The International Association for Cross Cultural Competence and Management (IACCM) emerged in 1997 from a dedicated effort to give a chance to doctoral students and early career academics from all over Europe to catch up with best West-European and US standards in cultural competence and management research and competent application of cultural knowledge in national and international business and management contexts.

Initial and generous funding was provided by the Austrian Ministry of Science and Education for 12 workshops and a large multi-disciplinary conference in which about 200 young scholars from 25 countries and 15 disciplines participated during 1994-1996. Continued engagement of the international team, of representatives of the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU-Wien) and the Institute for the Danube Region and Central Europe in Vienna (IDM), led to follow up grants for another six conferences sponsored by the European Commission within the framework of the INCO and TMR („Training and Mobility of Researchers“) Programmes of the European Union during 1997-2000.

Goals and Main Benefits of IACCM Activities

1. Open gateways between different regions of the World, which due to political reasons or geographical distance are separated from each other in the fields of business and management studies, with emphasis on (cross) cultural aspects: cross cultural business, cross cultural management, comparative cultural studies, comparative organizational behaviour, cross cultural linguistics and communication studies, and related areas of study.

2. Open gateways between different fields of cross cultural studies and related fields.

3. Rely on the mutual auxiliary function of the variety of disciplines which address cultural issues from different angles beyond management and organisation theories: industrial and organisational psychology, sociology, gender and diversity studies, linguistics, research into stereotyping, visual arts and artefact analysis, political science, among others. Explaining and understanding evolution(s) of culture(s) requires historical insights and methodological and attitudinal self-awareness.

4. Open gateways between research at different levels of social systems, personality, teams, groups, organisations, nations and cross-national communities.

5. Encourage research into similarities and differences within and between cultures and into cultural differentiations within social systems (organisations, professions, regions, strata of society, etc.).

6. Provide access to the wider international community of scholars, students, researchers and consultants and contribute to the emergence of personal contacts between younger and established scholars, which may encourage younger scholars to carry on with their investigations even under adverse conditions.

7. Make good publications possible, irrespective of the paradigms which are dominant in a certain field of management sciences and irrespective of the interests pursued by power-holders in specific countries.

 

Conference

When IACCM was founded in 1997 the idea was to generate continuity beyond specific conference series financed, supported and administered by different institutions. Since in 1997 some funding was available for an ongoing series workshops and conferences, for a start members of IACCM envisaged to have a visible “IACCM conference” more or less every 18 month, but due to sustained interest since 2007 the conference takes place every year in cooperation with different European universities and Associations, such as SIETAR, across European countries: so far in Austria, Bulgaria, Denmark, England, France, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, and Poland (http://www.wu.ac.at/iaccm/conferences).

Within the framework of our conferences, we regularly organize Doctoral Workshops.