Making the Case for a Post-national Cultural Analysis of Organizations

Abstract

Isolating the cultural within organizational analysis and extracting cultural lessons from managerial situations have generated cross-national categories of culture and competing paradigms for studying the cultural, intercultural, and cross-cultural influences of economic and social life. As organizations around the world combine different cultural diversities, and the use of individual, national, and political aggregates of study do not necessarily transpose well onto many business situations (especially in atypical examples such as those presented in nongovernmental organizations [NGOs], clubs, associations, and public agencies), the use of nation profiles and dimensions as analytical terms for culture in organizations has become questionable. This conceptual article draws from critical theory, anthropology, cultural studies, and management literature in investigating to what extent national character and dimensions should still be the dominant filter for studying people and culture in organizations. Postcolonial theory has revealed that research paradigms promoting gender, nation, age, ethnic, and other categories suffer from bias implicit in all “essentializing” and “reifying” projects. Such designs are too overconfident in their account of culture and do not sufficiently recognize a diversity of organizational subjects as a variable for study. A postnational cultural analysis is prescribed requiring a mitigated use of nation and dimension frameworks, a stakeholder perspective, and a research standpoint that transcends the perspective of the managerial function. Cross-cultural, intercultural, and multicultural business situations in the context of global work require a transcultural paradigm, created by and serving multiple cultures and acting across national and occupational boundaries. This accommodates the fact that much global trade is conducted primarily by oligopolistic corporations and that organizations not prioritizing profit objectives (NGOs, humanitarian associations, virtual chats, and public agencies) offer completely original avenues of cultural research. This article explores options for integrating the cultural credibly among the explanatory tools of contractual human organization and for innovating on the methods, designs, and formats of cultural research for management studies.

Keywords

postnational studies postcultural organizations transcultural studies cross-cultural research critical analysis

Introduction

This conceptual article draws from critical theory, anthropology, cultural studies, and management literature in investigating to what extent national character and dimensions should still be the dominant filter for studying people and culture in organizations. The section titled “An Overview of Cross-Cultural Research Streams” provides an overview of different streams of cross-cultural research as they have emerged in the social sciences and particularly management studies over the last 50 years, framing these within the circumstances of ever-developing economies. The section “A Critical Perspective on ‘Scientific’ Cultural Study” offers a broad critical analysis of the most well-known research applications, pointing to key advances as well as problematical flaws (particularly the use of universal dimensions summarized in Table 1) and more importantly the questionable sustainability of many cultural claims for contemporary organizations working within interdependent economies. The section “The Art and Philosophy of a New Cultural Study” points to subject areas and methodological avenues where some of these flaws may be addressed, emphasizing a multidisciplinary and transcultural perspective based on previous groundbreaking publications summarized in Table 2. The last section “Three Proposals for Reframing, Deframing, and Unframing Culture” offers three overarching recommendations for designing research that integrates the cultural credibly among the explanatory tools of contractual human organization, innovating with multidisciplinary and multiparadigmatic methods, designs, and epistemologies.

Table 1.

Critical Assessment of Universal Dimensions

Category	Definition	Potential bias/redundancy of category
Uncertainty avoidance	To avoid uncertainty by reliance on social norms, rituals and bureaucratic practices	Attempts to make the human condition more predictable belong to the realm of religion, science, and law. Uncertainty testing evaluates risk aversion, conformity, faith, and bureaucracy, which are inversely proportional to entrepreneurial activity. Educational level, gross domestic product (GDP), type of industry, and local history will skew uncertainty indices. This is a path-dependent dimension with probable overlap with many other variables such as personality, recent political conflict, natural disaster, poverty, wealth, corruption, and gender.
Power distance	Expectations of and compliance with unequal power distribution	The unequal distribution of power in organizations reiterates other institutions such as patriarchal authority common in many preindustrial societies (Inglehart, 1997). As power distance collapses with higher levels of education, secularism, well-being, and GDP, it is mediated by the local economy, competition, and political institutions. There is the additional problem of distinguishing between the terms power and hierarchy (D’Iribarne, 1997). Strong egalitarian values happen to correlate with small, wealthy states exhibiting high levels of general education (Scandinavia and the Germanic countries are good examples).
Individualism/collectivism (Hofstede’s framework)	The degree to which people feel autonomous in their life decisions or rather tied to social constraints and expectations.	“Individualism” and “collectivism” serve situational, historical, and institutional predicaments and can be considered a rational and functional response to an environment rather than an unconscious, genetic, or value-induced reflex built into cognitive structures inculcated by a cultural past. Variations on the typologies of collectivism and individualism have been proposed (Triandis, 1995). Self-expression and individualism increase with economic growth (Inglehart, 1997), independent of any culture, and they are vital in small populations faced with outside competition for resources. Entitled individuals in positions of power embrace autonomy even if they live in a “collective” culture. Like the power index, the individualism and collectivism surveys scatter countries according to predictable economic and demographic patterns (Triandis, 2004), so they might not really inform us at all about any particular organizational dynamic, nor do they inform about the organizational and individual variations within similar socioeconomic circumstances. Individual aggregate needs careful separation from nation aggregate (Smith et al., 2008). Although individuals are the basic subject of psychological analysis (Smith, 2004), the socialization of individuals and their interaction with a society is a matter to be studied at the level of families, peers, neighborhoods, schools, cities, and nations each with its own statistical imprint of culture (Smith, 2004). S. Schwartz controlled his value data with gross national product and a social index, leading to his proposal of differentiated individual and nation indices of itemized values (Schwartz, 1992, 1994) for cross-cultural comparison. The assumed “isomorphism of constructs” has been central in deciding how to use and understand culture in the managerial sciences (Fischer, 2009; Van de Vijver, van Hemert, & Poortinga, 2008). As no individual can create his or her discourse and sensemaking process in isolation to the rest of society, individuals are poor candidates for cultural sensemaking. Postmodern criticism rejects the possibility of any self-determining individual because the unitary, personal self is an illusion of contemporary society evidenced by the necessary reproductions and simulations in language and behavior that individuals engage in to sustain membership in any society (Alvesson & Deetz, 2006; Baudrillard, 1983).
Societal collectivism	Encouraging collective distribution of rewards and action	The ethics of solidarity may be encouraged by certain religious and spiritual doctrines, but egalitarian ethics are one of the hallmarks of the welfare state. The dimension is not methodologically neutral and overlaps with mechanisms exterior to organizations and individuals including political climate and institutions.
In-group collectivism	Expression of pride, loyalty and cohesiveness within organizations and/or families	Loyalty and commitment to core family often parallels strong patriotism and nationalism. In-group collectivism follows levels of uncertainty avoidance and GDP.
Masculine/feminine (Hofstede’s framework)	Preferential forms of social behavior that privilege either competition, materialism and wealth (masculine), or security, well-being and harmony (feminine).	The bipolar model follows typical distinctions made between liberal or socialist political philosophy. Although liberal economies value assertiveness, autonomy, materialism, aggression, money, competition, and rationalism, welfare socialism seeks protection and provision for the weak, greater involvement with the environment, an emphasis on nature and well-being, and a strong respect for quality of life and collective responsibilities. Masculine societies happen to include the most successful economically during the period of Hofstede’s study (the United States, Japan, and Germany) with the successful feminine societies having either smaller populations, less economic scale and/or strong collective, and welfare philosophies (Scandinavia, Costa Rica, France, Thailand). The masculine–feminine dichotomy divides organizations into those exhibiting either compassion, solidarity, collectivism, and universalism or competition, autonomy, merit, results, and responsibility. This dimension is eurocentric and sexist (Gilligan, 1982)
Gender egalitarianism	Extent of gender role differences and tolerance of gender discrimination	Gender egalitarianism is closely correlated with secular-rational authority (Inglehart & Welzel, 2005) as traditional authority tends to differentiate male and female social roles resulting in males having more money, power, and places of entitlement. This dimension may be redundant with power distance and may be moderated or not by organizational forces and certainly by the dominant economic and religious ethos.
Assertiveness	Acceptance of confrontation and aggressiveness as a means to interact with others	Assertiveness has a strong psychological component that may be fostered by family education and social expectations. Some evolutionary psychologists believe that men have evolved to be more aggressive and motivated by competition, whereas women avoid physical confrontation and coercive behavior in favor of cooperation (Barkow, Cosmides, & Tooby, 1992; Buss, 1999; Van Vugt et al., 2007), but the impossibility of separating learned behavior from genetic programming makes this item biased.
Future orientation	Focus on planning, investing and delaying gratification	This is a secular-rational value that challenges fate-based attitudes common to traditional society. Focus on the future is nurtured in liberal economies fueled by speculation and investment and the replacement of old technologies with new ones. Bias will occur when evaluating states forbidding speculation and assessment of future events creating the illusion of a culture “focused on the present” because its focus on the future does not coincide with investment.
Performance orientation	Encourages excellence and improvement	To value achievement is typical of the modernization period (Inglehart, 1997) and reflects “masculinist” thinking because it is based on rationalization and optimization emphasizing the belief that people should shape their universe and control the future. It recalls both individualism and masculinity dimensions, and it will be enhanced in industrial societies where technology and bureaucracy are institutionalized through education and the media.
Human orientation	Encourages fairness, altruism, caring and kindness	The focus on well-being and the de-emphasis on authority are associated with postmodern society (Inglehart, 1997), but humane fatalism also pushes populations to make the best of what they have and be kind to others. A human orientation could also arise from social philosophies that seek to mitigate the level of aggression and egocentrism that high GDP or alternatively high uncertainty inadvertently fosters. It may recall both feminine and collective indices. It may be supported or aborted by organizational imperatives, historical factors, or scarcity.

