Page 102 - Crossing Cultural Boundaries - Cees den Teuling

organisation. Financial losses and/or not obtaining the required and projected process efficiencies and revenues can be the result for the involved organisations. As argued by Kuznetsov and Kuznetsova (2014) the relative inadequacy of the available professional idiom is likely a certain feature in the organisational environment in the economies in transition, which requires some time and a point of attention in trans-boundary KT processes.
Oriented on the situation in emerging markets, several authors have identified a number of language-sensitive issues. Mainly observed and experienced by business trainers, consultants and educational professionals, difficulties are encountered in managerial KT (Branine, 2005; Elenkov, 1998; Michailova & Hollinshead, 2009). In the available literature, an attention is paid on subjects, such as the cultural constraints in emerging markets on knowledge acquisition and dissemination (e.g. May, Puffer & McCarthy, 2005; May, Stewart, Puffer, McCarthy & Ledgerwood, 2011) and the historical background of the invalid managerial expertise and practices of business in emerging markets/economies in transition (e.g. Holden, 1991; Holden, Kuznetsov & Whitelock, 2008a; Holden & Tansley, 2008b; Michailova & Jormainen; 2011a; Rodrigues, Gonzales Duarte & de Padua Carmen, 2012).
Analyses of the origins of language-related problems and their impact on KT and international business, as a threshold to the absorption and the evolvement of the level of MK in emerging markets, occur rarely. From the KT perspective, a consistent and detailed effort in this field is delivered by Holden (1991,1994), Holden at al. (1998), Holden and Tansley (2008b), Holden and Vaiman (2013). They argue that discursive barriers (socially and historically) have more influence by itself alone than on preventing mutual understanding. “They create false trails, protract dialogue, block the establishment of cognitive ground” (Holden & Tansley, 2008b, p. 212), costing the companies misdirected resources through knowledge depletion, talent waste and strategic readjustment (Baeuerle, 2013).
The situation in Russia and other post-communist countries is differentiated from each other but they all show a more or less lack in terms of equivalency and an interruption in the continuity of business practices, as executed in the decades under the Soviet system. The previous Soviet model, without the irrelevant notions of Western business, management and entrepreneurship, is replaced by a free-market model in which the Western notions are essential and in full use. Given the poor quality or even the absence of any support by legislative, institutional and informative institutions, there are obstacles and drawbacks in the new economic reality, where the “operators” have to
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