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Not part of the family?

The limits to managing
the corporate way in
international hotel chains
Carol Jones , Paul Thompson & Dennis
Nickson
Published online: 18 Feb 2011.
To cite this article: Carol Jones , Paul Thompson & Dennis Nickson (1998) Not
part of the family? The limits to managing the corporate way in international
hotel chains, The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 9:6,
1048-1063, DOI: 10.1080/095851998340748
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/095851998340748
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The International Journal of Human Resource Management 9:6 December 1998
Not part of the family? The limits to

managing the corporate way in
international hotel chains
Carol Jones, Paul Thompson and Dennis Nickson
Abstract Companies increasingly seek solutions to the corporate/local dichotomies

perceived to be a feature of more traditional approaches to managing across national

boundaries. At the human resource level, the rhetoric of transnationalism emphasizes
integration being achieved through ‘soft’ mechanisms, such as corporate culture devices,
which encourage all managers to develop an international (for this read corporate)
perspective on what they do. In theory, managerial staff are recruited and promoted on a
‘best person for the job’ basis and national identities are played down. Drawing upon
evidence from three international hotel chains (one American, one French and one
Swedish), this paper argues that there is a disjuncture between corporate culture devices
which assume that they can transcend national origins and the issues of interest and
identity which inform the activities and experiences of managers at unit level. The paper
suggests that companies need to be aware of the danger of assuming that one can be
trained to be ‘one of the family’. Rather, we argue that local managers are potentially
disadvantaged in terms of career progression as managers from the parent country utilize
criteria of acceptability informed by processes of socialization which are more
institutionally embedded and derived than has been assumed.
Keywords Internationalization, hotels, managers, corporate culture, identity
Introduction
This paper explores the tensions between the trends towards internationalization in the
hotel sector and the managerial resources available as agencies of such changes. There
has been a theoretical and policy debate about how to internationalize, and in particular
whether managerial personnel, knowledge and systems can be diffused across
companies and countries, or whether these are ‘locally’ or institutionally speci c.
Increasingly, companies are looking to ways to achieve a greater synergy (Edwards
et al., 1996; Marginson and Sisson, 1994), retaining existing economies of scale and
scope while enhancing a capacity to be locally responsive. In support of this the
prescriptive literature postulates a shift in emphasis from ‘hard’ to ‘soft’ mechanisms of
integration, from planning and control systems to cultural resources. This is encapsu-
lated in the idea of the ‘transnational’, characterized as a company with ‘the ability to
manage across national boundaries, retaining local exibility while achieving global
integration’ (Scullion, 1992: 68). While there have been legitimate doubts raised about
the scope of transnationalism (Hu, 1992; Whitely, 1994), it is suggested that it promotes
a more complex mix of national and corporate elements, centring at management level
upon shared knowledge, co-operation and horizontal networking (Edwards et al., 1996).
For the purposes of this paper the signi cant element is the rhetoric of pluralism and
0958–5192 © Routledge 1998