Table 2.

Knowledge Streams Using Multifactor Aggregates of Cultural Study: An Overview With Examples

Global accounts of cultural behaviors	World values, morals, and belief systems	Historical accounts of nations	Occupational study	Psychological sociological, anthropological, and philosophical analysis
These studies offer ecological and big lens views of cultures over centuries, generations, and millennia.Culture is an evolutionary force and has no borders.	These studies focus on human values and lifestyle choices as the primary definition of culture.Culture is a spiritual, moral, and intellectual quest.	These studies consider nation building from the perspectives of political system, economic choice, institutions, and military history.Culture is the aftermath of warring groups.	The approach is to understand psychosocial undercurrents shaping the way people work in organizations throughout the world.Culture is the way we deal with organizational and group life.	These take an interdisciplinary and overlapping perspective on people, institutions, zeitgeist, and economics interacting with religion, values, and technology.Culture is ultimately unknowable, but all pervasive.
Darwin (1871/2004). The descent of man.	Weber (1958). The protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism.	Gellner (1983). Nations and nationalism: New perspectives on the past.	Weber (1922/1968). Economy and society.	Polanyi (1944). The great transformation.
Bell (1973). The coming of post-industrial society.	Schwartz (1992). Universals in the content and structure of values: Theoretical advances and empirical tests in 20 countries. In M. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology.	Anderson (1983/2006). Imagined communities.	Hofstede (1980). Culture’s consequences: International differences in work-related values.	Hegel (1956). The philosophy of history (J. Sibree, Trans.).
Wallerstein (1974). The modern world system I.Wallerstein (1980). The modern world system II.	Huntington (1994). The clash of civilizations: Remaking of world order.	McNeill (1986). Polyethnicity and national unity in world history.	Smircich (1983). Concepts of culture in organizational analysis. Administrative Science Quarterly.	Granovetter (1985). Economic action and social structure: The problem of embeddedness. American Journal of Sociology.
Braudel (1984). The perspective of the world.	Inglehart (1997). Modernization and postmodernization: Cultural, economic and political change in 43 societies.	Hobsbawm (1990/1992). Nations and nationalism since 1780: Programme, myth and reality.	Calás and Smircich (1999). Past postmodernism? Reflections and tentative directions. The Academy of Management Review.	Hall and Hall (1976/1990). Beyond culture.
Diamond (1997). Guns, germs and steel: The fates of human societies.	Huntington and Harrison (2000). Culture matters: How values shape human progress.	Porter (1990). The competitive advantage of nations.	Sackmann and Phillips (2004). Contextual influences on culture research: Shifting assumptions for new workplace realities. International Journal of Cross Cultural Management.	Foucault (1970). The order of things.
Cavalli-Sforza and Cavalli (1995). The great human diasporas: The history of diversity and evolution.	Norris and Inglehart (2004). Sacred and secular: religion and politics worldwide.	Putnam, Leonardi, and Nanetti (1992). Making democracy work: Civic traditions in modern Italy.	Boyacigiller, Kleinberg, Phillips, and Sackmann (2004). Conceptualizing culture: Elucidating the streams of research in international cross-cultural management. In B. J. Punnett & O. Shenkar (Eds.). Handbook of international management research.	Geertz (1973). The interpretation of culture.
Chase-Dunn (1998). Global formation: Structures of the world economy.	Inglehart, Basanez, Diez-Medrano, Halman, and Luijkx (2004). Human beliefs and values: A cross-cultural sourcebook based on the 1999-2002 values surveys.	Fukuyama (1995). Trust: The social virtues and the creation of prosperity.	Alvesson and Deetz (2006). Critical theory and postmodernism approaches to organizational studies. In S. Clegg, C. Hardy, T. Lawrence, W. Nord (Eds.). The Sage handbook of organization studies.	Habermas (1975). Legitimation crisis (T. McCarthy, Trans.).
Landes (1998). The wealth and poverty of nations: Why some are so rich and some so poor.	Inglehart and Welzel (2005). Modernization, culture change, and democracy.	Ohmae (1995). The end of the nation sate: The rise of regional economies.	Fischer (2009). Where is culture in cross-cultural research? An outline of a multilevel research process for measuring culture as a shared meaning system. International Journal of Cross Cultural Management.	Appadurai (1996). Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalization. Public Worlds, Vol. 1.

An Overview of Cross-Cultural Research Streams

Management Studies

Cross-cultural study applied to the organizational sciences that emerged in recovering World War II economies, marshaling methods from applied anthropology to support first-world, postwar, modernization ambitions (Boyacigiller, Kleinberg, Phillips, & Sackmann, 2004; McSweeney, 2009; Sackmann & Phillips, 2004; Sackmann, Phillips, Kleinberg, & Boyacigiller, 1997; Westwood, 2006). Drawing from the work of Edward and Mildred Hall (1959-1976), Clyde Kluckhohn (1953), and Inkeles and Levinson (1954) to name a few, universals were adapted as a basis for comparing cultural differences in intercultural encounters. Primary cultural data were collected through the use of questionnaires to which increasingly sophisticated statistical analysis was applied to identify stable, national, and regional profiles (Hofstede, 1980, 1991; House, Hanges, Javidan, Dorfman, & Gupta, 2004; Schwartz, 1992, 1994; Triandis, 1995; Trompenaars, 1993). Universals, the collection of primary data by survey, and the empirical credibility lent by statistical analysis became the standard framework for cultural study within the management professions.

Geert Hofstede’s (1980, 1991, 2001) groundbreaking use of four “universal” cultural dimensions in his study of employees working in IBM facilities across the world revealed by statistical analysis how culture matters in making decisions, forming teams, and embracing styles of management and leadership. Hofstede’s dimensions became subsequently the premier reference for factoring culture into organizational analysis, and his survey results are often quoted to form the basis of a national ranking mechanism used in management literature and teaching for its simplicity. Among the most quoted management books of the last century (Minkov & Hofstede, 2011), Culture’s Consequences has become required reading in many international business programs worldwide.

The global leadership and organizational behavior effectiveness (GLOBE) studies, seeking to improve Hofstede’s framework, took on the statistically ambitious enterprise of working from the perspective of more than 25 countries to validate experimentally seven dimensions of culture, thereby bypassing the problematical use of studying just one company, from one cultural perspective, and addressing the contested aggregate of nation in its use of regional clusters based on history, political institutions, religion, and other path factors (House et al., 2004; Javidan & House, 2002). Conceptualized to compare leadership, teamwork, collaboration, role allocation, and organizational structure across the world, the GLOBE studies tested respondents’ perceptions of “what is” as well as what “ought to be,” tracking differences between idealized values and reported practice, and proposing extensive statistical profiles with regional comparisons. The GLOBE studies moved the Hofstede paradigm forward in seeking to resolve the problematical parameters of research design, cultural subject, and the limits of cultural claims.

Increasing knowledge of national cultural profiles became a training, management, and communication concern to enhance the effective interaction between managers and workers especially for enterprises set up in foreign countries with expatriates in managerial situations (Berry, 1976; Triandis, 1995; Trompenaars, 1993). Popular management literature produced pragmatic lists of “do’s and taboos” and critical incidents to increase awareness of national habits and preferences, shedding light on the particular problems of midlevel personnel involved in joint ventures, mergers, and the management of multinational teams. Focusing on the dialogue and interaction between diverse “others,” these studies offered explanatory devices for cultural otherness and prescribed coping behavior to enhance the impact, effectiveness, and output of admixing in work situations. These hands-on approaches provided simple constructs of culture to enable communication, technology, and educational development on the subject. Inspired by Hofstede and anthropological models instructed by Kluckhohn (1953), Kluckholn and Strodtbeck (1961), and Hall and Hall (1976/1990), Schwartz expanded these psychosocial applications by testing universal value dimensions at both the individual and national levels. Valid individual constructs included hierarchy, embeddedness, harmony, egalitarian commitment, intellectual autonomy, and mastery (Schwartz, 1992). National aggregates included power, achievement, hedonism, stimulation, self-direction, universalism, benevolence, tradition, conformity, and security (Schwartz, 1994). His study was not tailored for organizational purposes and did not have a particularly large sample. However, his framework allowed for introducing lifestyle and philosophical preferences to social science techniques and marked a first attempt to align individual and national aggregates to strengthen cultural and character study, enhancing the way in which universal dimensions could be investigated. Schwartz’ value studies also innovate by not subordinating the study of culture to the social transactions that take place only at work. In a similar vein, but applied to organizations, Trompenaars tested preferential behaviors found to be statistically prominent in certain national organizations validating the dimensions of time, achievement, ascription, individualism/collectivism, universalism/particularism, emotional/neutral, specific/diffuse, and man/nature (Trompenaars, 1993). He consolidated these in a study conducted with Hamden-Turners to evaluate managerial cultures worldwide (Hamden-Turner & Trompenaars, 1997). A recent innovation on values study introduces social axioms from multicultural perspectives as a means to measure qualitatively the way people’s beliefs shape their behavior (Leung, 2008; Leung, Bhagat, Buchan, Erez, & Gibson, 2005; Leung & Bond, 2004). All these studies enhance organizational understandings of the cultural dynamic at work through a multivariate approach considering individual, organizational, and national values.

