Extending discursive space: toward the development of an online information system for organizational consulting and management

Abstract

Modern business in Russia, being a new phenomenon in cultural traditions, is characterized by a lot of special features due to the recency of its ascendance within the new economic, social and political conditions. Many of these features seriously prevent the further development of organizations and are anyhow realized by agents of business activity. In this context, Tepfer (2000) identifies characteristic features like placing collective values above personal values, concentration of authority onto the chief executive, insufficient delegation of authority, and an inefficiency of discussions between people at different hierarchical levels in the organization (See also Humphreys and Nappelbaum, 1997). Forms of inter-organizational communications, such as business clubs, are not developed in a proper way. Within Russian organizations, problem handling is more likely to search for «the guilty ones» rather than to conduct a scrupulous analysis of allowed mistakes: representations of problems and the phenomena involved have a primarily emotional character. Direct communication, both inside an organization and in relations between different organizations, is complicated by virtue of the dominance of competitive relations, the cultural norms prevalent in Russian business, and absence of a supportive environment in which such communications might be realized