledge, shared expertise and mutual support between managers and owners/ entrepreneurs and the members of staff of the respective organisations, is not well- developed in Russia, in contrast to the developed economies. Russian authorities are instrumental in bringing organisations together, mainly sector wise. By the input of their (legal) power and larger amounts of investment capital and/or subsidies, the remains of previous artefacts of the FSU command-control economy are the subject of revitalisation processes, e.g. in the aircraft, power utility and automotive industries. Business networks, to be established by bottom-up development among SME organisations do not encounter a “level playing field” by the Federal and Regional authorities, in comparison to the state-owned and state-subsidised organisations. As a relict, left from the previous command-control economy, Russia’s “ruling class” still likes to be involved and to be able to grasp from the state owned and state controlled enterprises. Twenty-five years after the implosion of the FSU, roughly half of the economy in Russia is still (or again) in the ownership or under the control of the State. The pre-conditions for the development of a stronger, more liberal free-market economy are almost absent in the Russian economy of today and it can be assumed that there are no signs for improvement.
The final section of this chapter is dedicated to the importance of language and agreement on contexts to avoid miscommunications and misunderstandings in KT processes as well as to be able to accomplish SVC as the desired results.
2.9 Language, context, miscommunications and misunderstanding in Knowledge Transfer and Sustainable Value Creation processes
In the international business literature, a rather new and unobserved topic is the existence of disengagement of communication, which occurs frequently in emerging markets e.g. Russia. Connected to the deficiencies in the local professional business discourse, stemming from limitations in language proficiency can be traced from a lack of experience with the free-market economy, establishing barriers between the foreign service providers (transmitters) and local business owners/managers (recipients) in a trans-boundary KT (translation) set-up. To fail to implement the suitable linguistic expression, which complicates adjustments of a cross-cultural nature, will hamper and occasionally prevent to reach the level of ensured SVC by the involved actors and the
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