General Political and Social Science Studies

From the broader perspective of political and social science, the ongoing World Values Surveys (Inglehart & Baker, 2000; Inglehart, Basanez, Diez-Medrano, Halman, & Luijkx, 2004) drew inferences from individual census to measure national character trends by tracking personal attitudes and values and rejecting bipolar universals. This large-scale, cross-national survey conducted by an international consortium of professional statisticians, sociologists, and political scientists combines survey questions on a range of cultural, social, political, religious, and economic topics, classifying results according to the demographic spread of respondents and comparing banks of data over decades. Testing a range of reported opinions on a host of factors in modern life, these individual questionnaires cull and process data nationally but present results by statistical segments of age, gender, education level, and salary reporting group variations, thanks to a time series comparison of reported national values. The analysis draws attention to the dynamic nature of value change under the gradual influence of technology, globalization, industrialization, and democracy. Most importantly, the statistical framework is constructed so as to provide socioeconomic and path-related data to contextualize how wealth, technology, and political philosophy shape values with noticeable subregional dynamics acting within agrarian, industrial, and postindustrial contexts. The World Values Survey weighs socioeconomic data and education levels against cultural, regional, and path-dependent factors reminding of how individuals are embedded within political, religious, historical, and economic contexts that enable or disable certain character traits, something already noticed by eminent scholars of economics and history, including Marx, Weber, Landes, and Huntington (see Table 2). Although the World Values Survey has been influential in political science, it has been noticeably absent from management research with a few exceptions (Minkov & Hofstede, 2011), which is surprising because the census uses a similar framework with group survey as primary data and sophisticated statistical analysis to map national character against political climate.

Organizational Studies

An emphasis on the organizational as the primary manifestation of culture is again evident in the rise of corporate culture studies that collapse culture into the managerial–organizational manifestations of national and regional preferences. Types of culture within organizations have included vertical–horizontal, autocratic–democratic, and paternalistic–entrepreneurial to name a few. However, not all discussions of organizational culture focus on the functional aspects of management and communication. Some develop a rhetoric more familiar in cultural studies and sociology with organizational dichotomies including East–West, collective–individual, neutral–emotional, and tight–loose. As a result, the cultural, national, domestic, international, and transnational became enmeshed with these designs (Boyacigiller et al., 2004; Sackmann et al., 1997; Sackmann & Phillips, 2004). In this functional approach, the mechanical study of the organization requires unpackaging (corporate) culture and collapsing the sociocultural into the organizational–cultural, a multilevel task that blends culture with many other social questions (Fischer, 2009). These approaches innovate by providing organizational data that are then examined within the context of macrocultural forces.

Other studies focused on the organizational manifestations of culture have borrowed from ethnographic and narrative techniques, using the study of conversation, observation in situ, or corporate diaries to piece together a detailed snapshot of organizational character. “Emic” techniques, or taking an insider’s approach in understanding a foreign firm, have been used to identify ineffective or best practices within foreign organizations. The study of Japanese management, for example, combined the cultural, the organizational, and its economic outcome (Ouchi & Wilkins, 1985; Westwood, 2001; Wilkinson, 1990). Today, growing interest in China triggers similar cultural productions (Ghuari & Fang, 2001). Focus on organizational culture drawing from interviews, ethnographic observation, and the case study method to provide thick description have gradually been gaining ground (Geertz, 1973; Sackmann & Phillips, 2004), and a paradigm shift has indeed become noticeable in published research evidenced by gleaning the table of contents of recent issues of Cross Cultural Management: An International Journal, the International Journal of Cross Cultural Management, and Cross Cultural Research in which qualitative, quantitative, interpretive, and empirical studies are published side by side.

The historical understanding of the cross-cultural discipline—characterized by the nation lens, dimension testing, and focus on comparative and organizational aspects—still inform a great part of the knowledge base offered in business education and consulting firms today. These paradigms simplify the big picture of culture as essentially a question of national, context, and location differences permeating organizations, associations, and societies, and they are believed credible, thanks to mechanical, stable, and universal dimensions validated by statistical tools. They continue to be used because they enable comparison, have a predictive claim, and provide background to explain consumer, communication, and behavioral difference. This knowledge base situates culture as a key organizational and strategic feature addressed through appropriate communication, training, and recruitment of diverse others. This framework has the overall detraction of simplifying considerably the culture question, subordinating culture to the world of work and aiming to make steadfast cultural claims, whereas the cultural subject—like personality—is necessarily transient and unstable.

A Critical Perspective on “Scientific” Cultural Study

Many objections to the predominant framework for cultural analysis within business, inspired by Hofstede’s model and others of the same ilk, have received extensive critical commentary from theoretical, statistical, and practical perspectives (Baskerville, 2003; Boyacigiller & Adler, 1991; Dermot, 2002; Dorfman & Howell, 1988; Gerhart, 2008; Hamden-Turner & Trompenaars, 1997; Jacob, 2005; Javidan, House, Dorfman, Hanges, & de Luque, 2006; Kirkman, Lowe, & Gibson, 2006; Lingui & Koveos, 2008; McSweeney, 2002, 2009; Orr & Hauser, 2008; K. H. Roberts & Boyacigiller, 1984). For example, the sampling discrepancy of Hofstede’s initial survey disqualifies his results from being authoritative on organizations, societies, or nations as interviews involved sales and engineering personnel at IBM with few, if any, women and undoubtedly fewer social minorities participating (Moussetes, 2007). Even if country indices were used to control for wealth, latitude, population size, density, and growth, privileged males working as engineers or sales personnel in one of the elite organizations of the world, pioneering one of the first multinational projects in history, cannot be claimed to represent nations or even work cultures, and Hofstede (1980) himself discouraged the reader from using his data in any narrow way. Other critics have objected to the use of questionnaires as a valid method for cultural inquiry. Reported behavior is not equivalent to observed behavior or espoused values especially in organizational situations where people are likely to provide the “right” answer and behave the “right” way. The conflation of attitudes, behaviors, and values is problematical as it is important to distinguish between what is, what one thinks, what one does, and what one thinks should be done (Boje, 2001; Boyacigiller et al., 2004; Clifford & Marcus, 1986; Czarniawska, 2004; D’Iribarne, 1997; Soin & Scheytt, 2006). The GLOBE studies suffer from similar distractions, diminishing the validity of its statistical frameworks and inferences (Dansereau & Yammarino, 2006; Hanges & Dickson, 2006; Hofstede, 2006; Javidan et al., 2006; Van de Vijver, van Hemert, & Poortinga, 2008).

The use of universal dimensions (in Hofstede, the GLOBE studies, and many cross-cultural publications) has also been widely contested as a valid means to draw up cultural maps. Universal dimensions were created as constructs to measure and compare character forces internationally. They respond to environmental, political, historical, and psychological forces that cannot be truly separated. They are often biased by the perspective of the researcher, and they often contain implicit and explicit links to exogenous forces that affect behavior and character (such as political climate, wealth, and generation). Table 1 offers a summary of some of these dilemmas.

Table 1 summarizes many interpretive challenges of universal dimensions. Research paradigms using them to promote gender, nation, age, ethnic, and other cultural categories may suffer from bias implicit in all “essentializing” and “reifying” designs even though such initiatives cannot be discarded altogether as they sometimes prove convenient and yield vital insights (Ang & Dyne, 2008; D’Iribarne, 2009; Smith, Peterson, & Thomas, 2008). By compiling “empirical” cultural data sorted into preestablished categories, subjects are narrowed by stereotypes and an ethnocentric ordering process that contemporary critical study seeks to transcend (Osland & Bird, 2000; Yeganeh & Su, 2006). Claiming that there are human taxonomies suggests that culture, nation, and ethnicity are immutable personality characteristics that seal identity and that skill, character, and essence (Prentice & Miller, 2006) can be revealed by questionnaires and critical incidents arranged in columns and communicated meaningfully with statistics and graphs. The bipolar modes of comparison (e.g., small or large power distance) confine many universal concepts to highly generalized and mechanical portraits of character (Osland & Bird, 2000) that end up as stereotypes. The overlap between dimensions may skew comparisons between surveys, compromising coherence within the body of data published on the subject (Minkov & Hofstede, 2011).

Finally, the data-collection methods of much cross-cultural analysis resemble those used in economics, statistics, and demography, offering a means to make legitimate the “science” of cultural study for an economics and business readership requiring certain knowledge formats. A number of professional publications in prestigious cross-cultural journals now exceed beyond expectations the clever use of statistical technique to make pointed assertions about culture, and some premier journals of cross-cultural study explicitly require extensive empirical data as a publication requirement.¹ The combination of statistical analysis, the use of universal dimensions, and survey data has expanded the area of culture to include studies of just about everything. This has resulted in the collapse of the very notion of culture into psychological, historical, religious, organizational, economic, and generational forces. These attempts to use scientific protocol in human study do not fully factor the subjective influence of the researcher and the assumed but questionable “objective” and observable reality of human relationships (Clegg, Hardy, Lawrence, & Nord, 2006).