Not part of the family? 1049
diversity with regard to the relationship between parent-country nationals and host-
country nationals (hereafter PCNs, HCNs) at managerial level.
In the context of transnationalism a key mechanism of co-ordination is through
diffuse processes of ‘socialization’, most notably acculturation devices (Bartlett and
Ghoshal, 1989: 163). Companies are moving from a reliance on expatriated managers
as chief guardians of both systems and culture (Scullion, 1992), or what can be
characterized as emphasis on international managers, to ‘the majority of managers
[being] internationalized . . . through the subtle processes involved in creating an
international culture. This does not mean replacing local culture with corporate culture.
. . . The critical task is to co-opt managers in subsidiary operations and align their
interests with those of the company as whole’ (Barham and Rassam, 1989: 162–3).
Each manager, even if they remain forever in their home country, should develop an
international perspective on what they do irrespective of geographical or hierarchical
location (ibid.: 148–9). Rather than relying on managers moving as carriers and
guardians of the corporate approach, culture training brings host-country managers into
an identi cation with the whole. In this way they are all expected to become part of the
corporate ‘family’.
Within the sector which is the focus of our attention, change does not take place on
a blank canvas. The history of hotel internationalization has been characterized by the
spread of models of organization and management developed by the American chains,
in which control and integration were achieved through the delivery of a highly
standardized physical product, directed primarily at meeting the needs of American
business travellers, and underpinned by volumes of operating procedures (Nickson,
1997). Expatriate management tended to be the dominant approach, and overseas
operations were viewed as ‘appendages to a central domestic corporation’ (Go and Pine,
1995: 223, 279). For reasons we outline below, international hotel companies have,
however, accepted ‘the need to adapt their strategies to meet the particular socio-
cultural, economic and environmental needs at local level’ (ibid.: 13). Re ecting the
rationale of the international perspective, it is argued that ‘The challenge for
international hotel rms in today’s environment is to develop hotel managers who
understand the local situation but are able to interface with local clients and a world-
wide network of hotels and personnel’ (ibid.: 293).
Clearly these processes are not taking place in isolation. Cultural re-engineering has
been a central theme in business theory and practice for over a decade (Deal and
Kennedy, 1988; Linstead and Grafton-Small, 1992), and the limitations and awed
assumptions of corporate culture devices are increasingly understood (Willmott, 1993;
Meek, 1992). It is important to realize that the speci c imperative which informs the
emphasis on ‘soft’ integration in the international hotel sector is the current focus on the
service encounter as a key source of competitive advantage. Characterized by high
levels of intangibility, this is labour-intensive, cannot be separated from the point of
delivery and, as customers increasingly demand that it is ‘authentic’, cannot easily be
standardized (Jones et al., 1997). Further, culturally informed expectations and
perceptions brought to the service encounter (by both local and international customers)
mean that the balance between delivering a high-quality service and being seen as
intrusive is a delicate one (Teare, 1993). In order to resolve this ‘managerial paradox’
(Baum, 1995: 115), service companies attempt to create a ‘global service culture’
(Teare, 1993). In this context a signi cant role for managers is ‘to instil into staff the
core values that drive the vision the organization has about its quality of service’
1050 Carol Jones et al.
(Sparks and Callan, 1992: 215), so that employees across the whole organization
respond to customers in ways that are both consistent and customized.
These developments have had considerable implications for the approach to hotel
management and are suggested to invert traditional management hierarchies by
stressing the pivotal role of (empowered) employees on the ‘front line’ (Baum, 1995:
102–6). In order to ‘free’ such employees from the constraints of a rules- and authority-
based system, layers of management have been removed and managers are expected to
be in direct communication with their staff through devices such as ‘open tables’. In
such circumstances the emphasis for managers ‘moves from controlling and directing
people to training, coaching and facilitating’ (Sternberg, 1992: 71), which some authors
suggest can prove dif cult for middle managers in particular (Bowen and Basch, 1992:
217). Since these changes are often located within the broader parameters of total
quality management (TQM) initiatives, the ‘principles of systematised management
ef ciency’ (Barge, 1993), which facilitated early expansion by the American chains,
have not been abandoned but rather have been overlaid by ‘softer’ devices. Guest
satisfaction is rigorously monitored and employees are encouraged through various
rewards and sanctions to be proactive in problem solving (Jones et al., 1997).
The literature tends to treat the possibilities for integration into an international
perspective as unproblematic (Duenas, 1993). But there is some conceptual confusion in
both theoretical and policy debates about exactly what is being proposed. Thus
Rhinesmith (1991: 43) comments that, ‘Developing a global corporate culture
transforms a corporation and its management into an entity in which it is dif cult to
discern a single country bias – from the executive suite to the lowest or most critical
level in the organization’ (emphasis added). This is put even more forcefully by Reich
who sees ‘a growing cadre of global managers – supranational corporate players, whose
allegiance is to enhanced world-wide corporate performance, not to one nation’s
economic success’. They are, he argued, ‘more distant, more economically driven – in
essence more coldly rational in their decisions, having shed old af liations with people
and place’ (1991: 77). Deconstructed, these statements highlight that at the heart of the
international perspective is at least an assumption that there is or can be international
management. By this we mean a universal set of practices, principles and knowledge
informing an internationally shared understanding as to what constitutes ‘management’.
Can companies and managers become as nationally neutered or neutral as this
implies?
There have long been cultural (Hofstede, 1990) and institutional (Storey, 1992)
objections to this supposition. Indeed, Laurent (1983, 1986) argues that managers carry
an implicit, but nationally speci c, ‘management gospel’ about in their heads, which
informs their basic understanding of what management is all about, and which can
make them resistant to alternative ideas about how to manage. Such research would
tend to suggest that, although corporate culture training aims to ‘override or compensate
for the speci city of national cultures through the socialization of (in particular, senior)
personnel’ (Ferner, 1994: 86), the level of institutional embeddedness is such as to act
as a limit to international companies’ ambitions for cultural integration (Lawrence,
1992). To this could be added Hu’s (1992) persuasive argument regarding the inability
of ‘global’ corporations (whatever their stated intentions) to transcend their national
origins. It is clear that the claims for diversity and pluralism with regard to valuing host-
country nationals need to be examined more closely.
The anti-convergence arguments have been strengthened by recent case-study
analysis of international rms which has refocused attention on the dimension agency
(Edwards et al., 1996; Marginson and Sisson, 1994). However, in many cases the
reintroduced ‘actor’ is the rm and detailed elements of managerial resistance and
compliance to corporate attempts at cultural integration are often overlooked. The result
is that the realities of management as a political and social process is underplayed
(Reed, 1990; Watson, 1994). More critical studies are beginning to reveal that processes
of restructuring, such as delayering and employee empowerment, and the fracturing of
the speci c psychological contract between managers and bureaucratic organizations,
may not be as benign in their impact on managers as had been assumed (Scarborough
and Burrell, 1996; du Gay et al., 1996; Watson, 1994). In particular, attention is paid to
how such changes impact upon managerial identities, and what is perceived in the ‘re-
imagined organization’ (du Gay et al., 1996: 272) to be necessary to prove oneself a
serious organizational player. For example, Collinson and Collinson (1997) note the
increased signi cance of at least giving the appearance of being at work for long hours
– a form of ‘resigned behavioural compliance’ that has long been a feature of hotel
management (Guerrier and Lockwood, 1990: 155). In the context of international

