Abstract:

Our life has acquired increasingly global features; it unfolds within a space of multiple cultural, educational, social, geopolitical, technological, and informational interferences that come from all directions. A long while ago, this space was called a global village [12]. However, in the global village, we cannot ignore the polarization of the contemporary world. The Information Technologies are the main vector of globalisation. The opposite of globalisation in culture is called ethnocentrism; it is the tendency to judge the views of other cultures by comparing them to one’s own culture, which is considered as a unique criterion to assess genuine values (Oxford, Webster Dictionary). Contrary to what globalization preaches, ethnocentrism is much present everywhere in the world, under various forms and slogans. As long as the organisational culture represents shared beliefs, views and significations, we can argue that it has a significant informational component and that it benefits from the support of Information Technologies. The context of globalisation increases the relevance of this technological support on a daily basis. Culture, as nucleus and originator of ethnic features, and, to a certain extent, of ethnocentrism, defends itself by trying to resist the globalised offensive of the economic sector, in its concrete, generalized manifestations as industrial, commercial, financial and business integration, coupled with their global political and social effects. We argue that for businesses that wish to survive on the market, informational integration is more than compulsory in the 21st century. The definition of causality relations between the organisational culture and technology, on the one hand, and their impact on performance, on the other hand, as well as the process of checking these definitions in practice, have remained within the realm of disputes and speculations. Experts in the field of Information Technology consider that organisations have not managed yet to develop a culture that could exploit the opportunities offered by these technologies to the maximum. When we analyse the impact of Information Technologies we must not ignore that it is fairly difficult to evaluate it objectively, as long as we are already affected by the society in which we live and by the technology that we study. This is, in fact, the first effect of any technology: it diminishes the human capacity to evaluate its effects on us. Via this exploratory research we wish to capture the delicate equilibrium between globalisation and ethnocentrism through the prism of the main globalisation vector, namely Information Technologies.