Moving from these specific criticisms in the design of cross-cultural research, one can move to a more general series of objections concerning the output of much cross-cultural study. The first concerns the claims of national character. There are many reasons why neither societies (people, their values, and collective resources) nor economies (institutions, divisions of power, and rule of law) can be satisfactorily portrayed as “national.” The notion that people in a nation make up a homogeneous ethnic, linguistic, or religious group can almost always be proven inaccurate. In fact, polyethnicity has been an enduring reality of the majority of the world’s nations, actually composites of smaller cultural groups evidenced by a diversity of languages and local customs, united under a dominant religious, linguistic, historical, or symbolic cause (Kluckholn & Strodtbeck, 1961; McNeill, 1986). Today, the interaction of ethnicities and nations in an interconnected world necessarily creates a myriad of new hybrid cultural and linguistic communities that are also “cultural” (Pieterse, 1995), sometimes “nationless” (Palestinians or Kurds) and often transient (virtual chats). The idea that a political economy and its institutions function autonomously within a national border is also erroneous as there are no economies, societies, or educational systems in the world today that function without contact with counterparts abroad, phenomena that have been accelerated given technology and global media (Castells, 2000). The nation-state is an institutionalized and bureaucratized agreement of solidarity, which replaces ethnicity with a dominant political philosophy, rule of law, government, and system of policing deviants. Nation is a set of professed affiliations (Arnason, 2003) and not an empirical state of being, as it is the functional and historical outcome of a struggle for dominance in group norms (Gellner, 1983), suppressing some subcultures, empowering others. According to one scholar, nations have never been more than figments of the collective imagination harnessing patriotism in the service of paternalism, made possible on a grand scale by the homogenizing forces imposed on language and discourse that only the media can marshal (Anderson, 1983/2006). Modern nations grapple with the permeable character of territory, people, and institutional arrangements, and the seeds of human innovation—ideas, genes, and money—are frequently migratory (Witte, 2010b). In addition, there are strong generational and gender patterns that stratify most human societies evolving unevenly over time, necessitating an historical and comparative dimension to all social and economic questions. Minorities, foreign nationals, migrants, tourism, and cultural artifacts (music, art, clothes, narratives, and technology) erode the likelihood that any particular nation, society, or organization correctly reflects anything but broad motivations and values of changing and arbitrary groups. The strategic operations of international, multinational, and transnational firms have even abandoned the “nation” paradigm at the level of operations (Craig & Douglas, 2006; Ohmae, 1995). Despite these distractions, many having already been tracked in previous publications (Boyacigiller et al., 2004; K. H. Roberts & Boyacigiller, 1984; Sackmann et al., 1997, Sackmann & Phillips, 2004) and the questionable empirical support to firmly establish their direct impact on management practices (Gerhart, 2008; Peterson & Smith, 2008; Schaffer & Riordan, 2003), national aggregate continue to be used to illuminate questions about organizations in spite of within nation cultural variations (Kirkman et al., 2006; McSweeney, 2009) that cast doubt on the entire design.

The motivations to preserve a national framework for understanding culture are undoubtedly complex. Pragmatism would warrant studies that draw from available national data generated to serve business and industry across the world and allow political leaders to compare and contrast national data for the purpose of development, competition, and knowledge as they experiment with urban, employment, and institutional policies. The national paradigm also fits the way a large number of people describe their own identity as educational, and civic systems are likely to propound the view that one’s nation is a great part of one’s psychological and social reality and people are likely to embrace the story of their own nation as an integral part of who they are in the world today. Despite jet transportation and sophisticated satellite communications, most people are very aware of the local place and era that shape their consciousness, and they often form their most important emotional relationships based on these simple parameters. Finally, preserving the ideology of national identity maintains the political aftermath of 19th- and 20th-century military clashes that have now been made acceptable by media and marketing strategies promoting national branding through soccer leagues, consumer goods, corporate logos, wealthy families, and movie stars. Organizations rally behind these mechanical and rational manifestations of national sovereignty, and a diversity of legal, political, economic, and institutional realities are further served by borders, international organizations, and the military that police their frontiers. Friction is produced when cultural consciousness works like an evolutionary force, seeping through borders, adapting best practices, imitating effective and pleasurable behaviors, learning to respond ecologically to the environment, and migrating when necessary. This emotional, unconscious, and intuitive inspiration, pushing collectivities forward on a multicultural quest, is a reality of human history, proven by our genes (Cavalli-Sforza & Cavalli, 1995). Disregarding evolutionary theory—its central tenets including fitness, adaptation, natural selection, and mutation (Darwin 1859/1996)—would seem to detract from the conceptual solidity of organizational research focused on making claims suggesting static national, organizational, or even “cultural” character.

The Art and Philosophy of a New Cultural Study

The interdependence of political, economic, and cultural activities within transient social structures has long been considered a vital feature of research paradigms in sociology (Granovetter, 1985; Polanyi, 1944), making demographics, history, institutionalized religion, and political science vital background to any study of human groups. Additional “ecofactors” compromising the master narrative of static national profiles may include climate, population size, the availability of raw materials, special beliefs, topography, competition, available resources, technology, and so on (Berry, 1976; Diamond, 1997, 2005; Georgas, Van de Vijver, & Berry, 2004; Schaffer & Riordan, 2003; Smith, 2004). Many groundbreaking publications in global studies (see Table 2) focus an analytical lens not on nation-states but rather on multifactor explanations of the forces of culture, including path dependency, generation, migration, political regime, agriculture, and educational systems to name only a few (Appadurai, 1996; Bell, 1973; Braudel, 1984; Chase-Dunn, 1998; Geertz, 1973; Wallerstein, 1974/1980). Explaining management, leadership, and organizations relying on the device of organizational, microeconomic and national universals narrows the ecological, path-dependent, and situational nature of people and groups. If (cross) cultural analysis is central to the study of organizations, it must find a way to deal with the embeddedness of aggregates emulating the cross-disciplinary challenges addressed in other social sciences and the humanities (see Table 2). This requires accepting nonquantifiable evolutionary and idiosyncratic forces operating over short and long terms. This is rarely the focus in standard methods of data collection and testing and is likely to be avoided as a trade-off for statistical validity despite groundbreaking organizational study that recognizes culture as an essential ingredient of social complexity and change (Gelfand, Erez, & Aycan, 2007; Leung et al., 2005; Peterson & Smith, 2008; Sackmann, 1991; Schaffer & Riordan, 2003; Schein, 2006; Smircich, 1983).

Table 2 provides an overview of how multidisciplinary approaches applied to cultural study have informed a diverse knowledge base over the last few decades. Each category includes a primary disciplinary and/or thematic perspective on the question of culture operating as a biological, historical, economic, political, or social motor in human development. These foundation books and articles open substantially the more narrow organizational studies’ learning paradigm that draws typically from nation, region, or organizational data. Moving from a large lens on culture offered by ecological and classic macroeconomic and sociohistorical studies in the left column (including authors such as Darwin, Marx, Wallerstein, and Braudel), I include in moving to the right spirituality, war, ethics, and philosophy (including the works of Weber, Hobsbawn, Inglehart, and Fukuyama) and finally methodological innovations that consider the snapshot, the unique, and instantaneous a valid study of the cultural, techniques that have become commonplace in anthropology, cultural studies, and sociology (including Goffman, Bourdieu, Foucault, and Habermas). These categories are not intended to be exhaustive nor are the columns impermeable to each other, and I have certainly neglected to include many important books and articles. The chart endeavors to outline interdisciplinary frameworks that can be used to enhance more functional research designs, taking inspiration from structural, interpretive, and humanist paradigms now fully integrated into social science method (Primecz, Romani, & Sackmann, 2009).

Three Proposals for Reframing, Deframing, and Unframing Culture

Now that some of the shortcomings of nation profiling, data collection, and universal dimensions as a basis for cross- cultural study have been identified, and multiperspective publications involving a more dynamic treatment of culture identified in other disciplines provides a roadmap, finding alternatives to moving the cross-cultural paradigm forward in management studies proves challenging. Based on the summary data reviewed in this article calling into question national and statistical inferences, the dilemma of using universals summarized in Table 1 and the hallmark studies proposed in Table 2, three recommendations may direct this repositioning: mitigate nation frameworks and universal dimensions, integrate a stakeholder perspective, and take a research standpoint that transcends the perspective of the managerial function and explores unique and unconventional instances of organizational exchange. In summary, a transcultural paradigm is proposed based on the observations made in the first three sections—“An Overview of Cross-Cultural Research Streams,” “A Critical Perspective on ‘Scientific’ Cultural Study,” and The Art and Philosophy of a New Cultural Study”—of this article. A new definition of the cultural subject for organizational analysis is now required, removing the all-knowing cultural expert as the primary voice, employing qualitative research designs that feature multiple narrative accounts of cultural situations, and exploiting interactive formats in which this new cultural analysis can be presented, consumed, and revised continuously.

Mitigate Nation Frameworks and Universal Dimensions

Transnational organizations draw on a culturally diverse consumer base and are served by people socialized and educated all over the world. With migration, tourism, company mergers, and deeper international economic integration, some recent studies have been evaluating the impact of so many diverse others on the presumed “norms” of organizations (Leonard & Levine, 2006). This has fostered a growing interest in managing diversity in the workplace, rather than studying any particular national model that may or may not be predominant. Paradoxically, recruitment policies in large industries that screen employees using assessment centers are still prone to creating a normative managerial and employee base accentuating certain types of behavior and values, creating a corporate culture that may actually suppress local, ethnic, or national cultures within the firm. As a contrast, small businesses, NGOs, and public administrations that do not use standardized screening measures to hire employees federate people and resources around skills and character profiles serving different corporate and cultural interests, and they are likely to form unique cultural federations polarized around values. These nonnational realities of the contemporary organization make the workplace a transitional, transnational culture, contingent on corporate culture pressures as well as individual and collective behaviors inculcated by education, political, religious, or regional affiliations.