organizations these issues take on another dimension with regard to managerial identity.
As Child and Rodrigues note, identity is a neglected aspect of international knowledge
transfer. They continue, ‘identity is like a mirror with two faces: one face re ects what
a particular group has in common – values, beliefs, ideologies, experiences, practices –
whereas the other face re ects how this same group is distinguished from other groups
in these same respects. It involves a sense of belonging to particular groups as opposed
to others’ (1996: 47).
These aspects of inclusion and exclusion are salient to the discussion for other
reasons because, in what Gunz calls ‘the closed loop of organizational succession’
(1989: 232–3), managers tend to reproduce themselves in their own image (Kanter,
1977; Roper, 1994). In this respect HCNs, even where they have been inculcated into
and are accepting of the corporate culture, could be at a disadvantage in terms of career
progression, for, while the rhetoric may be of all managers being of equal standing
irrespective of national origins, this overlooks the centrality of acceptability criteria
(such as ‘ tting in’) to recruitment decisions (Jenkins, 1986). Are such factors shaped
by parent-country assumptions about managers and managing? How do they relate to
issues of national or occupational identity? Whatever the corporate rhetoric in terms of
valuing difference positively and ignoring national origins when recruiting staff, we
know little about what happens at an operational level (Ferner, 1994, 1997). Can non-
parent-country managers ever become ‘one of the family’ in the corporate sense?
In the rest of this paper we draw upon evidence from case studies of three hotel
chains (one Swedish, one American and one French) which have begun to internation-
alize relatively recently. 1 To preserve the anonymity of the companies and of the
managers to whom we spoke, the pseudonyms Swedco, Americo and Frenco will be
used in this paper. Interviews were conducted with seventy managers in the three chains
in Great Britain, the United States, France, Sweden, Austria and Poland. These included
interviews with general managers, corporate representatives and functional managers
(personnel, food and beverage, and front of house managers) at a variety of levels. A
semi-structured interview technique was used and all interviews were taped and
transcribed. In all three cases the majority of the company’s hotels were within the
country of origin and in this sense Americo has more in common with Frenco and
Swedco than with other, more internationalized, ‘American’ chains such as Hilton or
Holiday Inn.2 While Frenco had the greatest representation – in sixty- ve countries – 56
per cent of these are in Europe, with the main concentration being in France. Americo
has hotels in twenty-seven countries, with 94 per cent of its properties in America.
Swedco has coverage in ten countries, all in Europe (Mather and Todd, 1995). We will
rst outline the corporate perspective before going on to compare and contrast the
views, experiences and roles of parent- and host-country nationals at managerial level.
In the context of the latter, we will concentrate on HCNs in the UK in an attempt to
provide a xed point of reference against which to consider the impact and in uence of
ostensibly French, North American and Swedish derived ideas about how to manage an
international hotel chain.
Characterizing the Ways: the sector dimension
The techniques associated with human resource management (HRM) more generally
(Legge, 1995) provide the basis for the corporate approach – euphemistically called
‘Ways’ – in each of the three chains, emphasizing ‘participative management’,

