Content Sharing in Global Organization : A Cross-Country Perspective

Content Sharing in Global Organization: A Cross-Country Perspective

Amit Pariyar, Yohei Murakami, Donghui Lin, Toru IshidaDepartment of Social Informatics

Kyoto UniversityKyoto 606-8501 Japan

[email protected], {yohei,lindh,ishida}@i.kyoto-u.ac.jp

Abstract

Even though multilingual content is being offeredin country-specific websites, the difficulty of propa-gating content updates between the websites makescontent sharing problematic. This study presenteda qualitative analysis on collaboration for contentsharing in global organizations with the goal of con-tent consistency. Examining content from the con-tent categories revealed patterns of content sharingthat resembled the processes of Internationalization,Regionalization and Localization. The integrationof patterns of content sharing in collaboration illus-trated several benefits i) scaling content specificity forglobal, regional or local communities ii) propagationof content updates confined to the communities andiii) synchronization of content updates in several lan-guages, both globally and locally (some websites offermultiple languages).

1 Introduction

Global web presence is a key strategic response of or-ganizations desirous of promoting their business inter-nationally. To cater to the geographically dispersedcustomers, global organizations are attempting to es-tablish country-specific web presences in which thedesign, language and content suit the target coun-try [3]. The global organization in average publishesmore than 100 country-specific websites in 43 lan-guages [27]. Despite the obvious advantage of a com-petitive edge in the global market, offering content inmultiple languages in several countries demands con-tent consistency be maintained among the websites,a significant managerial overhead.

Inconsistencies in content shared between thecountry-specific website are common due to inade-quate propagation of content updates; this resultsin omitted content and conflicting content betweenthe websites. The presence of such inconsistency

showcases inefficiencies in the collaboration needed toshare content between websites. From the technicalperspective, it is crucial to investigate the attributesof collaboration that can support consistent contentsharing between websites.

Web globalization often places an emphasis oncountry-specific web presence; content is adapted tosuit the cultural norms of each locale [3, 7, 11, 16, 22].Management focus is, therefore, inclined towardsstrategies that assign cultural adaptation responsibil-ities to the country offices [4, 23, 27]. Furthermore,the application of global design templates with theaddition of several constraints is the preferred hybridstrategy for generating country-specific websites [12].Though attention is focused on balancing global con-sistency against local flexibility in the design and cul-tural adaptation; the multilingual content that formsthe organizations core message, also needs to be man-aged. Particularly if the same content is to be sharedamong different localities, it is necessary to carefullytrack the content so that the content updates can bepropagated to the appropriate websites.

The objective from this research is to present aqualitative analysis on the collaboration in global or-ganization for sharing content between the country-specific websites. From this research, we are able toillustrate the patterns of content sharing between thecountry-specific websites that resembles the processesof Internationalization, Regionalization and Local-ization. At a granular level, the combination ofidentified patterns of content sharing also revealedthe processes of Glocalization. Associating the pat-terns in collaboration for content sharing is also illus-trated to ensure the propagation of content updates insame language or in several languages offered withina country-specific website or between the country-specific websites to avoid content inconsistencies.

This paper is organized as follows. Section 2presents a motivating example to illustrate the casesof inconsistencies in content offered in the country-

2014 ASE BigData/SocialInformatics/PASSAT/BioMedCom 2014 Conference, Harvard University, December 14-16, 2014

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Table 1: Example of Inconsistencies in Content Between Country-Specific Websites

specific websites. Section 3 presents the literaturereview and hypothesis for this study. The researchmethodology is presented in Section 4. The detailedresearch findings are discussed in Section 5 with theverification of hypothesis in Section 6. Finally wemake a conclusion in Section 7.

2 Motivating Example

To illustrate the cases of inconsistencies in content of-fered in the country-specific websites, we present thescreenshot of the content “3M at a Glance” that isshared between the country-specific websites for US,Canada and Switzerland. The content is offered inthe global website of 3M and is shared in its 100country-specific websites.

From Table 1, it is clear that the content isoffered in the official languages of the respectivecountries. In cases, where the countries have multipleofficial languages (such as Canada with English andFrench language) the content is also synchronizedbetween the languages. The content in the sharedofficial language (English) is reused between thecountry-specific website for US and Canada. In sucha setting where content is shared in same languagebetween the websites and synchronized between theofficial languages following problems can be compiled.

(a) Content Updates Not Propagated. Table1 illustrates that the content updates for the year2013 is shared between the country-specific websitesfor US and Canada and synchronized between the

offered languages in English and French, but thecontent in country-specific website for Switzerlandis still not updated in the offered Deutsch andFrench languages. This case illustrates the lack ofpropagation of content updates in the languagesoffered between the country-specific websites.

