Abstract and Key Words

Abstract：Since 1980s, enterprise culture has become a common concern as well as a hot topic of management theory. Currently, with the continuous development of economic globalization, more and more companies are aware of the function of enterprise culture which plays an important role in the success of companies. Many reasons, however, especially the effect of culture, cause different enterprise culture among different countries. This thesis, based on the case study of “Wal-Mart”, discusses the definition of enterprise culture and studies the differences and reasons of Chinese and western enterprise culture. The aim of comparison is not only to comment management, but also benefit both sides through evaluation in order to avoid detours for management practice. It holds that enterprise culture comes into beings in the course of continuous development of each company with its own specialty. Chinese enterprises shouldn't follow western enterprise culture totally and even shouldn't confine to its existing enterprise culture. What it should do is to establish its own enterprise culture in order to promote the development of the economy.

Key words: culture; enterprise culture; cultural difference; Wal-Mart;

摘要:自上个世纪八十年代，人们开始关注企业文化，并成为管理理论的热点。目前，随着世界经济和全球化的不断发展，越来越多的企业开始意识到企业文化的作用，即一个公司的企业文化对其成功与否起着至关重要的作用。然而，由于至多因素，尤其是文化的影响，造成了不同国家之间不同的企业文化。本文探讨了企业文化的定义，以沃尔玛作为西方企业文化的代表，研究了中西方企业文化存在的差异及其原因，而比较研究的目的并不是仅仅为了进行理论上的褒贬，更主要是通过双方利弊得失的剖析，使比较的双方都能从中获得裨益，最终为了管理实践少走弯路。本文认为，企业文化是每个企业在不断发展中形成，具有特殊性。所以中国不能照搬西方的企业文化，更不能局限与现有的企业文化，而是要发展一个属于自己特有的企业文化，更好的促进我国经济的发展。

关键词：文化；企业文化；文化差异；沃尔玛；

1. Introduction
Now, with the increasing trend of globalization, the whole world has become a global village, which means that the communication of the whole world is more and more frequent and intensive. So when companies operate internationally, they face such cross-cultural challenges as understanding the differences in communication patterns and styles, preferences for leadership approach and styles, different system of decision making and so on, as all of these are closely related to enterprise culture. It is evident that a proper understanding and proper handling of cross-cultural dimensions of management is a prerequisite for successful international management. Especially for China, with its accession into WTO, more and more foreign companies enter into Chinese market and it has become a necessity for China to establish a unique enterprise culture according to its own national conditions.