INTRODUCTION
Mintzberg's idea of strategy process involves strategic thinking that integrates organization’s performance wherein planning and cultural perspectives in handing the overall process of business is important to its success and development in the global market as these perspectives relate properly in understanding various contexts of business strategy as it contributes to the application of strategy development and its process. Thus, the perspectives involving the fast-moving business planning and culture could have affected the strategic planning in ways such as the continuous change, technological discontinuities, shorter innovation cycles and competition as it can provide a better paradigm shift which is a new way of defining organization management and business operations. Multinational organizations competing in the global marketplace have been attempting to emulate the best practices of organizations, particularly in advanced countries, to enhance their competitive advantage in the global markets (Hiebeler, Kelly, & Ketteman, 1998). In their search for best practices, they often overlook the fact that they are functioning in a global environment marked by culture and planning as a crucial perspectives on business strategy in transfer of the best practices for the benefit of the business instead d of enhancing competitiveness.
DISCUSSION
The characteristics of perspectives in relation to business strategies guides people's efforts to create and respond to cultural diversity in a work group; normative beliefs about the value of cultural identity at work; expectations about the kind of impact, cultural differences can and should have on the group and its work; and beliefs about what constitutes progress toward the ideal multicultural work group in the unstated assumptions that underlie the way a person manages his or her subordinates or the way a group structures its work. Some work has already been completed in developing a conceptual framework using the Hofstede's four dimensional Value Survey Model (VSM) model (Hofstede, 1980) to deal with transfer issues in the areas of business processes, business functions and management functions across cultures (Raval & Subramanian, 1998). In the case of best practices, the context in which the best practices were developed and are transferred to other cultures assumes considerable significance and relevance as it influences the perception, understanding, interpretation and motivation for transfer, acceptance and successful implementation of best practices. Hall attempted to identify the implications of differing cultural contexts to the operational realities of doing business across cultures. He identified the key dimensions that differentiate between high and low context cultures.
In low context cultures, the environment in which transactions take place has less significance and individual acts take center stage. Low context cultures typically stress legalistic approaches to business transactions and honor only the written word. The responsibility for organizational errors and misdeeds is pushed to the lowest level of the hierarchy. Bidding processes are prevalent to promote competitiveness and efficiency. Low context cultures recognize and respect personal space and intrusions are not welcome. Time is considered a scarce resource and carries economic value. It is considered monochronic and is treated in a linear fashion. High context cultures, on the other hand, place more importance on the context of actions and transactions. Individual actions assume meaning in the context in which they occur. Personal and organizational integrity is valued highly and a person's word is his or her bond. Relationships between individuals and between individuals and organizations precede transactions. Trust is the cornerstone on which relationships are developed. Responsibility and accountability are taken by the highest levels of management (Hall, 1983) and pose formidable competitive challenges for multinationals in transferring best practices between different cultural environments (Harris & Moran, 1996).
Actions or strategies that may possibly bring failure to an individual or an organization are avoided because they are believed to bring shame. This creates an aversion to risk-taking and the entrepreneurial spirit and encourages the decision maker to stick to time-tested practices and policies that are proven to be successful in individual and business behavior (Harris & Moran, 1996). Thus, products that have extended longevity and can be passed on to the next generation are viewed as having high quality. Benchmarking best quality characteristics will be affected by these differing perceptions of what quality is and the value of transferability between cultures should be considered. Thus the level of customer satisfaction for a product or service will vary due to the cultural influence on perceptions. In context culture, the product life cycles are noticeably shorter due to frequent design changes, changing tastes and planned obsolescence. However, in a high context culture, the lifecycle of products is usually longer because durability and longevity in design are favored over frequent redesign and planned obsolescence. Transfer of best designs, ignoring these fundamental cultural and value conflicts, is likely to create rejection by the consumer and loss of competitiveness.
A fast-food operation in a low context culture may highlight and reward the speed with which a customer order is processed and completed. The same speed in a high context culture is likely to be perceived as rude, inconsiderate and uncaring. Transferring a best practice in the same industry between differing cultures may actually produce negative customer reactions. An important characteristic of business cultures is the value of time and it creates perceptual differences that will significantly impact on the transferability of best practices designed and performed in a sequential manner and in systematic and orderly flows to be based on job performance and task completion. The cultural perceptions of accuracy diverge between high and low context cultures. Low context cultures revel in extreme accuracy and design instruments and processes that are driven by this passion for accuracy. Atomic clocks which measure time in nanoseconds and microprocessors that can compute to the nth decimal are examples of this penchant for accuracy and may drive an organization to spend large sums to identify and remove a small discrepancy in search for this accuracy. However, in cultures, it is not easy to replace the traditional face-to-face contact and referral-based practices that give priority to connections over creditworthiness with an impersonal `objective' process. The customs and traditions hamper the substitutability. Cultures that promote flexibility and competitive competitions such as the United States are more likely to design and develop products, services and processes that can be substituted with relative ease when better alternatives become available (Fatehi, 1996).