New workplace realities have shifted the formats in which culture “other” knowledge is sought and generated (Sackmann & Phillips, 2004). A growing power base of consumers and managers with non-Western educational credentials and philosophies has been integrated into organizational, managerial, and communications processes with an ever-expanding number of cultural typologies and cultural admixing (Boyacigiller et al., 2004; K. H. Roberts & Boyacigiller, 1984). Emerging economies and new business ventures are constantly reinventing organizations, and they are joined by a growing constituency of NGOs with new business models and novel ways to manage them. The rise of multicultural virtual teams operating globally now increases exponentially the types of intercultural encounters any one person will have in a work situation. New forms of media and communication now include a greater number of interest groups communicating strategy, advertising, and consulting advice. Many are devised by self-learners without business degrees, less inclined to privilege one way of managing or prioritizing over another especially because business education, degrees, and business schools can be counted as yet other forms of cultural influence and cultural training (Witte, 2010a), and in situ entrepreneurship is likely to give equal importance to intuition and opportunity. Pressure can be felt in many advanced capitalist societies to integrate greater diversity within the corporation by deliberate campaigns to include minorities, promote more women to senior positions, and embrace ethical and environmental philosophies to prove their corporate social responsibility. Bicultural people, third-culture kids, and growing numbers of cosmopolitan individuals living, socializing, and working in multicultural environments derive from a diversity of sources their cultural lifestyles, consumer habits, spiritual beliefs, and practical behaviors. New clusters of regional multistate activity (i.e., the European Union [EU], North American Free Trade Agreement [NAFTA], Mercado Comun Sudamericano (MERCOSUR) and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations [ASEAN]) are places of both cultural convergence and divergence, effacing the centrality of any one nation or philosophy in the organization of socioeconomic life. Although nationality continues to be used as a broad indicator for identity and values, cultural behavior has come to encompass in our raised social consciousness the interdependent variables of gender, age, ethnicity, education, occupation, function (Sackmann & Phillips, 2004), kinship, social class, and personality. Taking into consideration this new social environment in which work takes place, new methods for studying culture, organizational culture, and interacting cultures are needed because it no longer makes sense to compare monocultures when people and organizations draw from so many cultural references, and static descriptions of cultural behavior are likely to become invalid quickly. Moreover, transnational corporations and the rise of virtual technology compromise the credibility of using within nation, institutional, or psychosocial measures of culture because synergy and assimilation better reflect the reality of an embedded cultural world. In addition, the world of work sometimes collapses into worlds of leisure, worlds of political and social causes, and virtual enterprises ill adapted for applying the conventional theories of organization. With multicultural researchers viewing multicultural subjects for a multicultural readership, the variables of culture as well as research paradigms and epistemologies for culture have greatly multiplied, compromising the use of common points of cultural comparison, gathering cultural data according to preset categories, or using any fixed concept of culture as an explanatory device for human activity.

Given these complexities, the format of books and articles by which organizational scholars propose understandings of culture may also prove less appropriate than media featuring fluid and adaptable communication options. The imperfect, evolutionary, and tentative conclusion requires new standards for reading and writing culture. Alternative formats might include narrative insider accounts assembled by teams of multicultural authors or participants interested in piecing together a snapshot of one instance in the evolution of cultural dynamics in the workplace that affects the outcomes of microeconomic activity. Literary accounts, film, and collective narratives would contribute to this qualitative perspective. The blog, webinar, forum, and interactive formats including podcast, twitter, and facebook offer the features of peer-based revision, stakeholder participation, constant editing, and the interaction of a wide readership.

Individuals worldwide regularly in contact with TV, radio, film, and the Internet have identities shaped by many subcultures and identity sets rather than any one national culture (Ashforth & Mael, 1989; Boyacigiller et al., 2004; Sackmann, 2003; Sackmann et al., 1997). Fiction in particular (stories, myths, books, films, and TV series) allows individuals to imagine a multitude of subjective worlds in which it is possible to live and act. These fictional models influence behavior, prompt dress codes, launch new expressions, generate trends, and set the social agenda, driving the economy and social dialogue in ways that are vastly understated. Fictional accounts of “what should be,” “what could be,” “what is,” and so on might allow surveyed participants enough psychological distance from the conformity of some work situations to think creatively and critically. The financial crises of the 1980s, the 1990s, and the first decade of the 21st century remind us more than ever that rumor, conformity, and groupthink trigger herding behavior, driving an otherwise “rational” community of risk experts to operate in extremely risk-averse ways contingent on global information and communication channels. Tapping into these areas of unconscious emotion opens the research paradigm to embrace the subjective and imaginative areas of the cultural being that are part of our human reality.

People in organizations responding to questionnaires may not always distinguish between what they say and what they actually do. The propensity to lie, to exaggerate, to subvert, to dissimulate, and to pay lip service is within the standard realm of human behavior and not taking these distractions into account compromises the degree to which reporting can be considered “truth.” Data collection methods that factor for possible sources of ambiguity, subjectivity, complexity, paradox, hypocrisy, and contradiction are admittedly fallible. Integrating idiosyncrasy and the uncertain integrity of respondents to reflect the unconscious and hidden dimension of human agency multiplies endlessly the parameters of culture for standard economic and business consumption. Accepting that these undeclared, inconvenient, and messy forms of culture spontaneously enacted in the workplace are an integral part of the human subject warrants a qualitative approach to research designs, more modest claims about what data mean, and the willingness to read data that are not always neatly packaged. Rejecting coherence and the absence of definitive cultural patterns is a prerequisite for transcending more conventional designs of a cultural analysis (Geertz, 1973; McSweeney, 2009; Sackmann et al., 1997; Sackmann & Phillips, 2004). Symbolic, subjective, implicit, imaginary, situational, chaotic, unconscious, psychodynamic, and nongeneralizable elements of human interaction are necessarily a part of cultural life (Bourdieu, 1979; Goffman, 1959; Habermas, 1984; Ouchi & Wilkins, 1985; Smircich, 1983). Management and organizational science would greatly enhance its repertory of cultural forces through the integration of ethnographic techniques that capture some of these dimensions, including worker journals, narrative methods, literary formats, unedited film, fictional representations, photos, humor, and drawings provided by insiders, participants, and stakeholders (Boje, 2001; Clifford, 1986; Czarniawska, 1999; Denning, 2004; D’Iribarne, 1997; Gabriel, 2000; Gannon & Audia, 2000; Rosen, 2000; Soin & Scheytt, 2006).

Integrate a Stakeholder Perspective

Management studies have traditionally been concerned with managers, and many studies attempt to use culture as a means of enhancing managerial competency. Prescriptive studies recommending courses of action (how to motivate, best practices of leadership, team building, and communication) are poorly disguised policy formulation of how to maintain control, and they are informed by the experiences of the powerful (even if this is not conscious or intentional). This is another straw man delivered in many popular business books imitating celebrated authors such as Tom Peters and Peter Drucker where the sole experiences of top leadership in major corporations inform the principles of management. Unobserved and unnoticed groups of workers and other participants are often faceless, and their motivation, attitudes, and particular contributions are left largely unexamined or confined to “culture” profiles that managers seek to understand. Yet, social relationships are conditional, situational, and adaptive, and they resist static description (Goffman, 1959). The set of organizational constraints into which managers and workers are embedded have been neglected in the analysis of behavior as if culture somehow escaped these institutional, contextual, social, and class forces (Bourdieu, 1984). By including the perspectives of those who do not necessarily manage organizations and the larger perspective of organizational stakeholders, including customers, suppliers, and society at large, a sharper picture of social interaction in the workplace comes into focus allowing for new spaces of meaning and a closer examination of the human, cultural, and social capital factors driving organizations (Sackmann, 2004).

Polling for data in this postcultural research environment might include rejecting preestablished questionnaires and surveys and relying on “indigenous self-representations” (Smith, 2008; Westwood, 2006) or self-reporting, which has the advantage of letting people describe their unique experience of situations. Integrating a stakeholder perspective requires interpretative methodologies used in the humanities and social sciences, including discourse analysis, narrative study, ethnographic interview, and field observation as well as the willingness and openness of managerial audiences to read such scripts (Westwood, 2006). By recognizing the subjective positions that surface in open interviews and participant observation, it is still possible to engage in research that is both qualitative and quantitative (Kwek, 2003; Soin & Scheytt, 2006; Yeganeh & Su, 2006). In addition, this transcultural research construct assumes variability within and across cultures and introduces items that are not of universal interest to the managerial professional but rather specific to individuals or groups across occupations allowing for a local cultural synergy to be declared. By making all voices audible, and tolerating the unstructured and contradictory contributions of diverse stakeholders, bicultural individuals, and multiple cultural perspectives (Sackmann, 2003), an enriched organizational picture can emerge where interdependence and variation illuminate questions about work, the economy, and the social narratives that drive institutions. This opens the possibility of examining synergy, diversity, and assimilation (Yeganeh & Su, 2006) as organizational opportunities. Mostly, a clearer picture of “the cultural” (as opposed to “Culture” and “Nation”), its corporate culture facets, and its centrality or insignificance to people, processes, and events can come to light.