(b) Content Conflict. The case of contentconflict between the languages offered within acountry-specific websites are also illustrated fromthe content (Deutsch and French) offered in country-specific website for Switzerland. Though the contentis not updated with respect to the content offered atother country-specific websites, there is also conflictin the statistics for the number of employees betweenthe languages. In addition to this, the contentin the shared language (French) offered at bothcountry-specific websites for Canada and Switzer-land provide conflicting content from the lack ofpropagation of content updates between the websites.

(c) Content Missing. Though the contentupdates are propagated in the shared language(English) between US and Canada, the contentin French is not completely synchronized with thecontent in English offered at Canada. This illus-trates a case when the content is partially missingbetween the languages though the content updatesare propagated in the shared language between thecountry-specific websites.

The problems illustrated from the example high-light on the inconsistencies in content that can oc-cur from the lack of propagation of content updates


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between the country-specific websites. The collab-oration for content sharing between country-specificwebsites therefore has to ensure the propagation ofcontent updates for content consistencies when offer-ing content in their official languages. Furthermore,the integration of multilingual service platform suchas Language Grid1 to the collaboration offers possibil-ities for the translation of content updates using thelanguage resources [10]. The next section presentsthe hypothesis for this study.

3 Research Hypothesis

Achieving a global presence is daunting given thevarying perspectives on the role of culture. Theview of cultural homogeneity across countries, aris-ing from the dominance of western culture, favorsthe standardization of products and services acrossthe globe [6, 13]. However, Hofstedes typology of cul-ture clearly elucidates the differences in cultural val-ues among countries, implying the importance of lo-calizing the products and services so as to ensure cul-tural relevance to the local market [8]. Confoundingthe homogenizing effects of “international” culture,previous research in web globalization has empha-sized cultural customization for effective web presence[3, 7, 11, 14, 22].

Besides cultural factors, research in business mar-keting also highlights the significance of administra-tive, regional and economic factors in applying ormodifying global business strategies [5, 15]. Proxim-ity in culture, geography, colonization history, pasttrading, and so on, is known to influence currentbusiness activities between countries. The socio-geographic factors in collaboration for the cross bor-der knowledge flow among the organizational unitshave also been shown to be steps towards globalizingworkforces [1]. In the context of web globalization,alongside cultural adaptation, the role of geographyis rather limited when designing market-specific web-sites [21].

Exploring the geographical factors, the presence ofcountry-specific websites in global organization servesas a podium for examining geographic context insharing content between the countries. From the geo-graphical lens, the relevance of content within a coun-try or across the countries within a regional cluster ispresumed to persist in the country-specific websites.On this context, web globalization is presented withthe daunting task of managing the knowledge flowbetween the country-specific websites (e.g. propaga-tion of content updates for consistent content sharing

1http://langrid.org/en/index.html

between the countries)

Previous studies have presented web categories asa means to evaluate the efforts in web globalizationsuch as standardized, proactive, global, localized andhighly-localized websites [24, 25]. While the firstthree categories of websites provide same content forboth domestic and international users; the remainingcategories of websites provide localized content ineach of its country-specific website. In relationto collaboration in global organization, the webcategories presumably either depicts standardizationin content sharing with the same content offeredin entire country-specific websites or localizationwith localized content offered for target countryand not shared between the country-specific web-sites. In addition to this, the content offered inmultiple websites also illustrate content sharedin varying proportion between them suggestingon the patterns of content sharing between thecountry-specific websites. The propagation of con-tent updates between the websites is confined fromsuch patterns of sharing content. To test for theexistence of patterns, we set the following hypothesis.

H1 Content Sharing between the country-specificwebsite is characterized with the patterns of contentpropagation.

Associating content propagation with the pat-terns enables collaboration for sharing contentconsistently from the propagation of content updatesbased on those patterns. In addition to this, theprevious researches [9, 19] also presented views onthe influences of culture in the content and designfeatures in global websites. Country-specific websitecomprising of several such content features is alsopresumed to exhibit several propagations to otherwebsites. It is therefore expected that varying level ofmanagerial support is required in a country-specificwebsite for the propagation of content updates. Weset the following hypothesis to test for the existenceof several patterns of content propagation from acountry-specific website.

H2 Content in a country-specific website exhibitseveral patterns of propagation to other websites.

The goal of the stated hypotheses is to draw arelation between content sharing and the patterns ofcontent propagation during collaboration. In doingso, the existence of patterns is assumed to enableconsistent content sharing from the propagationof content updates. The result obtained from thisstudy is also expected to expand our understanding


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Figure 1: Framework in Examining Content Sharing

of web globalization from geographic perspectiveof localization. The following section presents adetailed study of the hypothesis.

