Confucian principles in ICT Chinese practice: an exploratory model

The paper discusses culture, business culture and the influence of cultural values on managerial practice in general, and Information and Communications Technology (ICT) practice in particular. We argue that western ICT systems are based on optimization, underpinned by the positivism paradigm embedded in the western goal-seeking problem solving model. Eastern, in particular Chinese, ways of thinking, are based on a type of subjectivism that underlines a more intuitive, systemic way of viewing the world. The use of western-design ICT in an emergent business Chinese culture embedded in Confucian values reveals some misalignments. A model to explore these misalignments between ICT practice and Confucian Chinese business culture is advanced. Drawing from organizational theory models of national and business culture as premises, we propose a model containing a set of constructs to empirically investigate and confirm the processes involved in these misalignments.