Take a Research Standpoint That Transcends the Perspective of the Managerial Function and Explores Unique and Unconventional Instances of Organizational Exchange

The dimensions used in much cross-cultural analysis are concerned with power, structure, order, process, law, system, role, and rationalization, and these reflect the goal of the researcher to dominate the subject and write the master narratives of knowledge (Habermas, 1970) as well as the claims of management and organizational science that seek to understand, predict, and improve a microeconomic activity. Postmodern theory has highlighted that the motivations and assumptions of subjective researchers in the knowledge creation process are also cultural agents to analyze critically (Alvesson & Deetz, 2006; Foucault, 1970). The specter of a “colonialist” attitude inferred in some initiatives in cross-cultural study has exposed an unethical bias in the cultural and managerial gaze (Childs & Williams, 1996; Kwek, 2003; Westwood, 2001d, 2006). Feminist theory has pioneered new research paradigms seeking to remove the authoritative claims of an all-knowing agent of cultural, economic, and social knowledge to transform the way in which we frame questions of difference, egalitarianism, power, and discursive practices that nuance social realities (Calás & Smircich, 1999; Ely & Padavic, 2007; Gilligan, 1982; Harding, 1998). To resolve these epistemological conflicts, numerous interdependent “subjective” perspectives can be used (Calás & Smircich, 1999) as well as multiparadigmatic explorations of a fluid cultural object (Primecz et al., 2009). Correcting bias also entails that the perspective of the researcher as a disciplinary expert in management should be declared as just one of many subjective approaches to “knowing” about situational cultures to avoid producing cross-cultural inferences that confirm and mirror more or less the preoccupations of authors and publishers (Alvesson & Deetz, 2006; Tajfel, 1981; Trice & Beyer, 1993; Westwood, 2001, 2006). The importance of the self-disclosure of the researcher was in fact inaugurated by Hofstede himself in his preface to Culture’s Consequences (Hofstede, 1980). Focusing on new cultural instances arising in the context of cross-cultural and intercultural exchange and in particular cultural novelty in the context of global work, global communication, and global teams as the basic unit of an analysis shifts the field of study to a transcultural paradigm, accommodating the fact that much global trade is conducted primarily by oligopolies (Robinson, 2003) and that organizations not prioritizing profit objectives (NGOs, humanitarian associations, virtual chats, and public agencies) offer completely original avenues of cultural research within atypical institutions (De Maria, 2010; Eberle, 1997; Grabowski & Roberts, 1999; Lewis et al., 2003; S. Roberts, Jones, & Frühling, 2005).

Conclusion—A Postnational Analytical Model for Organizations

The aim of this analysis is not to efface the importance of previous advances in cross-cultural management studies but to position different streams of organizational study as a process within a changing social consciousness. I am not proposing either that culture or nation is entirely abandoned as filters for organizational study, although I would not be the first to point out the problematical associations made with these contested social science paradigms (Brumann et al., 1999; Kuper, 1999; McCrone, 2008; McSweeney, 2009), especially as organizations work within the regulatory framework of state economies and much data are only available in nation formats. Proposing the term postnational or postcultural has nothing truly novel either when juxtaposed with postmaterial, postmodern, and postindustrial epistemologies and the sister term postsocial appearing in the opening chapter of a collection of works on globalization (Robertson & White, 2003). I recognize my own subjective interests in advancing a postcultural cause because I fail to see how an abridged vision of culture or nation for managerial purposes promotes knowledge about human systems, and I agree with others that many cross-cultural declarations produce stereotypes that are unethical (Kwek, 2003).

I am especially eager to position the full range of the humanities in their rightful relevance to organizational study as the tools and techniques used in language, literature, art, history, and philosophy offer many creative outlets for thinking about development, management, motivation, communication, and the world of work. But the argument for a postnational cultural analysis is not ultimately a political, personal, or disciplinary preference. It is a knowledge-based petition to use the full gamut of humanities, social science, and scientific learning with all their possible and integrated methodological, theoretical, and philosophical filters to understand what influence the cultural has on making organizations what they are and what they can be.

Culture is a fugitive concept, contingent on esoteric, hybrid, and partly invisible variables. It is more prism than lens, more mutt than pedigree, and more organic than structural. It is bottom-up and top-down, historical and contemporary, and mechanical and idiosyncratic. Its study requires intuition and creativity as much as documentation and statistics. The collective sets of behaviors and values reinforcing or shaping moral, political, economic, and lifestyle choices that we have come to call culture, crafts and is crafted by, both random and predictable courses of gradual adaptation, selection, and competition in the Darwinian sense of the social analogy. The disparity between tangible and measurable “culture” (Smith et al., 2008) and the contemporary anthropological and sociological treatment of culture as a problematical, inconsistent, contradictory, and variable concept in complex and unstable social fields (Appadurai, 1996; Brumann et al.,1999; Geertz, 1973; Kuper, 1999; Smircich, 1983) has yet to gain currency in organizational research despite important advances in thinking about the methodologies and goals of cross-cultural research (Primecz et al., 2009; Sackmann, 2003).

Sociology, literature, and cultural studies have long outgrown the concept of culture as an overarching metaphor, recognizing fragmentation, locus, and resistance as part of the situational realities of group life. Maintaining the outmoded master narrative and method of culture as a dimension, construct, and core metaphor to understand organizations has pushed culture into defending its importance with the “techno-logical-scientific-strategic” forms of knowledge (universals, statistics, and nation truths), barring the subjective, finite, dynamic, and interpretative contexts of the “life world,” which are ethical, political, and communication alternatives (Habermas, 1970, 1984). A growing corpus of ethnographic, narrative, discourse analysis, critical, postmodern, postcolonial, and indigenous alternatives nuance this criticism and have pioneered an innovative variety of organizational thought experiments (Alvesson & Deetz, 2006; Alvesson & Skoldberg, 2000; Boje, 2001; Calás & Smircich, 1999; Clifford & Marcus, 1986; Czarniawska, 1999, 2004; Denning, 2004; Gabriel, 2000, 2004; Gannon, 2000; Grant, Hardy, Oswick, & Putnam, 2004; Leung & Bond, 2004; Martin, Frost, & O’Neill, 2006; Rosen, 2000; Sackmann, 1991, 2003; Schaffer & Riordan, 2003; Smith, 2008; Soin & Scheytt, 2006; Westwood, 2001, 2006).

The cultural differences distinguishing people and organizations worldwide are less straightforward than epistemologies proposed in the measurement and administrative sciences would lead us to assume. The risk of overestimating dimensions of culture and perpetuating cultural stereotypes to be consumed by audiences demanding empirical “proof” of culture trumps another possible goal of studying culture in organizations, which is to enhance prosperity, create worker satisfaction, and find viable group contracts allowing for advantageous multicultural interaction. “Culturalizing” management is a lot like racializing humanity in its imposition of presumed character categories and shared social histories. If culture is a social construction, so too is the research that claims to unravel culture. “Consumed” in the academic and corporate arena to become forms of organizational “distinction” (Bourdieu, 1984), this mechanical perspective on culture leaves other possibilities to be regarded as unempirical, politically biased, flawed, or peripheral to administrative concerns. This is implicit (even sometimes explicit) in the publication policies of many authoritative journals on cross-cultural management research.

An investigation of culture at work does not have to be the pursuit of monolithic cultural categories, universal traits, and multivariate diagnostics. It does not have to be about gender/nation/age/ethnic group but rather about the economies, institutions, and circumstances into which individuals and groups are embedded, as well as their educational and functional formatting as they align with organizational histories. It is the job of the organizational scholar to tease out these factors and see in chosen “cultural” dimensions facets of many subjective worlds. As people in organizations and organizational scholars draw their values from multiple cultural realities (Boyacigiller et al., 2004; Sackmann & Phillips, 2004) only transcultural perspectives seeking transcultural outcomes are a viable alternative. A successful postnational cultural framework might allow for studying manifestations of the cultural outside the ideological constraints of research in business making for analytical subjects that include the perspectives of understudied populations and a greater use of atypical and nonbusiness organizations including NGOs, virtual organizations, and other “side streets” of occupational interest. Accepting that these sketches of organizational life are necessarily incomplete, subjective, and transitional requires of cross-cultural readership the ability to transcend the standardized empirical demands of economics to accept that the fuzzy, messy, and surprising facets of the life world are equally parts of our economic and organizational realities. It may require rethinking the formats in which cultural investigation is shared with the academic community integrating peer generated, multiperspective, and even fictional designs including blog, tweeter, and webinar. The opportunities of this transcultural paradigm far outweigh the inconveniences because they inject infinite subjects of human possibility into the investigation, restoring to the study of the world of trade the creative, subjective, human dynamic prone to variation, mutation, and evolution.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Brendan McSweeney of Royal Holloway University of London as well as the blind reviewers at the Journal of Management Inquiry for invaluable comments on earlier versions of this article.

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

References

Alvesson

Deetz

(2006). Critical theory and postmodernism approaches to organizational studies. In Clegg

Hardy

Lawrence

Nord

(Eds.), The SAGE handbook of organization studies (2nd ed., pp. 255-283). London, England: SAGE.

Alvesson

Skoldberg

(2000). Reflexive methodology: New vistas for qualitative research. London, England: SAGE.

Anderson

(1983/1991/2006). Imagined communities. London, England: Verso.

Ang

Dyne

L. V.

(Eds.). (2008). Handbook of cultural intelligence. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe.

Appadurai

(1996). Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Arnason

(2003). Nationalism, globalization and modernity. In Robertson

White

K. E.

(Eds.), Globalization: Critical concepts in sociology (7 vols., pp. 128-152). London, England: Routledge.

Ashforth

E. E.

Mael

(1989). Social identity in the organization. Academy of Management Review, 14, 20-39.

Barkow

J. H.

Cosmides

Tooby

(Eds.). (1992). The Adapted Mind : Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture. New York: Oxford University Press.

Baskerville

(2003). Hofstede never studied culture. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 28, 1-14.

10.

Baudrillard

(1993). Symbolic Exchange and Death ( Grant

I.H.

, Trans.). London: Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

11.

Bell

(1973). The coming of post-industrial society. New York, NY: Basic Books.

12.

Berry

J. W.

(1976). Human ecology and cognitive style: Comparative studies in cultural and psychological adaptation. New York, NY: John Wiley.

13.

Boje

(2001). Narrative methods for organizational and communication research. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

14.

Bourdieu

(1979). Public opinion does not exist. In Mattelart

Siegelaub

(Eds.), Communication and class struggle (pp. 124-130). New York, NY: International General.

15.

Bourdieu

(1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

16.

Boyacigiller

N. A.

Adler

N. J.

(1991). The parochial dinosaur: Organizational science in a global context. Academy of Management Review, 16, 262-290.

17.

