The book is the result of the shared insights and collaboration between Vasco Freitas Silva and Alette Vonk. Silva is a Chemical Engineer and Country Manager of a Portuguese engineering venture in Angola. Vonk was academically trained in development sociology and is currently a Dutch University Lecturer in Intercultural Management and a business consultant. Their manuscript is based on their research concerning the confluence of tradition and modernity within an organization in Angola. Interestingly, the Portuguese and Angolese cultures have long existed side by side in this southern African country. When the Portuguese came to Angola in the 17th century, they had to sign a peace treaty with the local Queen Njinga. Without the treaty, she would not allow the Portuguese to send their Catholic missionaries to her country. Remarkably, as Silva learned along the way, acknowledging the authority of an Angolese leader or Soba, is still very necessary to establish a peaceful relationship with the locals in a modern venture in twenty-first-century Angola! As the authors put it, “Africa has two versions of everything” and, henceforth, tradition and modern leadership correspondingly converge in the management world of postmodern Africa.The book's title connects the African philosophical concept of “cultural confluence” to the management culture of a Portuguese venture in transition. It links a collective African multiple identity, which offers space for the merging of traditional and modernity and internal regeneration and growth, to a venture's search for a new cultural formula. A traditional-based council is created to bring its European management culture closer to the multi-layered African identities of its Angolese employees.Central to the book is a Portuguese venture in Angola. The incentive for its organizational change stems from the experience of country manager Silva of a strike by its frontline workers. The reason is a managerial mistake in the communicated amount for the extra hours they were supposed to work during the weekend. The financial inaccuracy caused a collective refusal of the employees to go to work. In the authors' view, the walkout could not be explained without thorough research into the underlying cultural motivation of its Angolan employees.The book is, therefore, the result of a confluence of the “soul search” of country manager Silva to gain an enhanced understanding of the friction between the workers and the predominant Portuguese management of the venture and cultural analyst Vonk. Their collaboration resulted in a culturally layered disclosure of the motivation of the management of Silva's venture to create a cultural council (informally known as Soba or Chief Council). This new council is partly based on the organizational-style characteristic of Angolan traditional chieftaincy. The authors' narrative discloses how the Cultural/Soba Council, led by a local chairperson, helps the predominantly Portuguese management in successfully closing the cultural gap with its Angolese workers, which eventually resolves the conflicts between the two.Before coming to this solution, country manager Silva and his team needed to gain a better understanding of the cultural roots of the problems within their venture. Therefore, Vonk helped Silva by increasing his cultural awareness of the organization by offering him her etic cultural insights. For her etic analysis of the venture's organizational culture, Vonk used the Hofstede 6-D model, which measures culture quantitatively based on six dimensions. Of each dimension, Vonk indicated how the Portuguese and Angolan societies scored. She then used these findings to increase understanding of the frontline workers' main motivation for their wild strike. Her umbrella insight is that dimension-wise, Angola is characterized by a so-called “pyramid culture cluster”. This means that the country scores high on the level of collectivism, power distance and uncertainty avoidance.The very collective nature of Angolese society made the employers act against the Portuguese management of the venture. The Country Director had, instead, expected certain Angolan individual workers to inform him what had caused the problem. Silva had thus underestimated the bond between the workers and their loyalty towards one another rather than to the venture. Understanding the nature of the Angolan collective African culture and how to deal with it effectively was thus a learning curve and a challenge for the director. The differences in power distance, which are somewhat higher in Angola than in Portugal, resulted in a lack of personal and trusted relationships between the frontline workers and the management, which is common in high power distance cultures. Hence, seemingly nobody dared to go against the top-down flow of managerial information for the workers. Their culturally high level of uncertainty avoidance made the Angolan workers feel very uncomfortable with the uncertainty about the number of extra time hours that they worked on weekends, and it seemed inappropriate to them to go against it. Their short-term orientation appeared to have made them less willing to wait any longer until the management had resolved the issue, and their high score on indulgence probably played an important role in choosing leisure over work at the weekend, now that the amount of their financial compensation for the extra-time weekend hours was unknown. Therefore, by going through six dimensions in the Hofstede model together, Vonk and Silva found part of the explanation for the wild strike. The Hofstede model, while used as an interpretative framework, thus proved itself successful in analysing an otherwise incomprehensible situation and managing future expectations.The remaining part of the cultural analysis was of an emic nature. Silva carried out this part by using “Genchi Genbutsu”, a philosophy developed by Toyota, which means “Go and see for yourself”. This emic approach was used by this Japanese car company to find out more about their internal culture by using qualitative research methods, such as conducting interviews and participant observation. The Toyota philosophy and research method helped Silva to develop his methodology for generating local knowledge and perspectives on the