exibility, communication and employee empowerment. Core concepts (at Frenco
growth, quality, pro t, decentralization, participation, communication and training) or
‘philosophies’ provide a framework for organizing and managing in what is stressed as
a departure from the rules- and authority-based system of the standard operating
manuals. A shift to greater local autonomy and managerial freedom is emphasized, but
‘everything, you have to have a cut of the philosophy in it’ (Americo General Manager,
United States).
Customer responsiveness is now the driving force for all the chains, delivered
primarily through employee empowerment. The underpinning philosophy is encapsu-
lated in the view that ‘if you take good care of the staff, the staff will take good care
of the customer’. Layers of management have been removed: at Americo the number of
‘managerial’ posts in the kitchen area has fallen from nine to ve, while the layers
between general managers and the company president have been cut from eight to two. 3
Those that remain are expected to manage the hotels as if they were their own
properties, or, in Frenco terms, to be ‘intrapreneurs’, and in all cases managers are
given high levels of personal responsibility and accountability. Various forms of
customer and employee monitoring are now commonplace in service organizations
(Fuller and Smith, 1991). But both Americo and Frenco also utilize employee
satisfaction surveys in which managers’ performance is appraised by their subordinates.
The decentralization of budgets and creation of pro t centres, at both hotel and
departmental levels, provide further monitoring devices.
Swedco and Frenco managers were keen to stress differences between their approach
and the traditional approach associated with the early American chains, underlining that
this difference re ected aspects of national culture. ‘The spirit, the philosophy and the
way of doing things is very French. . . . When we launch the company abroad,
systematically we had that very, very strong philosophy and the French way of doing
things’ (French Managing Director, Frenco, Britain). Although, many of the supposedly
‘national’ features were in fact identi able within the HRM lexicon, these could also be
appropriated to support claims to a distinctive, nationally inspired way of managing.
Thus at Swedco, according to a Swedish personnel manager, the fact that ‘we don’t
have titles and the same distance between managers and staff’, re ected something
‘typically Swedish’. Utilizing national identity in this way, to market the product and
establish the corporate image, is increasingly in tension with the perceived utility of the
international perspective as a mechanism for employee integration.
These claims to ‘distinctiveness’, however awed by their reliance on ‘rather vague
national stereotypes’ (Edwards et al., 1996: 43), need to be understood in terms both of
elements of change and continuity, as well as in relation to the fact that the emphasis
on ‘philosophies’ or concepts as primary mechanisms of integration is a relatively
recent phenomenon. In all three companies long-serving managers were having to get
used to working with approaches to managing that have changed radically. Examples
were given of managerial resistance to developments such as delayering, TQM and
empowerment, and in some cases of managers who could not accommodate the changes
being removed. The unease which managers felt is re ected in the following comment:
‘The general managers have come up to me more perplexed about their leadership style
and the right approach’ than about empowerment and customer focus, ‘the biggest
hurdles are around directive versus participative leadership’ (International Director of
Training and Development, Americo Headquarters, US). In fact the operating principles
that shaped the earlier chains are still valued for their usefulness as mechanisms of co-
ordination and control. They ensure that each hotel ‘is running . . . towards the same
points . . . each conference room would be set out the same way, you would greet the
guests the same way . . . it’s actually centralizing the hotels so they follow the concepts’
(Personnel Manager, Swedco). Although the respondent added that ‘it’s all within the
Scandinavian style’, all is not in fact left to the ‘philosophies’ and the debt to the past
cannot be overlooked in the rush to see all as change.
Recognition of the value of playing down national origins is surprisingly recent:
‘Frenco was French I would say up to the end of the 1980s but, starting from the 1990s
onwards, it’s world-wide and international and the way we behave is international’
(Managing Director, France). At Americo a similar process, in this case of signi cantly
reducing the dependence on operating manuals and returning to the principles of the
founder, was identi ed. Thus, until the late 1980s, ‘we always considered ourselves to
be fundamentally an American company’ but ‘we’re starting to go through the pains of
becoming an international organization’ (Director of Service Development, Americo
Headquarters, US). There are therefore many PCNs who joined companies that were
rmly wedded to their national context (irrespective of geographical location), but who
now nd themselves part of change processes in which, at corporate level at least, it is
perceived to be expedient to de-emphasize this. The confusion which this can cause for
individuals can be seen in the range of comments by senior French managers about the
extent to which Frenco had detached itself from its French origins: ‘France is not an
issue any more in our company’; ‘I would be hypocritical if I was telling you that there
wasn’t some French to it because [Frenco] is French.’ The problem was compounded at
Swedco, where the corporate literature uses ‘Scandinavian’ and ‘Swedish’ inter-
changeably. Re ecting this apparent ambiguity, a Danish general manager working in
Britain acknowledged in answer to the question of national orientation, ‘I don’t know
to be honest, but we talk about Swedish’. We will return later to how these tensions
manifest themselves in the relationship at hotel level between PCNs and HCNs.
If in transnational organizations managers need to be more self-reliant and able to
deal with complexity, uncertainty and ambiguity at an operational level (Bartlett and
Ghoshal, 1989), then mechanisms to incorporate managers into the corporate philo-
sophy are essential. Frenco took the most centralized approach to management training,