Boyacigiller

N. A.

Kleinberg

Phillips

M. E.

Sackmann

(2004). Conceptualizing culture: Elucidating the streams of research in international cross-cultural management. In Punnett

B. J.

Shenkar

(Eds.), Handbook of international management research (2nd ed., pp. 99-167). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

18.

Braudel

(1984). The perspective of the world. New York, NY: Harper & Row.

19.

Brumann

Abu-Lughod

Cerroni-Long

E. L.

D’Andrade

Gingrich

Hannerz

Wimmer

(1999). Writing for culture: Why a successful concept should not be discarded. Current Anthropology, 40, 1-27.

20.

Buss

D. M.

(1999). Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of Mind. London: Allyn & Bacon.

21.

Calás

M. B.

Smircich

(1999). Past postmodernism? Reflections and tentative directions. Academy of Management Review, 24, 649-671.

22.

Castells

(2000). The rise of the network society. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

23.

Cavalli-Sforza

L. L.

Cavalli

(1995). The great human diasporas: The history of diversity and evolution ( Thorne

, Trans.). Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

24.

Chase-Dunn

(1998). Global formation: Structures of the world economy. New York, NY: Blackwell.

25.

Childs

Williams

R. J. P.

(1996). An introduction to post-colonial theory. London, England: Prentice Hall.

26.

Clegg

Hardy

Lawrence

Nord

(Eds.). (2006). The SAGE handbook of organization studies (2nd ed.). London, England: SAGE.

27.

Clifford

Marcus

G. E.

(Eds.). (1986). Writing culture: The poetics and politics of ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press.

28.

Craig

C. S.

Douglas

S. P.

(2006). Beyond national culture: Implications of cultural dynamics for consumer research. International Marketing Review, 23, 322-342.

29.

Czarniawska

(1999). Writing management: Organizational theory as literary genre. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

30.

Czarniawska

(2004). Narratives in social science research. London, England: SAGE.

31.

Dansereau

Yammarino

F. J.

(2006). Is more discussion about levels of analysis really necessary? When is such discussion sufficient? Leadership Quarterly, 17, 537-552.

32.

Darwin

(1871/2004). The descent of man. New York, NY: Penguin.

33.

De Maria

(2010). The failure of the African anti-corruption effort: Lessons for managers. International Journal of Management, 27, 117-122.

34.

Denning

(2004). Telling tales. Harvard Business Review, 82, 122-127.

35.

Dermot

(2002). Forward from a critique of Hofstede’s model of national culture. Human Relations, 55, 1373-1395.

36.

Diamond

(1997). Guns, germs and steel: The fates of human societies. New York, NY: Norton.

37.

Diamond

(2005). Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed. New York, NY: Viking.

38.

D’Iribarne

(1997). The usefulness of an ethnographic approach to the international comparison of organizations. International Studies of Management & Organization, 26, 30-37.

39.

D’Iribarne

(2009). National cultures and organisations in search of a theory: An interpretive approach. International Journal of Cross Cultural Management, 9, 309-321.

40.

Dorfman

P. W.

Howell

J. P.

(1988). Dimensions of national culture and effective leadership patterns: Hofstede revisited. Advances in International Comparative Management, 3, 127-150.

41.

Eberle

(1997). Cultural contrasts in a democratic non-profit organization: The case of a Swiss reading society. In Sackmann

(Ed.), Cultural complexity in organizations (pp. 133-159). London, England: SAGE.

42.

Ely

Padavic

(2007). A feminist analysis of organizational research on sex differences. Academy of Management Review, 32, 1121-1143.

43.

Fischer

(2009). Where is culture in cross-cultural research? An outline of a multilevel research process for measuring culture as a shared meaning system. International Journal of Cross Cultural Management, 9, 25-48.

44.

Foucault

(1970). The order of things. London, England: Tavistock.

45.

Fukuyama

(1995). Trust: The social virtues and the creation of prosperity. New York, NY: Free Press.

46.

Gabriel

(2000). Storytelling in organizations: Facts, fictions and fantasies. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

47.

Gabriel

(2004). Stories in organizational research. In Cassell

Symon

(Eds.), Essential guide to qualitative methods in organizational research (pp. 114-126). London, England: SAGE.

48.

Gannon

M. J.

Audia

P. J.

(2000). The cultural metaphor: A grounded method for analyzing national cultures. In Earley

P. C.

Singh

(Eds.), Innovations in international and cross-cultural management (pp. 91-106). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

49.

Geertz

(1973). The interpretation of cultures. New York, NY: Basic Books.

50.

Gelfand

M. J.

Erez

Aycan

(2007). Cross cultural organizational behavior. Annual Review of Psychology, 58, 479-514.

51.

Gellner

(1983). Nations and nationalism: New perspectives on the past. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

52.

Georgas

Van de Vijver

F. J. R.

Berry

J. W.

(2004). The eco-cultural framework, ecosocial indices and psychological variables in cross-cultural research. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 35, 74-96.

53.

Gerhart

(2008). Cross cultural management research: Assumptions, evidence and suggested directions. International Journal of Cross Cultural Management, 8, 259-274.

54.

Ghuari

Fang

(2001). Negotiating with the Chinese: A socio-cultural analysis. Journal of World Business, 36, 303-325.

55.

Gilligan

(1982). In a different voice: Psychological theory and women’s development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

56.

Goffman

(1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. New York, NY: Doubleday.

57.

Grabowski

Roberts

K. H.

(1999). Risk mitigation in virtual organizations. Organization Science, 10, 704-721.

58.

Granovetter

(1985). Economic action and social structure: The problem of embeddedness. American Journal of Sociology, 91, 481-510.

59.

Grant

Hardy

Oswick

Putnam

(Eds.). (2004). Handbook of organizational discourse. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

60.

Habermas

(1970). Toward a rational society. London, England: Heinemann.

61.

Habermas

(1975). Legitimation crisis ( McCarthy

, Trans.). Boston, MA: Beacon.

62.

Habermas

(1984). The theory of communicative action (2 vols., Reason and the rationalization of society: Lifeworld and system). Boston, MA: Beacon.

63.

Hall

(1976/1990). Beyond culture. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. (Original work published 1976)

64.

Hamden-Turner

Trompenaars

(1997). Response to Geert Hofstede. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 21, 149-159.

65.

Hanges

P. J.

Dickson

M. W.

(2006). Agitation over aggregation: Clarifying the development of and the nature of the GLOBE scales. Leadership Quarterly, 17, 522-536.

66.

Harding

(1998). Is science multicultural? Postcolonialisms, feminisms, and epistemologies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

67.

Hegel

G. W. H.

(1956). The philosophy of history ( Sibree

, Trans.). New York, NY: Dover.

68.

Hobsbawm

(1990/1992). Nations and nationalism since 1780: Programme, myth and reality. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

69.

Hofstede

(1980). Culture’s consequences: International differences in work-related values. Beverly Hills, CA: SAGE.

70.

Hofstede

(1991). Cultures and organizations: Software of the mind. London, England: McGraw-Hill.

71.

Hofstede

(2006). What did GLOBE really measure? Researchers’ minds versus respondents minds. Journal of International Business Studies, 37, 882-896.

72.

House

R. J.

Hanges

P. J.

Javidan

Dorfman

P. W.

Gupta

(Eds.). (2004). Culture, leadership, and organizations: The GLOBE study of 62 societies. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

73.

Huntington

(1994). The clash of civilizations: Remaking of world order. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.

74.

Huntington

Harrison

L. E.

(Eds.). (2000). Culture matters: How values shape human progress. New York, NY: Basic Books.

75.

Inglehart

(1997). Modernization and postmodernization: Cultural, economic and political change in 43 societies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

76.

Inglehart

Baker

W. E.

(2000). Modernization, cultural change, and the persistence of traditional values. American Sociological Review, 65, 19-51.

77.

Inglehart

Basanez

Diez-Medrano

Halman

Luijkx

(Eds.). (2004). Human beliefs and values: A cross-cultural sourcebook based on the 1999-2002 values surveys. Mexico City, Mexico: Siglo Beintiuno Editors.

78.

Inglehart

Welzel

(2005). Modernization, culture change, and democracy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

79.

Inkeles

Levinson

D. J.

(1954). National character: The study of modal personality and sociocultural systems. In Lindsey

Aronson

(Eds.), The handbook of social psychology (2nd ed., pp. 418-506). Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

80.

Jacob

(2005). Cross cultural investigations: Emerging concepts. Journal of Organizational Change Management, 18, 514-528.

81.

Javidan

House

R. J.

(2002). Leadership and cultures around the world: Findings from GLOBE. Journal of World Business, 27, 1-89.

82.

Javidan

House

R. J.

Dorfman

P. W.

Hanges

P. J.

de Luque

M. S.

(2006). Conceptualizing and measuring cultures and their consequences: A comparative review of GLOBE’s and Hofstede’s approaches. Journal of International Business Studies, 37, 897-914.

83.

Kirkman

B. L.

Lowe

K. B.

Gibson

(2006). A quarter century of culture’s consequences: A review of empirical research incorporating Hofstede’s cultural values framework. Journal of International Business Studies, 37, 285-320.

84.

Kluckhohn

(1953). Universal categories of culture. In Kroeber

A. L.

(Ed.), Anthropology today: An encyclopedic inventory (pp. 507-523). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

85.

Kluckholn

F. R.

Strodtbeck

F. L.

(1961). Variations in value orientations. Westport, CT: Greenwood.

86.

Kuper

(1999). Culture: The anthropologists’ account. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

87.

Kwek

(2003). Decolonizing and re-presenting culture’s consequences: A postcolonial critique of cross-cultural studies in management. In Prasad

(Ed.), Postcolonial theory and organizational analysis: A critical engagement (pp.47-74). New York, NY: Palgrave.