A strategy framework receiving considerable theoretical and empirical attention is the structure-strategy-performance model (Caves, Gale & Porter, 1974; Porter, 1980; Scherer, 1970). This framework proposes that the performance of a company depends on the strategies undertaken within a particular industry's competitive structure. Managers able to effectively match the business strategies of the firm with the competitive environment will be rewarded by enhanced firm performance. McArthur and Nystrom argued that the business environment modifies the form of the strategy-performance relationship. They recommended the use of all three industry competitive environment dimensions in future studies of strategy-performance. They found financial performance is affected by the business strategies of the firm while holding industry and national culture constant across firms. Therefore, examining the role that business strategies play on the estimation of earnings will help increase the information content of performance predictions for global competitors and, hopefully, decrease the level of perceived risk associated with investments in international ventures (Shaked, 1986). In the global marketplace the strategy-performance link has been shown to be affected by culture, which stems from a country's values, norms and beliefs (Franke et al., 1991; Katz et al., 1997; Katz, Werner & Brouthers, 1999).
Hofstede developed a classification scheme for national cultures by identifying four bi-polar dimensions of national culture: individualism-collectivism, masculinity-femininity, high-low power distance and high-low uncertainty avoidance. Nations having high levels of individualism will tend to encourage and reward workers for their individual efforts. At the other extreme is collectivism, the belief in the importance of group decision-making and group-oriented goals. For example, the United States is ranked high in individualism reflecting the value placed on individual achievement while Japan is ranked high in collectivism reflecting the group-oriented focus of workers in Japan. In this context, Hofstede's theory of culture predicts that culture will significantly affect business strategies as vehicles to achieve organizational success. For example, Katz et al. (1999) empirically tested a model predicting the importance of culture on business goals. They demonstrated that culture, particularly affects growth strategies and performance of firms in the international banking industry. Thus, since culture affects the strategies and performance of the firm (Osland & Cavusgil, 1996), it is likely that national culture will affect the ability to predict the future performance of the firm. There is evidence to suggest that culture, industry competitive factors and business strategies will affect how financial analysts interpret the future performance of global competitors as well as business and economic differences across countries (Das & Saudagaran, 1998)
In the cultural context global competitors attempt to use the resources at their disposal to develop sustainable competitive advantage and in which financial analysts predict the results of business strategies on the performance of the firm. Furthermore, business planning has traditionally been thought of as a mechanism to implement direct and explicit controls through formally established goals and, as such, has been promoted as a central tenet of good management (Ansoff, 1965; Anthony, 1965). From the perspective, business planning is a rational and neutral instrument that can encourage managers and employees to conform to organizational expectations. The decision process and the outcome of business planning is a powerful and important force for change and control (Porter, 1980). Further, the business planning process is regarded as one of neutral transcription that works primarily by informing those in the organization. Planning failures are then seen to result from politics, inadequate process, inflexibility, and, often, lack of commitment (Quinn, 1980; Miller and Friesen, 1984). So, at the same time, planning has also been criticized for generating rigidity and other unintended consequences and for not delivering the control desired by managerialists (Wildavsky, 1974; Van Gunsteren, 1976; Gray, 1986; Mintzberg, 1994).
Regarding planning as coercive and hierarchical is incomplete; it also provides and sanctions legitimate forms of discourse and language and thus serves as a mechanism of knowledge that produces new understandings of the organization. As a form of pedagogy, business planning is not a neutral mechanism of transcription but, rather, has significant implications for the forms and amounts of capital within a field and for organizational identities. Business plans not only announce that change is coming, but it is through the activity of business planning that change actually occurs. In this paper, we argue that business planning is indeed "effective" in introducing change but that the process through which this occurs is more complex than much of the current literature suggests (Pusey, 1991; Gore, 1993; Pollitt, 1993) Business planning has introduced a vocabulary and method of managing alien to a sector that has understood its main rationale as the preservation and interpretation of the business resources that constructs the various organizations within it as small businesses with control effected through business planning and market forces for strategic action and resistance (Meyer and Rowan, 1991; DiMaggio and Powell, 1991b).