utilizing a special facility in Paris described as ‘the international cross-roads for
communication, exchange and the sharing of experience’ (training centre document).
All Frenco managers attended the training centre where they networked with other
managers, gained an understanding of the global aspects of the organization and learned
the philosophy of the company. Managers from across the world are brought together
to discuss strategy and promote inter-cultural learning: ‘You have a genuine feeling
every time you go there . . . of interest from the team. That makes you feel part of the
[Frenco] family and the centre of it is the [Frenco] family’ (French General Manager,
Britain). As a result of this, managers come back ‘completely transformed’. The Frenco
culture was portrayed as being both expressive of ‘common objectives and spirit of
togetherness which create a Group uni ed in spite of its diversity and originalities’
(corporate document), and able to be customized to generate a speci c management
philosophy at ‘regional’ level (North American Frenco document).
The Swedco Way concept was intended to encompass the whole range of the
company’s operations, from marketing and personnel management to the physical
layout of hotels as well as service style. Swedco had a small training facility in Sweden,
originally established to compensate for the absence of state provision for formal hotel
management education in Sweden. Here ‘our non-Nordic colleagues’ receive ‘cultural
training’, including in the Swedish service philosophy (1990 Annual Report). The
company did send non-Scandinavian general managers to Sweden to work for varying
periods of time, but few British managers had been there, unless they had visited
privately for a holiday. More common was a course of Swedco Way training based at
each hotel, which, a Swedish general manager suggested, should ensure that all
managers will ‘be the same and we should all speak the same language’. There was
evidence at the time of the interviews of a shift in the approach to cultural integration.
Thus management training materials, while utilizing the unitary icon of ‘One company
– One direction’, also suggested, that corporate values were ‘guidelines for local
discussion’. Laudably, but somewhat optimistically perhaps, it was noted, ‘Values must
be discussed, understood and made applicable – otherwise they won’t work . . . [they]
must be accepted by everyone’.
Americo had a very structured approach to management education, and had tried both
centralized and decentralized approaches. In the early phase of internationalization
managers had been sent from the host countries to spend six months in Americo hotels
in the United States, on the basis that ‘We think it’s in their best interests, they can
come over and learn our standards and take them back’ (Director of Service
Development, US). As with many other features of ethnocentrism, this was increasingly
too expensive an option to pursue and was being abandoned. The company also use
specialist task forces who spend up to two months training ‘the local people in our way
of doing things’ (Director of Training and Human Resources, Britain), but are careful
to pilot new initiatives fully before ‘rolling them out’ internationally. It is managers’
responsibility to instil the culture at hotel level, reinforcing the importance of their own
prior integration into the corporate ethos. At the time of the interviews Americo were
devising training programmes around the theme of ‘global leadership’ and cross-
cultural management, although acknowledging that this was proving dif cult.
At the corporate level it is clear that the international perspective outlined by Barham
and Rassam informs the espoused corporate strategy: ‘The “new” manager must see the
culture of other countries if only to understand his guests and staff as both are becoming
truly international in nature’ (Frenco, Managing Director, France). It was also
acknowledged that this is a route being travelled rather than a destination reached: ‘We
still grow our leadership from within but we are also at a new cross-roads’
(International Director Training and Development, Americo Headquarters, US).
Re ecting on the failure of expatriated French managers in North America, an
American general manager with Frenco noted, ‘[Frenco] have really to have a good
base of knowledgeable people from the part of the world they’re moving into so that
there is a better understanding of the cultural differences and all the things involved in
running a business in that country.’ With the cost of expatriation estimated at $250,000
per employee in 1987 (Dowling et al., 1993: 53), companies have sound nancial
justi cations for looking to solutions such as those discussed in this paper.
It is important to recognize that there are two dimensions to the corporate ‘Ways’ in
the three chains which we studied and that some aspects appear to be more
straightforwardly transferable. First, they are underpinned by a business dimension
which, at one level, amounts to little more than good business sense in the context of
the market: meeting customer needs and providing satisfaction, retaining pro tability,
seeking international growth and increased market share. As such, they draw upon a
rationale with which managers would nd little to disagree. Indeed, some HCNs
identi ed commonalties between hotel chains, suggesting that there was actually little
that was distinctive in what their company did: ‘It’s nothing unique. It’s nothing
Sheraton aren’t doing or Hyatt or anybody else’ (British Assistant General Manager,
Swedco). It is this dimension, taken in isolation, which underpins statements such as
those by Rhinesmith and Reich.
With some reservations about its appropriateness in all contexts, in each of the chains
most British managers saw the informal and more participative approach as a welcome
change from the formality and status differences which they suggested characterized
British hotels. Although most would stop short of suggesting, as did one British Swedco
manager, that it was ‘like leaving home every morning and going to work in another
country’, many were often willing to accept (however erroneously) that this approach
did indeed re ect management styles in the parent nation. However, there is a second
dimension to the corporate ‘Ways’ which is more problematic and arguably less
amenable to transfer across national boundaries. When asked to describe the concepts
and philosophies, PCNs, in particular, found this dif cult because they could not easily
