This individualism can be traced to the fact that individuals comprised many of the immigrants to the nation and these individuals built new lives lacking the family structure that they may have enjoyed in their countries of birth ("A Nation," 1999).
Management models make basic assumptions about the environments in which they are developed; attempting to implement those models in other environments can cause difficulty without understanding how different cultural factors affect the models. Three management models and their application in American and Japanese business environments are considered.
Americans have a monolinear relationship with time; that is, Americans view time as having a past, a present and a future, and allocate specific blocks of time to particular tasks. Once that block of time has past, it is considered unrecoverable, and Americans speak of "wasting" time if they are engaged in an activity that they determine is unproductive. Japanese, on the
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