Global culture is increasingly understood as not only the spread of ideas, meanings, and values across world space but also as the transmission of creativity or the phenomenon whereby something novel and helpful is created or designed such as innovative notions, inventive artworks, and enterprising solutions to longstanding managerial problems. The concept of global culture arose in the 1990s within the wider dialogue concerning economic, political, and technological globalization. Global culture combines such diverse subjects as: consumption; publishing on the Internet; popular culture; multimedia videogames; international travel; interactive cultural circulation; individualization; and spatially extended cultural relations beyond national borders such as entertainment, design, advertising, and art. Global culture is usually typified by the creative expansion of cultural and material relations, the creation of shared and contested standards and forms of knowledge, individual and collective identities, and rising interconnectedness among different peoples.

A highly noticeable feature of global culture is the diffusion of often-American fast food chains like McDonalds, Burger King, and KFC. Global culture, then, depends largely on big manufacturing and service corporations that frequently have thousands of outlets and employees, millions of customers, and operate in hundreds of countries every day, significantly boosting the possible homogeneity of the forms and contents of goods and services, not to mention countries, cities, and consumption. This is often complimented by the spread of culture through film entertainment such as that produced by Hollywood and Bollywood. Global cultures also spread through technological innovations largely emanating from Silicon Valley and dominated by giants such as Microsoft, Apple, Google and companies such as Activision and Electronic Arts, producing Games that are played by hundreds of millions across the globe, together with companies from Japan such as Nintendo and Sony and Ubisoft from France. Relentless cultural globalization in innumerable countries is consequently accompanied by the necessity on the part of managers, and, by extension, management scholars, to address questions of global finance and global politics, the globalization of knowledge, global consumption patterns, global networks, communications, and histories.

Global cultural industries and firms, therefore, function within the twin context of long-term historical processes and contemporary worldwide human integration and hybridization while looking for answers to questions concerning the ‘management’ of social geographies and religious beliefs, of language, post-colonization, pluralization, neoliberal capitalism, knowledge dissemination and appropriation, and advanced information and communications technologies. The specific consideration that academic researchers in management, cultural and media studies, creativity, design, innovation and entrepreneurship give to global culture can be explained by their interest in various methodological perspectives on it and by the perhaps disturbing prospect of the metamorphosis of contemporary international organizational diversity into a future global organizational homogeneity driven by Western consumer culture.

Given the apparently all-embracing nature of global culture and the need to understand its organizational diversity, homogenization, consumer and cultural tendencies, this conference aims to not only to identify emerging managerial theories and practices with a view to understanding, questioning, and explaining today’s creative products and services, design-led businesses, enterprises, and innovative global and local cultures. At the same time the conference would be interested in new and novel ideas that can emerge from a fusion of new technologies and global cultural changes within new generation X and Y.

Yet, it is difficult to consider cultural globalization as a wholly ‘positive’ influence in management thought and practices as managerial discussions of it are often confined to Western businesses. Of particular significance in the contemporary era is the neglect in management discussions of companies based in Brazil, Russia, India, and China (the BRICs), which are playing a major part in the proliferation of alternative cultures across the earth. Moreover, those enterprises deriving from countries with low levels of development are rarely considered, despite growing interest in the opportunities available at the bottom of the pyramid. Many cultural industries are, in reality, local rather than global, yet internationally there is a cultural domination from the USA in particular. Furthermore, global, local, or even ‘glocal’ managerial theories and practices have occasionally to be offset against the realpolitik of post-colonization, dominant and emergent products, foreign and domestic spaces and changing regulatory regimes. These managerial theories and practices are also decidedly contested, chiefly because of the numerous critiques of global culture that view it as a danger to the cultural identities of individuals and nations. Likewise, global cultural management is habitually practised instantly at the global level rather than theorised steadily beforehand (i.e. it does not signify meticulously designed cultural strategies but careless ones). Such management, of course, has resulted from a world in accelerated motion. Thus, it is hard to reconcile, for example, indigenous local cultural industries with foreign global cultural industries, particularly in developing societies under conditions of hybridity - and investigating them will almost certainly not produce the ‘correct’ cultural theory, logics of practice, or the ‘one best way’ to appreciate globalization. Accordingly, the conference welcomes critical papers that address the menacing and challenging aspects of global managerial practices, cultural industries, or the implausible reconciliation of global managerial practices, cultural nationalism, tribal, and cultural resistance.