"Unraveling Intercultural communication in an Hungarian cookie Company"

This paper presents a case study of a Hungarian company going through the double transition of having been recently acquired by a foreign corporation and, at the same time, reorienting its business approach from east to west. This juncture in time for Central and Eastern European companies, namely the early 1990s, provides an unusually good opportunity for studying the role of culture in organizational change in that deep structural changes were occurring at both the macro, or national/regional level, and at the micro, or company/organizational level. The case thus raises questions regarding the differences between what we normally call organizational and national culture, and the degree to which there is interplay between them in the organizational context. Working with the concept of culture in such a way calls, in turn, for further development of the concept, one which is here named cultural currency. While the case itself is now dated, the theory is not; new contexts of transition appear with regularity on the world scene of globalization.