This study attempts to investigate how, in Sino-foreign joint ventures in China, Chinese managers and workers on the one hand and western managers on the other explain and resolve their cultural conflicts in terms of the incompatibilities and tensions between particularism and universalism, the two opposing Chinese and western values. It hypothesizes that all parties have to find ways to resolve conflicts in order to maintain employment and keep the business enterprise viable. We argue that both Chinese and western employees must have adjusted, more or less, their values and behavior, and that a new culture of cooperation has consequently emerged from hybridization of particularism and universalism in the course of mutual learning. This cultural innovation exemplifies that globalization in the domain of culture is a process of reciprocal learning by people from diverse cultures.
