al processes and influence individual managerial behaviour in a way that reinforced worldwide strategies and organizational objectives'. This implies a potentially integrative role for culture and management training and development (MTD).Going beyond the typical concern with 'better skills', this study offers a much more complex and multi-faceted picture of MTD which reveals an intricate interplay between MTD and corporate culture. We show how managers in a multinational firm disguised as International Products (IP) account for their training and career development activities and how they rationalize such activities in terms of an integrative corporate culture. [1] Thus, MTD serves as a tool for the transmission of culture, while a putative integrative culture in turn furnishes the rationale for MTD. This recursiveness finds legitimacy in the ideological premise, promulgated by senior management, that it is in the joint interests of the firm and the managers to absorb and internalize the organizational values inherent in the corporate culture, because this helps managers to secure a high-flying career. The legitimacy of this assumption is analyzed by adopting a two-pronged approach which examines the functional and symbolic explanations for t he MTD-culture interplay. Below, we set out the three components of our conceptual model. Management Training and DevelopmentMTD includes personal development, socialization and organizational change (e.g. Margerison 1991; Mumford 1989) and the design and application of competencies to improve behavioural outcomes (e.g. Boam and Sparrow 1992; Boyatzis 1982; Spencer and Spencer 1993). The concept of 'learning' has also been central to MTD, from 'action learning' (e.g. Revans 1980), and 'experiential learning' (e.g. Kolb 1984), to the more recent developments in the 'learning organization' (e.g. Argyris 1996). The dominant theme in MTD is the development of managerial expertise to enhance organizati...