divorce them from ‘ways of being’ that were closely entwined with their national
identity. As we now move on to discuss, an entrenched problem for HCNs and for
corporate ambitions for integration via devices such as the international perspective,
may be with PCNs who trade on their nationality and cannot detach the ‘corporate way’
from it, rather than with HCNs’ hostility to the corporate style per se.
An acceptable style?
Since the orientation towards an international perspective has a relatively short history,
in reality expatriation is common, depending on the perceived level of competence and
trustworthiness of HCNs, and the level and function of various managerial posts
(Scullion, 1992). The justi cations given suggest that companies are still more
comfortable with their own people in key posts – particularly general and nancial
management – and international growth might in the short term enhance rather than
diminish this reliance. As a corporate respondent at Americo conceded, ‘I think there’s
a comfort level . . . during this growth spurt . . . in dealing with more Americans right
now is where it’s at’. In food and beverage provision PCNs also had a role to play at
Swedco and Frenco by adding ‘authenticity’ to the product. Ambitions for diversity are
thus often tempered by other organizational imperatives and ethnocentric assumptions
are not as easy to relinquish as implied by the prescriptive literature.
Studies which seek to identify the ‘characteristics’ of national cultures in relation to
management style (Laurent, 1983, 1986; Hofstede, 1990), tend to emphasize managerial
resistance to such ‘foreign’ incursions. Certainly there was some evidence that
nationality-oriented assumptions could alienate non-PCNs:
I think it has been a learning curve for the French to t themselves into other cultures.
Sometimes it doesn’t come easy, we do have dif culties and some problems here in the
UK. We have got quite a lot of French managers here in the UK and their whole style,
their whole working style is different to the English culture. They are much more
aggressive and forthright and outright, and they will say what they think. And sometimes
that can be damaging to the English culture, to the employees working underneath who
have to adapt themselves to French management styles. So we are in our own country
trying to adapt to French management.
(British General Manager, Frenco)
Although corporate aspirations are to play down nationality at managerial level,
managers themselves cannot be relied upon to be able to do this. A Danish general
manager working at Swedco in Britain noted that, prior to his appointment, ‘the
Swedish side of it was a negative factor. There used to be a lot of Swedish managers
here in this hotel. They all used to speak Swedish, no one could understand them. A lot
of phone calls to Sweden, whenever a Swede came there was special treatment,
Swedish member of staff, special treatment. So I’ve been trying in the last four months
to turn that around, and it’s very dif cult, it’s going to take a while.’ At corporate level
there is an increasing recognition of the problems this can create. But how might the
non-PCN t into this scenario at unit level and what are the potential barriers to the
stated objective of diversity and pluralism?
Research evidence demonstrates that recruitment and selection decisions continue to
be highly dependent on non-functionally speci c criteria of acceptability premised on
whether an individual is perceived to ‘ t’ into an organization, department or team
(Jenkins, 1986). There are several types of acceptability criteria identi able in the
interview evidence which could present exclusionary barriers to non-PCNs and which
could be overlooked in the corporate rush to embrace ‘cultural’ integration.
The rst is the fact that PCNs, including at corporate level, have some sympathy with
the perception of management as more a nationally derived ‘way of being’ rather than
a universally accepted set of practices and techniques that can simply be codi ed,
transported and learned. Although the international perspective works on the premise of
socializing managers into the company through culture training, PCNs draw upon
institutional features of socialization which cannot be replicated in this way. Thus, a
Swedish director of human resources commented, ‘It is not easy, I would say, to get the
Swedish management culture abroad because it is so much the human culture in a
country which speci es the way of managing companies.’ It was noted in interviews in
Sweden that the Swedco Way was not considered as important in Scandinavia
because,
they are all Scandinavians . . . take Sweden here, we have all got the background, we
have all been to the same type of schools, more or less, generally speaking. . . . We are
a much more homogeneous group of people. That means when I am giving you a
message or an instruction or asking you for a piece of advice, you know what I am
asking.
(Swedish General Manager)
Similarly when questioned about the ‘Frenchness’ of the Frenco approach, a French
general manager working for Frenco in Britain noted, ‘The French way is in a sense by
education, we are educated in our food, in our way of life’. Indeed, a British general
manager at Frenco remarked, ‘Even if the French guys have worked in England for
some time they’re still French and still have the same culture’. British managers, it was
suggested, were adapting to the Frenco approach, ‘very slowly but I think it is a
question of how they have been raised, trained and things like that’ (French General
Manager, Britain). At Americo emphasis was put upon networking between managers
in different countries, and on breaking down barriers between American and HCNs.
However, many Americo managers were very long-serving staff who tended to know
each other well, and were ‘like a family’ (General Manager, US). Indeed, the Director
of Service Development at Americo headquarters argued that if he was given ten
people, three of whom were Americo managers, he could always pick them out, ‘by
their mannerisms, their dress, the way they think about things’. While the stress appears
to be on being a ‘corporate’ person, rather than having a speci c national identity, given
the relatively short time in which Americo have been operating internationally, being an
Americo person and being American are virtually synonymous.
The second aspect is the knowledge base regarded as a necessary underpinning to

