A Comparative Study On The Operation Patterns Of NBA And CBA From Cross-Cultural Perspective

After 110 years of innovation and perfection, basketball is more than a simple ball game. It has developed into a modern sport game with abundant cultural connotations containing art, economy and culture, which exerts a sound influence on economy and culture in human society. As the symbol of the highest level of the world?s basketball, NBA(National Basketball Association) has become the most influential professional sport organization and the most successful sport events after more than 60 years development. It is crowned as a successful example for global various professional sports leagues for its efficient marketization operation model. Led and influenced by NBA, those countries with moderately high level of basketball started to take the road of professionalism.For basketball, professionalism and marketization has become a development trend in the world today. In 1995, Chinese basketball has also taken the road of professionalism, starting the CBA(China Basketball Association) league. After the baptism in the last two decades, CBA league has made encouraging progress in professionalism and marketization and developed into a professional sport league with strong influence, bright commercial prospect and tremendous market development potential. However, due to long-term influence of planned economy on China sports, Chinese professional basketball culture is also influenced by Chinese national culture to a large extent. It not only resulted in obvious defects and inelasticity in the organization structure, management system and market-oriented operation of CBA league, but also impeded the pace of basketball marketization. Therefore, there is an obvious gap between CBA and NBA in the respects of competitive level, operation pattern, market promotion and professional level.Given the fact that CBA was established half a century after the start of NBA, the gap between the operating time would cause different development degree of the two leagues. However, what can reflect the essence of problem better are their different social and cultural conditions. Both of the basketball leagues are closely related to the different national cultural backgrounds. The huge diversity of NBA and CBA in terms of competitive level, management system, organization structure, market-based operation and rules and regulations reflects the fact that the development of the two national basketball leagues is interrelated at great level with Chinese and American cultures.This paper will focus on Chinese and American professional basketball leagues from the perspective of culture on the basis of Hofstede?s four cultural dimensions theory, compare the differences in the operation of NBA and CBA, and analyze how the Chinese and American cultures affect the operation of CBA and NBA in terms of organization structure, management system, market-based operation and so on. By way of the contrast and comparison with the successful commercial operating pattern of NBA, in combination with the realities of our country?s national culture, some suggestions are offered to CBA for its market-based operation. Providing a new perspective in the domain of the comparative study of NBA and CBA, this paper will analyze and compare NBA and CBA operating pattern from cross-cultural perspective so as to provide useful reference to promote the development of Chinese basketball professionalism.