Business planning is one of the most pervasive and taken-for-granted mechanisms for organizational control (Galbraith, 1977). As noted earlier, its rationale draws implicitly or explicitly on a control model of power in organization and may be used to control the actions of other organizations (Brunsson and Olsen, 1993) Thus, business plans are seen as representing the transcription of rational decision processes as the mode of transcription of the plans remains unaddressed, a neutral mechanism to a desired end. Business planning is a pedagogic action, in which the format of the plans simultaneously excludes and inculcates. Business planning excludes certain ideas as unthinkable, such as not being businesslike, efficient, customer-oriented, and revenue-seeking, while also promoting a vision of the organization as a business, subject to instrumental reasoning. The process of business planning also acts as a form of learning by doing. Business planning has significant implications for the capital of a field and, with this, positional and organizational identity. What is valued in the field shifts, in our case from representing views of culture and artifacts to a concern with what will generate revenues. Moreover, business plans not only announce that change is coming, but it is through the activity of business planning itself - the introduction of revenue generation, products and customers - that business culture and change occurs.
In contrast to culture the categories that are chosen in business planning are important not only for their causal implications but because they directly affect the recognition and definition of capital. Business planning is not limited to a change in the physical activities that constitute work or the labor process. It is part of a process that defines and constructs markets for various forms of capital. Business planning reconstructs what it is that is being produced and for whom and defines the value of the product. In this important but neglected sense, business plans actively contribute to the production of consumers, producers, and products and indicate how these are to be managed. Business plans not only provide categorization submaps but also influence identity submaps (Dutton, Dukerich, and Harquail, 1994). There is no reason why a business plan should contain certain things and not others. The SWOT model, however, was presented as a legitimated vocabulary, a technical procedure, the way things should be done if business planning was to be done properly. (Fiol and Huff, 1992: 282) As Mintzberg (1994) suggested, the goals implicit in the use of business planning are forced on an organization that relies on the process and business planning has been premised on cultural sites being, if not businesses, organizations that may be likened to businesses.
Business plans were presented as an integrated hierarchy of ordered and organized actions, a cascade through goals, outcomes, strategies, and performance measures. Emphasis was on content, principally increased gate visitation and revenue generation activities, and strategies for implementation. Planning thus controlled the premises that underlay the decisions, if not the actual decisions themselves (Mintzberg, 1994: 198). Most sites were obliged to engage in this process; those that were not obliged worried about the implications of their exclusion. Although sites are front-line organizations with high performance ambiguity (Smith, 1965) and may be assumed to have a decentralized power structure (Jermier and Berkes, 1979), the view is that the opportunities for loose coupling between actions and talk were minimized, and change was real. In this sense, business planning encouraged managers to try to learn a feel for the new situation and to try to absorb some of the cultural capital to be gained by appearing entrepreneurial. Managers generally began to use the business planning process to gain legitimacy in the larger environment by using "the language of business." Business plans were also used to signal to lower-level managers and employees that their organizations were changing. The appearance of business plans as mere acts of technical transcription concealed the force this process involved. In particular, it directed attention away from the shifting of cultural capital toward economic capital and the diminution of existing identities.
CONCLUSION
In conclusion, organizations in their search for best perspectives relating to business strategy adheres certain practices for global competitive advantage that could be driven by an assortment of motives such as strategy enhancement, profitability, cost reduction and business shares in the market. A proper understanding of and adaptation to the cultural context can help achieve these objectives. Ignoring them may hinder the success of the competitive strategies and cause costly failures. The particular challenges to the adaptation process arise from the transfer of one type of cultural environment to a different one. The challenges across culture to differences in perception, understanding, interpretation and motivation patterns of customers, competitors and other role players in the market. This leads to conflicts in norms and values influencing the transfer process in the areas of product attributes, design and substitutability as well as business practices, impacting upon the cost structure and profitability options. Understanding of the cultural perspective can be invaluable in preempting as well as responding effectively to competitive challenges and building competitive advantage in global markets.
Therefore, business planning involved a more substantial, less strategic, and less conscious transformation of the entire field, toward large-scale production. It signaled not only the increasing translation of cultural capital into economic capital but also the absolute attrition of cultural capital, the field's primary form of capital. Business planning was much more than a symbolic and defensive exercise. The use of business planning illustrates the importance and power of language for issues of control, particularly the power to consecrate linguistic and discursive competencies, i.e., the ability to create categorization submaps and specify the form and structure of decision processes. For some sites, particularly the smaller ones, this process seemed to create insecurity and anxiety, but all managers recognized that the emphasis on business activities and the creation of products was changing the way the institutions functioned. The business planning process was misrecognized by participants and undermined the department's ability to preserve its capital, which had been predominantly social and cultural. There may be shifts toward and away from the field of large-scale production, but the symbolic violence of the business planning process permanently changes the identity of producers and the capital of the field. The power of pedagogy lies in actors' complicity in their own control, not only changing themselves but also what is valued in the field in which they operate.
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