4 Research Methodology

The methodology for the qualitative analysis of thecontent offered in the country-specific websites withina global organization is presented here.

4.1 Data Collection

For this study, the websites of global brands that areranked amongst top 25 global websites from the webglobalization report card is chosen [28]. From theranking, the websites of four global brands Nivea2,3M3, Starbucks4 and Acer5 with different productsand services offered worldwide are selected for thisstudy. The chosen global brands have more than 40country-specific websites with the contents offered inmore than 20 languages.

A sample of 8 country-specific websites from eachglobal brand representing countries from Asia Pacific,North America, Europe and Middle East-Africa areselected to illustrate content sharing across the geo-graphical regions. The sampled country-specific web-sites for India, Australia, United Kingdom, Ireland,United States, Canada, Middle East and South Africaoffer content in the shared language English. Thecountry-specific websites for Canada and Middle Eastalso offers content in French and Arabic languages re-spectively. In this study, we will investigate on thepropagation of content offered in the shared languageEnglish between the country-specific websites.

2http://www.niveaformen.com3http://www.3m.com4http://www.starbucks.com/site-selector5http://www.acer.com/worldwide

4.2 Content Categories

To study the propagation of content between thecountry-specific websites, first the content categoriesto sample content from the websites are identified.The content features in the corporate websites havebeen studied in [9, 19] to categorize content that pro-vide general company information, financial informa-tion, support and employment information to the cus-tomer and so on.

The following content categories are reused in ourstudy: “Corporate Information” in sampling contentthat provide company information such as missionstatements, “Product Information” in sampling con-tent on description, usage and specification of prod-ucts and “Customer Support Information” in sam-pling content on ways to contact company or find an-swers to queries. The sampled content in the country-specific websites are manually analyzed to label themto the specific content categories.

4.3 Research Framework

Fig.1 outlines the framework in examining the rela-tion between content from the content categories andits availability and propagation between the country-specific websites of the global brands. For the sam-pled content (“representing a webpage”) from eachcontent category, first their availability across thecountry-specific websites is examined. Content Avail-ability is defined as the presence of link to the contentin the country-specific website. In the sampled con-tent the availability of link is denoted with a tick (X)and its unavailability is denoted with a dash (-). Thisis followed with examining the propagation of sam-pled content between the country-specific websites.

Content Propagation is defined as the flow of con-tent between the websites with the purpose for shar-ing content updates. In the sampled content, thepresence of common element e.g. a paragraph of text


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Table 2: Content Availability and Propagation in Content Categories

between the websites is used as a threshold in de-termining the flow of content i.e. propagation has oc-curred between the websites. The propagation of con-tent is denoted with (Y) while (N) denotes no prop-agation between the country-specific websites. Con-tent availability and Content Propagation togetherbring insights on the publication of content and theirconfines in propagation to other countries. The re-search findings from this study are detailed next.

5 Research Findings

Table 2 illustrates the qualitative results from exam-ining the availability and the propagation of contentfor the content categories “Corporate Information”,“Product Information” and “Customer Support In-formation”. The findings from this study are com-piled in the following subsections.

5.1 Content Availability

It is found that the content from each content cat-egory are not standardized due to the differences intheir availability in the country-specific websites ofglobal brands. Table 2 illustrates the differences inavailability of content for “Corporate Information” asthe content is available at all country-specific websitesof global brands 3M, Acer and Starbucks except forNivea. The differences in the availability of contentis also observed for the content categories “ProductInformation” and “Customer Support Information”.The content for “Product Information” is available atall country-specific websites only for Acer and Star-bucks whereas the content for “Customer Support In-formation” is available at all country-specific websitesof Nivea, 3M and Acer except for Starbucks.

The differences in the availability of content at thecountry-specific websites for the global brands sug-


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(a) Propagation of Content “Laptop Aspire S7” toall

(b) Propagation of Content “Medium Roast Kenya Coffee”within or beyond regions but not all

(c) Propagation of Content “3M Contact” to none

Figure 2: Cases of Content Propagation Between Country-Specific Websites

gest that there is no standardized approach for pub-lishing content for specific categories. This findingalso supports the study in [19] which suggested onthe differences in content categories across culturalgroups.