strike. By concentrating on family, society, company and foreigners as areas of interest for his emic research, Silva discovered that the Ubuntu philosophy of “I am, because we are” is widespread in contemporary Angolese society, which historically has been part of the Bantu matrilineal zone. Consequently, the workers' attitude on the work floor was usually non-confrontational because, in the workers' view, one mistake would have an impact on their group image. Hence, errors were seldom reported to the foreign managers. This implied that there was a lack of trust towards these managers, which was considered to be too distant. Silva also learned that the workers did open up, however, in the vicinity of their Soba or traditional chief and that the latter's way of leading the community outside the company was personal and consensus-based. All things considered, the managing director received the building blocks for a process of organizational change. He did so by creating a new council to bridge the cultural gap between the workers and their foreign management. This so-called Culture/Soba Council was then integrated into the managerial organizational structure to build more trust and deepen the relationship between the management and the Angolese workers. The council was led and chaired by a local frontline employee, who was appointed for a year, after which someone else would become the Soba or Council chairperson. The council leader was selected on criteria similar to those used to choose local chiefs (Soba), such as good communication qualities, character, high intelligence and a sense of justice, among others. Criteria relevant to the venture were added to the selection criteria, such as the level of involvement in the company's mission, values and strategy. The council's monthly meetings succeeded in being spaces in which employees felt free to speak up, thereby improving the employer-employee relationship and also letting the employees gain a more in-depth understanding of the venture's mission.In the concluding part of the book, Vonk elaborates on the distinction between a Culture/Soba Council and the more common works council. Unlike the latter, the Culture/Soba Council does not create a us-vs-them mentality in a sole working space setting. Instead, it mainly focused on building harmonious relationships between the management, the workers and their (extended) family by stimulating open dialogue in a humane setting in which a formalized freedom of speech allows all voices to be heard by the chief and the elders before they make their decision. This way of getting to know one another well in small (sub)groups is central to the Ubuntu way of life that permeates all Bantu-rooted cultures in Africa, including the Angolan Ndongo-Matamba cultural groups in Angola, who were thus once ruled by the female queen Njinga (1624–1663) to the great surprise of the patriarchal Portuguese. The underlying idea of Ubuntu-based dialogues is that by creating a group consciousness, everyone involved can get in tune with one another and act as one interconnected whole (ubuntu). This was an effective way of ruling in small-scale societies, such as those in traditional 17th-century Angola (then known as Ndongo-land).The authors conclude that the newly created Culture/Soba Council, based on the traditional Angolan Bantu culture and the Ubuntu philosophy of group collaboration, respecting everyone's humanness and building harmonious relationships, enabled the Portuguese management to move from an impersonal and task-focused bureaucratic organization towards one that centralized personal relationships and community. Rather than centralizing the Portuguese management itself, the venture thus transformed its organization to one where the community of workers was felt to be most significant. As the authors wrote, Nelson Mandela, the late South African president and figurehead of post-apartheid Ubuntu African leadership, once strikingly put it, “If you want the cooperation of humans around you, you must make them feel they are important – and you do that by being genuine and humble.”The book is somewhat dense but well-written and structured logically. It starts with a short summary of the problem in the Portuguese venture – the wild strike – and then moves to a theoretical explanation containing emic and etic cultural analyses and background before coming to its solution. The book would have been an easier read if the authors had first focused on the case study (the wild strike) and the creation of the Culture/Soba Council as a solution and then provided the theoretical framework to gain a more in-depth understanding of the cultural background of the conflict and the motivation behind the organizational change. An omission is that the book does not provide an in-depth historical background of Angolan leadership, which makes it at times difficult to follow which part of the Culture/Soba Council is newly created by Silva and which part connects directly to Angolan traditional leadership culture. The book also lacks an embedding of the organization in the Angolese and Portuguese colonial and postcolonial power structures, which, no doubt, also have an impact on contemporary organizations within the African country. In the colonial period, Angolan chiefs were puppets of the Portuguese colonial regime, involved in forced labour, which further complicates the image of Angolan traditional leadership.Nevertheless, the authors are fair enough to mention that their cultural analyses do not provide these historical insights into African leadership. The Hofstede model enabled Vonk to measure the cultural values and differences within Portugal and Angola as separate countries. Silva's emic analysis is limited to the situation within one Portuguese venture in contemporary Angola. Nevertheless, the book is the result of an insightful case study of the type of problems encountered by European managers in African countries and their successful and culturally meaningful solutions.To conclude, this book, based on the affluent confluence of Vonk and Silva's cultural insights, is urgent reading material for managers, students in management and cultural studies, and African history, philosophy and leadership studies.
Louise Müller (Tue,) studied this question.