The Cultural Frame Management: The Emergence of Cultural Intelligence in Chinese IT Service Vendors

As China transforms itself toward a leading destination for global IT service outsourcing, major Chinese vendors increasingly face the challenge of collaborating simultaneously and effectively with three major client bases with diverse national cultural backgrounds, namely domestic, Asia especially Japan, and the West especially the U.S. and Western Europe. This provides a good opportunity to study how firm-level cultural intelligence is formed within vendors. To explore this question, qualitative case studies of twelve leading China-based IT service vendors, including all of the most globally recognized Chinese vendors, were conducted. Based on interviews with top and middle level managers, and drawing on the practice-oriented view of culture and the cultural frame perspective, this paper develops the notion of collective cultural frame and identifies the process of cultural frame management within the vendor. This process functions as a mechanism by which firm-level cultural intelligence emerges within vendor organizations.