5.2 Content Propagation

From Table 2 the differences in the propagation ofcontent between the country-specific websites for eachcontent category are also observed. Table 2 illustratesthe content for content category “Customer SupportInformation” propagated to all country-specific web-sites for global brands Nivea and Acer; while thereis no propagation of content for 3M. This showsthe differences in the propagation of content betweencountry-specific websites of each global brand. Sim-ilar findings are made in the propagation of con-tent from the content categories “Product Informa-tion” and “Corporate Information”. The contentfor “Product Information” is propagated to entirecountry-specific websites only for Acer whereas thecontent for “Corporate Information” is propagated

to entire country-specific websites for 3M, Acer andStarbuck.

The differences in the propagation of content be-tween the country-specific websites of each globalbrand also suggest that there is no standardized ap-proach of content propagation from specific cate-gories. The content from the content categories isfurther studied to extract the information on thepatterns of propagation between the country-specificwebsites.

5.3 Pattern of Content Propagation

To study the patterns, we refer to the propagationof content from content categories in Table 2. Asthere are four content propagations from each con-tent category, we have a total of 12 propagation ex-amples that is examined for this study. These propa-gation examples are representatives of diverse globalbrands and several content categories. The follow-ing notations are used to illustrate the content prop-agation. As shown in Fig.2, the node representsthe country-specific website, the directed edge repre-


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sents the propagation of content between the country-specific websites and double circled node representsthe country-specific website where the content is pro-duced. We assume that the content is produced atthe country-specific website for UK from the absenceof publicly accessible information on content manage-ment for the chosen global brands. The dotted linerepresents various geographical regions.

5.3.1 Propagation Cases

From examining the propagation of the content,we identify three cases of propagation for contentsharing (a) propagation to entire country-specificwebsites (b) propagation to multiple country-specificwebsites but not to entire country-specific websitesand (c) no propagation between the country-specificwebsites (illustrated from Fig.2). Interesting resultsfor the suitability of content in the geographical re-gions and the confines on the propagation of contentupdates for synchronization between languages areobserved from the identified cases.

(a) Entire country-specific websites. Fig.2.a.illustrates the propagation of content “Laptop AspireS7” from the content category “Product Informa-tion” produced at country-specific website for UKand propagated to all country-specific websites invarious geographical regions. This case of contentpropagation stresses on (i) suitability of the contentfor all geographical regions (ii) content with a globalreach shared at multiple country-specific websitesand (iii) propagation of content updates at entirecountry-specific websites for consistent contentsharing. The global reach of content also suggeston the synchronization of content updates in severallanguages offered in entire country-specific websites.

(b) Within or beyond regions. Fig.2.b. il-lustrates the propagation of content to multiplewebsites but not to entire country-specific websiteswith the content “Medium Roast Kenya Coffee”which is propagated to entire country-specific web-sites except for country-specific website US. Fromthe geographical perspective, this case highlights on(i) suitability of the content with a regional reachshared to countries within or beyond regions.

From inter-regional view, the content is propagatedfrom country-specific website for UK in regional clus-ter Europe to the countries belonging to the regions:Asia Pacific, North America and Middle East-Africa.From the intra-regional view, the content is propa-gated from country-specific website for UK to Irelandwithin the same region. The inter-regional and intra-

regional suitability of content sharing within regionsor beyond geographical region can be used forthe propagation of content updates between thecountry-specific website within the region or acrossthe regions. The content “Medium Roast KenyaCoffee” is also locally produced at country-specificwebsite for US which can be appended to country-specific website for UK from intra-regional suitability.

(c) Propagation to none. The case of nopropagation between the country-specific websitesis illustrated with the content “3M Contact” asshown in Fig.2.c. This case suggests on (i) suitabilityof the content to the specific locale where it isproduced (ii) content with local reach not shared atmultiple country-specific websites and (iii) contentthat are independently updated without requiringconsistencies with other country-specific websites.Though it is logical that the content offered locallyfor a particular country-specific website may not besuitable for another country-specific website, thiscase highlights on the synchronization of contentupdates restricted to the languages offered withina country-specific website. For example contentupdates synchronized only between English andFrench languages within country-specific website forCanada.

5.3.2 Collaborative Content Sharing

From examining the cases of propagation, we gener-alized the patterns of content sharing that resemblesthe processes of Internationalization, Regionalizationand Localization. Fig.3 illustrates the generalizedpatterns of content sharing in a collaborative settingbetween the administrators managing the contentin the languages offered in their country-specificwebsites discussed below.

Internationalization. In previous studies, In-ternationalization as the processes for generalizing aproduct for handling multiple languages and culturalconventions is widely discussed [4, 27]. Fig.3.a.generalizes Internationalization pattern of contentsharing in which the administrator can update thecontent in the offered language (L1) with contentupdates that are propagated to the languages (L2, L3and L4) offered between the websites. Inconsistenciesin content between languages is avoided from thepropagation of content updates in entire offeredlanguages.