hotel management in speci c national contexts. Many hotel managers continue to work
their way up through the ranks, and formalized hospitality management education has
been evolving only slowly. It has long been suggested that the style of management
exported by the early American chains stressed the business side of the hotel and
focused upon accommodation as the key determinant, while the ‘grand’ hotels of
Europe endowed the management of guest relations with a special signi cance and
emphasized the role of the ‘hotelier’ or mein host. The latter were also supported by the
technical training offered in prestigious hotel schools such as those in Switzerland
(Guerrier, 1993). Hotel management thus has generally a weak occupational identity,
with relatively low barriers to entry (Baum, 1995: 78 Table 4.1, 145–6). However,
French managers were able to draw upon other types of cultural capital to legitimize
their relationship to and role in the company, speci cally a strong sense of craft skill
and occupational identity: ‘we manage by oor management and that is a bit the French
way because we have been educated to work as a cook, a pastry chef. That is the
French way’ (French Managing Director, Britain). In contrast to Britain, where French
managers perceived there to be a ‘casual’ attitude to service and a reluctance to enter
the industry. In France, it was argued, hospitality work is seen as a ‘profession’ which
people are keen to enter (see also Baum, 1995: 150–1). The British hostility to service-
sector work was also noted by British managers at Frenco, and by British and
Scandinavian managers at Swedco – although in the latter case a similar perception was
held to be characteristic of the Swedish service sector. Several French managers were
of the opinion that the American and British approaches to hotel management were
similar, ‘more systematic, step by step’ and ‘by the book’ (French Managing Director,
Britain).
The ‘craft’ element was less apparent in the American chain, particularly in America
itself. Implicit in the French understanding is that a food and beverage route provides
the ‘technical’ skills to underpin managerial career moves away from operational and
into more general management (Baum, 1995: 79). As we noted earlier, this is an area
in which PCNs are preferred. In stark contrast, an Americo food and beverage manager
in the United States noted, ‘I think we’ve elevated the service segment to the point
where we’re not just hoteliers any more, we’re mainstream managers. I could leave this
company today and I could go and work for somebody not evenly remotely associated
with the hotel industry. Once I learned the technical aspects of the job I have the
management skills to be effective in their organization.’ In this context, the under-
pinning knowledge provided by the standards and systems enables the company to
move managerial personnel between hotels, ‘because although things are marginally
different, the procedures are the same. So, for example, a food and beverage director
from here could go to another hotel and know exactly what he had to do’ (Director
Training and Human Resources, Americo, Britain).
A third aspect of acceptability appears to be the particular ‘corporate way’ itself.
Given some of the comments above, it is not surprising that at both Swedco and Frenco
there was perceived to be a problem recruiting managers from American chains: ‘I think
we have been more successful recruiting people with good attitudes from other smaller
chains than from . . . American chains because they have manuals, which over time
limits the individual’s creativity and ability to make the right decision’ (Swedish
General Manager, Britain). Paradoxically, the barriers which this was perceived to raise
were most cogently expressed by a British manager at Americo describing a recently
acquired hotel: ‘They were [with the original franchisee] for fteen years, and [the
established corporate culture] is not easy to break down. . . . We have put the name up
but it is still the same people working there. But how the hell do they learn to be
[Americo] without exposure to us. They have been to the US but it’s not quite the same
thing’ (Director of Training and Human Resources, Britain). Several managers
expressed the view that those with no training, and thus no corporately engendered
preconceptions, were the least problematic in this respect: ‘It’s quite an unusual
environment to come into, particularly . . . if you’ve had some training. If you’ve had
no training then I don’t think you really know any better. But if you’ve got someone
who’s come from an established group or hotel which does things the traditional way,
then I don’t think they can come to terms with [the fact that] the managers don’t wear
pin-striped trousers’ (British Food and Beverage Manager, Swedco).
The ambiguous relationship between corporate aspirations to transcend national
boundaries and individual suspicions of those who were ‘not one of us’, even when they
had undergone extensive corporate training, is highlighted by comments regarding
German general managers at Swedco. Although they were described by some of the
Danish general managers working in the UK as ‘completely Swedenized’, Swedish
managers were more cautious in evaluating this cultural transformation. Once returned
to Germany, they could, it was suggested, ‘very easily fall back into ordinary German
management styles. So . . . you cannot be sure because you had them trained here in
Sweden and put them back, that they kept the [Swedco] culture’ (Director of Human
Resources, Sweden). PCNs are often preferred because they can be trusted to ‘be one
of us’ – as the comments above begin to underline. But the reactions to a host-country
general manager at Swedco reveal other tensions about what constitutes acceptability
and demonstrate how these can extend to include other HCNs.
At the time of the interviews Swedco had recently appointed its rst British general
manager. Although this was an external appointment, this move was partly in response
to pressure from employees who saw career options blocked: ‘It was a signal to all that
staff that you can actually become a general manager at [Swedco] without being a
Scandinavian person’ (Danish General Manager, Britain). The observations of a British
personnel manager encapsulate the tensions which surrounded this decision:
being Swedish and having directors who are Swedish, I think it is very dif cult to let go
and say ‘OK we’re going to let somebody who is English take this on board’. And I
would say if you take it as far as the [Swedco] family side of things, they are not part of
the family, in the sense they aren’t Swedish. So they’re not always going to have the same
opinions as the Swedish people sometimes and I think that is very dif cult to accept.
(emphasis added)
The British manager had considerable international experience, but the degree to which
this sector expertise was almost negated by other perceived drawbacks can be judged
from the comments of the Swedish Director of Human Resources: while acknowledging
that the British General Manager had ‘learned a lot of the [Swedco] Way and adapted
to the [Swedco] Way, I am not sure that inside he feels the [Swedco] Way.’ The extent
to which this socialization and the ‘knowledge’ which it generates is more than can be
encompassed by corporate culture training is also apparent in comments made by a
British director of training and human resources at Americo. Contrasting his experi-
ences of ownership changes in which whole new management teams had been brought
in from Americo compared to where an existing management team had been retained,
he noted:
almost the entire Executive Committee was replaced . . . and [Americo] people came in
and it was kind of a shock for the people because all of a sudden the senior management
had changed. But it is from them we learned the [Americo] way of doing things. There
were policies and procedures but rather than them saying ‘here is the book’ . . . we
actually observed people doing it.
In Paris a similar change had left the original senior management team in place and, as
a consequence, ‘the change was much slower and to a certain extent I’m not sure they
ever truly became an [Americo], and that was an issue’. While perhaps more informed
by a sense of transferability than was the case in comments by French and Swedish
managers, this nevertheless highlights both the central role of PCNs and the sense that
there are those who are perceived to be ‘inside’ the culture and those who are not, those
who were of the ‘family’ and those who might be taken in.
Finally, research into managerial careers demonstrates the importance of mentoring
in pursuing a career, in particular of having access to someone who understands the
informal organizational learning processes and can help subordinates get on (Gunz,
1989). Those who are on the inside can advise newcomers how to behave appropriately.
The weak internal labour market in hotels, coupled with a relative absence of formal
criteria for promotion or entry is likely to exacerbate this reliance (Baum, 1995: 78
Table 4.1; 145–6). For example, a British manager, working at the wholly-owned
Americo property, noted that, prior to returning to the UK, he had worked at the
Americo hotel in Warsaw under an executive chef who was ‘an [Americo] man through
and through’, and who had told him (the interviewee), ‘you’re not an [Americo]
person’, before going on to show him how to become one. Although other research has
suggested a preference for HCNs (Powell, 1992), the evidence presented here suggests
that some HCN managers recognized the limitations of non-PCN managers in being
able to provide the level of insider knowledge and networking necessary to bene t their
own careers. Indeed, at Swedco this perception had led British managers at the more
established hotels to resist the idea of a non-Scandinavian general manager at these
properties.
Conclusions
This paper argues that the view that ‘soft’ mechanisms of integration, such as those
supporting the international perspective, will remedy the negative consequences of
ethno-centric approaches to managing across national boundaries needs to be treated
with caution. A recent desire to play down national features, in particular those of the
parent country, has glossed over the distinction between corporate integration and the
globalization of management principles and practices. While the former is tacitly
premised on the existence of the latter, the evidence suggests that we are a long way
from Reich’s ‘coldly rational’, nationally rootless cadre. Part of the explanation for this
confusion lies in the failure fully to appreciate the two dimensions to the international
perspective: namely, the business dimension and the identity dimension. The ‘inter-
national management’ literature concentrates on the former and overlooks the extent to
which both companies and their employees are intrinsically bound up with issues of
national, occupational and organizational identities in complex and contradictory
ways.
While the international hotel chains used in this study utilize the rhetoric of the
international perspective, this stops a long way from international management and is
likely to be limited to the corporate convergence of managerial identities across national
boundaries. However, even this ambition is problematic because, although the
international perspective is ostensibly de-coupled from the national context, in fact what
‘international’ means in this context is ‘corporate’. Assuming this is a nationally neutral
construct does not make it so, and this limitation is particularly clear in examining the
activities and perceptions of both parent- and host-country managers.
From a corporate perspective, managerial identities (in the individual, national and
occupational sense) are perceived to be resources which can be assimilated into the
corporate ethos without much apparent regard for problems of personal dislocation or
the realities of management as practice. It has long been recognized that HCNs, do not
‘renounce their cultural citizenship when coming to work for the rm’ (Van Maanen
and Laurent, 1993: 307), and may indeed only comply at a surface level (Tayeb, 1994).
The research presented here suggests a complex process of HCNs both adopting and
rejecting elements of corporate messages. However, integration through corporate
education and training may be insuf cient in itself to provide the managerial legitimacy.
Rather, PCNs draw upon processes of socialization which are more institutionally
embedded and derived than can be compensated for by corporately provided managerial
education and training. Further, as delayering and restricted growth curtail the
opportunities for advancement, PCNs’ stress on national credibility as a key dimension
for career success makes sense as a closure mechanism.
The continued close association between managerial credibility and national identity
means that, even within the rhetoric of the international perspective, PCNs are in a
powerful position in relation to HCNs. Pluralism and diversity are unlikely to emerge
naturally from the international perspective as implemented in the chains we studied.
Companies need to look carefully at the tacit assumptions which shape decisions about
managerial career progressions and to be aware of the extent to which they are informed
by notions of acceptability forged within the parent-country context. They perhaps need
to recognize that it is debatable in the current context whether HCNs ever can become
‘one of the family’ or can only ever acquire an honorary status in this respect.
Carol Jones
University of Central Lancashire
Notes
1 This research was part of a larger project in which were involved comparing mechanisms of
integration and diffusion of corporate knowledge in international companies in services and
manufacturing. All the research was funded by the University of Central Lancashire .
2 Although Hilton International is now owned by Ladbrokes, while Holiday Inn is owned by
Bass, their roots, culture and spirit are still regarded as re ecting their American origins
(Mather and Todd, 1995).
3 Some respondents at Swedco argued that the company was more ‘leanly’ managed (i.e. had far
fewer managers) than other companies.
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The International Journal

Not part of the family?

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/095851998340748

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Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of

Not part of the family? The limits to

Carol Jones, Paul Thompson and Dennis Nickson

Abstract Companies increasingly seek solutions to the corporate/local dichotomies

perceived to be a feature of more traditional approaches to managing across national

Keywords Internationalization, hotels, managers, corporate culture, identity

0958–5192 © Routledge 1998

management (Guerrier and Lockwood, 1990: 155). In the context of international

Characterizing the Ways: the sector dimension

‘Ways’ – in each of the three chains, emphasizing ‘participative management’,

The second aspect is the knowledge base regarded as a necessary underpinning to

Human Resource Management, 25(1): 91–102.

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