Cultural Literacy: Emerging Nations Need to Reclaim Self-Respect.

An Abstract 
of
Cultural Literacy: Reclaiming Self-Esteem and Intellectual Freedom or Innovation

The Cases of India and China

(First presented in 2002 and slightly revised in February 2014)

Mohan R. Limaye

Professor Emeritus

College of Business and Economics

Boise State University

One observes that most developing nations and non-privileged cultures are currently employing Western models of management in their corporations and primarily U.S.-authored textbooks in their universities.  This wholesale borrowing by emerging countries has resulted in at least two damaging phenomena: (1) a total disconnect between the English-educated elites and the commoners and (2) imitative or secondhand research coming out of these developing countries.  We can see these lamentable results, for instance, in India.  This presentation asserts that, only by “going to the roots” and re-investigating the thinkers of the past, the teacher-researchers and business-people from these developing countries will reclaim their self-respect and intellectual autonomy.  This new emancipation is the need of the hour.

This presenter is not opposed to borrowing on an equal footing and supplementing or modifying native theories or conceptual frameworks with Western models.  Thoughtful borrowing of concepts and behaviors is “healthy”, not slavish or blind imitation.  For one thing, slavish imitation is destructive of the self-image of the borrowers and perpetuates their cultural and intellectual subordination.  For another, slavish borrowing kills originality in the borrowers’ thinking and practices.  In a trade between two equal partners, however, both sides win and are enriched because each has something valuable to (and desired by) the other.  The strength of this position, going to the roots, is illustrated by examples from India and China – the two cases in which the knowledge of the ancients will be demonstrated to be potentially beneficial for modern conceptualization of human resource management and also for its practice in modern India and China.