Regionalization. The view on Regionalizationrepresents a world that is less interconnected with


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(a) Internationalization Pattern of Content Sharing (b) Regionalization Pattern of Content Sharing

(c) Localization Pattern of Content Sharing (d) Glocalization Pattern of Content Sharing

Figure 3: Content Updates Propagated Between Languages in Collaborative Content Sharing

a stronger regional focus and is interesting forresearches on market segmentation [20]. Fig.3.b.generalizes Regionalization pattern in a collaborativesetting in which content updates are synchronizedin the languages (L1 and L2) for its intra-regionalsuitability. Inconsistencies in content that arerelevant regionally is avoided from the propagationof content updates to countries either within a regionor beyond regions.

Localization. The view on localization is towardsthe process for making a product linguistically andculturally appropriate to the target locale (country/region and language) where it will be used and sold[4, 23, 27]. Fig.3.c. generalizes localization patternillustrating a collaborative setting in which contentupdates are synchronized only in the languagesoffered locally within the respective country-specificwebsite without propagation between websites.For example content updates synchronized only inlanguage L3 and L4 for country-specific website C.Inconsistencies in content that is locally managedis avoided from the propagation of content updatesonly in the languages offered within a country.To investigate the additional patterns of contentsharing, we examined content at a granular level.For this, we examine the component content in a

webpage “About 3M” from 3M and examine itspropagation between the country-specific websites.Four component content on “Who we are”, “Ourvalue”, “3M at glance” and “3M in Country”with combinations for their suitability at globaland local scales is found within a webpage. Thecase resembles Glocalization processes with thecontent communicating both globally and locally[14]. Fig.3.d. generalizes Glocalization pattern in acollaborative setting in which content updated byadministrator for country-specific website (A) areshared globally in several languages (L1, L2, L3 andL4) but the content updated by the administrator forcountry-specific website (C) are only shared locallyin languages (L3 and L4). The integration of suchpatterns with inconsistency detection mechanism asin [17] offer consistent content sharing with globalcontent management systems.

6 Hypothesis Verification

From Table 2 it is possible to illustrate differences incontent sharing between the country-specific websitesfrom the depiction of patterns of content propagation.The Regionalization pattern for content “SensitiveFace Wash”, “Multi-Touch Display” and “MediumRoast Kenya Coffee” from content category “Product


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Information” in Nivea, 3M and Starbucks illustratescontent sharing with a regional focus. However, theInternationalization pattern in Acer illustrates con-tent “Laptop Aspire S7” shared with a global fo-cus which requires tracking content updates at eachcountry-specific website. The difference in contentsharing is also observed for the content categories“Corporate Information” and “Customer Support In-formation”. These qualitative results are convinc-ing in supporting hypothesis H1 by illustrating dif-ferences in content sharing between country-specificwebsites characterized from the confines in the prop-agation of content updates.

Table 2 also illustrates propagation of content thatare not standardized with respect to the content cat-egories. Country-specific website comprising of sev-eral such content categories therefore exhibits severalpatterns of propagation. For example the country-specific website for UK from a global brand Niveacomprises of content from content categories “Cus-tomer Support Information”, “Corporate Informa-tion” and “Product Information” each depicting pat-tern of content sharing: Internationalization, Region-alization and Regionalization respectively. It is con-vincing that the patterns of content sharing are notunified in a country-specific website and hypothesisH2 is supported from the presence of several patternsof content sharing to other websites.

7 Conclusion

This research presented a qualitative analysis on thecollaboration for content sharing in global organi-zations as depicted in their country-specific web-sites. The results are convincing in characterizing dif-ferences in content sharing between country-specificwebsites from the presence of several patterns of con-tent propagation. From examining the content in dif-ferent content categories, patterns of content sharingwere revealed that resembled the processes of Interna-tionalization, Regionalization and Localization. At agranular level, the combination of identified patternsof content sharing also illustrated the process of Glo-calization. Several benefits are illustrated from theidentification of such patterns i) scaling the suitabil-ity of content for global, regional or local communitiesii) propagation of content updates confined for con-sistent content sharing between the communities iii)synchronization of content updates globally in sev-eral languages offered on all country-specific websitesor in the languages offered within a country-specificwebsite. The pattern of content sharing in a collab-orative setting is also illustrated in avoiding incon-

sistences from missing content, content not updatedand conflicting content in the languages offered fromthe country-specific websites. The future work willexplore the technical capabilities with the integrationof patterns in the collaboration tools for inconsistencymanagement in global content management systems.

Acknowledgment

This research was partially supported by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (S) (24220002) from JapanSociety for the Promotion of Science.

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