88.

Landes

(1998). The wealth and poverty of nations: Why some are so rich and some so poor. New York, NY: Norton.

89.

Leonard

J. S.

Levine

D. I.

(2006). The effects of diversity on turnover: A large case study. Industrial and Labor Relations Review, 59, 547-572.

90.

Leung

(2008). Methods and measurements in cross-cultural management. In Smith

Peterson

Thomas

(Eds.), The handbook of cross-cultural manage research (pp. 59-73). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

91.

Leung

Bhagat

R. S.

Buchan

N. R.

Erez

Gibson

(2005). Culture and international business: Recent advances and their implications for future research. Journal of International Business Studies, 36, 357-378.

92.

Leung

Bond

M. H.

(2004). Social axioms: A model for social beliefs in multi-cultural perspective. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 36, 119-197.

93.

Lewis

Bebbington

A. J.

Batterbury

S. P. J.

Shah

Olson

Siddiqi

M. S.

Duvall

(2003). Practice, power and meaning: Frameworks for studying organizational culture in multi-agency rural development projects. Journal of International Development, 15, 541-557.

94.

Lingui

Koveos

(2008). A framework to update Hofstede’s cultural value indices: Economic dynamics and institutional stability. Journal of International Business Studies, 39, 1045-1063.

95.

Martin

Frost

O’Neill

(2006). Organizational culture: Beyond struggles for intellectual dominance. In Clegg

Hardy

Lawrence

Nord

(Eds.), The sage handbook of organization studies (2nd ed., pp. 255-283). London, England: SAGE.

96.

McCrone

(2008). Culture and nation. In Bennett

Frow

(Eds.), The Sage handbook of cultural analysis (pp. 317-337). London, England: SAGE.

97.

McNeill

(1986). Polyethnicity and national unity in world history. Toronto, Ontario, Canada: University of Toronto Press.

98.

McSweeney

(2002). Hofstede’s model of national cultural differences and their consequences: A triumph of faith—A failure of analysis. Human Relations, 55, 89-118.

99.

McSweeney

(2009). Dynamic diversity: Variety and variation within countries. Organization Studies, 30, 933-958.

100.

Minkov

Hofstede

(2011). The evolution of Hofstede’s doctrine. Cross-cultural management: An International Journal, 18, 10-20.

101.

Moussetes

(2007). The absence of women’s voices in Hofstede’s Cultural Consequences: A postcolonial reading. Women in Management Review, 22, 443-455.

102.

Norris

Inglehart

(2004). Sacred and secular: Religion and politics worldwide. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

103.

Ohmae

(1995). The end of the nation state and the rise of regional economies. Cambridge, MA: Free Press.

104.

Orr

L. M.

Hauser

W. J.

(2008). A re-inquiry of Hofstede’s cultural dimensions: A call for 21st century cross-cultural research. Marketing Management Journal, 18, 1-19.

105.

Osland

J. S.

Bird

(2000). Beyond sophisticated stereotyping: Cultural sensemaking in context. Academy of Management Executive, 14, 65-79.

106.

Ouchi

W. G.

Wilkins

A. L.

(1985). Organizational culture. Annual Review of Sociology, 11, 457-483.

107.

Peterson

Smith

(2008). Social structures and processes in cross-cultural management. In Smith

Peterson

Thomas

(Eds.), The handbook of cross-cultural management research (pp. 35-58). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

108.

Pieterse

J. N.

(1995). Globalization as hybridization. In Featherstone

Lash

Robertson

(Eds.), Global modernities (pp. 45-68). London, England: SAGE.

109.

Polanyi

(1944). The great transformation. New York, NY: Rhinehart & Company.

110.

Porter

M. E.

(1990). The competitive advantage of nations. New York, NY: Free Press.

111.

Prentice

D. A.

Miller

D. T.

(2006). Essentializing differences between women and men. Psychological Science, 17, 129-135.

112.

Primecz

Romani

Sackmann

S. A.

(2009). Cross-cultural management research: Contributions from various paradigms. International Journal of Cross Cultural Management, 9, 267-321.

113.

Putnam

R. D.

Leonardi

Nanetti

(1992). Making democracy work: Civic traditions in modern Italy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

114.

Roberts

K. H.

Boyacigiller

N. A.

(1984). Cross national organizational research: The grasp of the blind men. In Straw

B. M.

Cummings

L. L.

(Eds.), Research in organizational behavior (pp. 423-475). Greenwich, CT: JAI.

115.

Roberts

Jones

Frühling

(2005). NGO’s and the globalization of managerialism: A research framework. World Development, 33, 1845-1864.

116.

Robertson

White

K. E.

(2003). Globalization: Critical concepts in sociology (7 vols.). London, England: Routledge.

117.

Robinson

W. I.

(2003). Beyond nation-state paradigms: Globalization, sociology and the challenge of transnational studies. In Robertson

White

K. E.

(Eds.), Globalization: critical concepts in sociology (7 vols., pp. 189-221). London, England: Routledge.

118.

Rosen

(2000). Chapters in organizational ethnography. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Harwood.

119.

Sackmann

S. A.

(1991). Cultural knowledge in organizations: Exploring the collective mind. Newbury Park, CA: SAGE.

120.

Sackmann

S. A.

(2003). Cultural complexity as a challenge in the management of global companies. In Foundation

(Ed.), Corporate cultures in global interaction. Liz Mohn—A cultural forum (pp. 58-81). Gütersloh, Germany: Bertelsmann.

121.

Sackmann

S. A.

Phillips

M. E.

(2004). Contextual influences on culture research: Shifting assumptions for new workplace realities. International Journal of Cross-Cultural Management, 4, 370-390.

122.

Sackmann

S. A.

Phillips

M. E.

Kleinberg

M. J.

Boyacigiller

(1997). Single and multiple cultures in international cross-cultural management research: Overview. In Sackmann

S. A.

(Ed.), Cultural complexity in organizations: Inherent contrasts and contradictions (pp. 14-49). Newbury Park, CA: SAGE.

123.

Schaffer

B. S.

Riordan

C. R.

(2003). A review of cross-cultural methodologies for organizational research: A best-practices approach. Organisational Research Methods, 6, 169-215.

124.

Schein

(2006). Culture: The missing concept in organization studies. Administrative Science Quarterly, 41, 229-240.

125.

Schwartz

S. H.

(1992). Universals in the content and structure of values: Theoretical advances and empirical tests in 20 countries. In Zanna

(Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (pp. 1-65). New York, NY: Academic Press.

126.

Schwartz

S. H.

(1994). Beyond individualism and collectivism: New cultural dimensions of values. In Kim

Triandis

H. C.

Kagitcibasi

Choi

S.-C.

Yoon

(Eds.), Individualism and collectivism: Theory, method and application (pp. 85-119). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

127.

Schwartz

S. H.

(2007). Value orientations: measurement, antecedents and consequences across nations. In Jowell

Roberts

Fitzgerald

Eva

(Eds.), Measuring attitudes cross-nationally: Lessons from the European social survey (pp. 161-193). London, England: SAGE.

128.

Smircich

(1983). Concepts of culture in organizational analysis. Administrative Science Quarterly, 28, 339-358.

129.

Smith

P. B.

(2004). Nations, cultures and individuals: New perspectives on old dilemmas. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 35, 6-12.

130.

Smith

P. B.

(2008). Indigenous aspects of management. In Smith

Peterson

Thomas

(Eds.), The handbook of cross-cultural management research (pp. 319-332). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

131.

Smith

P. B.

Peterson

Thomas

(Eds.). (2008). The handbook of cross-cultural management research. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

132.

Soin

Scheytt

(2006). Making the case for narrative methods in cross-cultural organizational research. Organizational Research Methods, 9, 55-77.

133.

Tajfel

(1981). Human groups and social categories: Studies in social psychology. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

134.

Triandis

H. C.

(1995). Individualism and collectivism. Boulder, CO: Westview.

135.

Trice

H. M.

Beyer

J. M.

(1993). The cultures of work organizations. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

136.

Trompenaars

(1993). Riding the waves of culture. London, England: Economist Books.

137.

Van Vugt

De Cremer

Janssen

D. P.

(2007). Gender Differences in Cooperation and Competition: The Male Warrior Hypothesis. Psychological Science, 18(1), 19-23.

138.

Van de Vijver

F. J. R.

van Hemert

D. A.

Poortinga

Y. H.

(Eds.). (2008). Individuals and cultures in multilevel analysis. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

139.

Wallerstein

(1974). The modern world system I. New York, NY: Academic Press.

140.

Wallerstein

(1980). The modern world system II. London, England: Academic Press.

141.

Weber

(1958). The protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. New York, NY: Charles Scribner.

142.

Weber

(1922, 1968). Economy and society. Berkeley: University of California Press.

143.

Westwood

(2001). Appropriating the other in the discourses of comparative management. In Westwood

Linstead

(Eds.), The language of organization (pp. 241-282). London, England: SAGE.

144.

Westwood

(2006). International business and management studies as an orientalist discourse: A postcolonial critique. Critical Perspectives on International Business, 2, 91-113.

145.

Wilkinson

(1990). Japan versus the west: Image and reality. London, England: Penguin.

146.

Witte

(2010a). The global awareness curriculum in international business programs: A critical perspective. Journal of Teaching in International Business, 21, 101-131.

147.

Witte

(2010b). Past and future culture. South Carolina, Charleston: Booksurge.

148.

Yeganeh

(2006). Conceptual foundations of cultural management research. International Journal of Cross Cultural Management, 6, 361-376.