Questioning paradigmatic distinctions in cross-cultural management research: On the “duality” of culture

Introduction

Building on work done in relation to the social sciences in general, but also intercultural communication and organisational science (Burrell and Morgan, 1979; Deetz, 1996; Fischer et al., 2005), cross-cultural management (CCM) scholars have previously identified, with a degree of consensus, several major “paradigms” which seem to have guided studies in the field over the past few decades (Barmeyer and Mayer, 2020; Mahadevan et al., 2011; Primecz et al., 2009; Romani, Barmeyer, et al., 2018a; Romani and Claes, 2014). As outlined in the introduction to this special issue, there is some debate in the field as to whether these “paradigms” are truly mutually exclusive, as the term from Thomas Kuhn (1970) would suggest, or whether they can in fact be used in a complementary fashion to shed light on different aspects of the object of study, as several scholars suggest (Grosskopf and Barmeyer, 2021; Primecz et al., 2023; Romani et al., 2011). In the words of Stanley Deetz: “Paradigms are incommensurable as they strive to maintain coherence, but are commensurable to the extent that they encounter the ultimately indeterminant outside world.” (1996: 193).

The article is based on the consideration of four major “paradigms”, as outlined in the 2018 article by Laurence Romani, Christoph Barmeyer, Henriett Primecz and Katharina Pilhofer: positivist, interpretivist, postmodern and critical. Even if subsequent publications from these authors have tended to downplay the importance of the postmodern perspective as a separate paradigm (Grosskopf and Barmeyer, 2021; Primecz, 2020; Primecz et al., 2023), I will argue that the “discursive turn” which it represents is of fundamental importance, building on the pioneering work by Joanne Martin, who applied it to organisational culture as the third of her three perspectives (Martin, 1992).

After illustrating them heuristically, in the context of a particular type of organisation, the “European University Alliance”, this article discusses to what extent these “paradigms” or “perspectives” ¹ can indeed be used in a complementary way to analyse organisational practices. A key argument in the article is that these apparently contrasting “paradigms” in fact function more like complementary “perspectives”, when these terms are carefully analysed in light of the relevant scientific literature (part 2, infra). The article further suggests that, given more recent developments in the field, studies insisting on multiple “paradigms” sometimes artificially dissociate and underscore the differences between them, rather than the common ground, possibly overstating their allegedly “paradigmatic” nature. By proposing a key to articulate them within a single conceptual framework (part 3, infra), it further suggests and that the different perspectives might actually be seen to function together within a single paradigm, in the light of Kuhn’s (1970) discussion of this term. The aim of this argument is to help reduce tensions and sometimes confusion between approaches. Clarifying their apparent underlying assumptions, also facilitates the emergence of competing, non-Western theories, by making it easier to situate these in relation to the field.

Finally, this article is written from outside – and aims beyond – the strictly disciplinary boundaries of CCM. As a scholar working principally in the field of Communication Studies, I bring a particular disciplinary angle to the questions discussed, insofar as I consider culture as a process inextricably linked to communication (Hall, 1959). In their interactions, individuals draw on and actualise cultural knowledge from various sources: national cultures, but also organisational cultures, professional cultures, cultures linked to various territorialized (regional, local) or non-territorialized groups (interest groups, ethnic groups, etc.). In this sense, “intercultural” does not simply mean “international”, and “cross-cultural management”, as I see it, relates to managing various cultures and identities within organisational settings (Fitzpatrick, 2017; Frame and Sommier, 2020). In the context of a “multi-paradigm” approach, cross-disciplinary discussion can thus help question or make explicit some of the underlying presuppositions associated with both “paradigmatic” and disciplinary biases.

Applying a “multi-paradigm” approach: the example of a European University Alliance

In order to illustrate and discuss the various “paradigms” identified in the CCM literature and in intercultural communication more widely, I have taken the example of the European University Alliance “FORTHEM”, as a terrain with which I am familiar. ² Set up in 2019 and funded by the European Commission, the FORTHEM Alliance currently brings together nine universities in different European countries, in order to develop in-depth cooperation across all areas of higher education activity (education, research and innovation, outreach…) and, in fine, to involve at least 50% of its stakeholder community in collaborative physical, blended or online actions. At the time of writing, in July 2023, 50 such European University Alliances have been funded, across the European continent. They represent a particular type of organisation, some of which have adopted a legal status (e.g. as an association: this is not currently the case of FORTHEM), and all of which bring together various stakeholder groups, including students, academics and non-teaching staff, as well as unfinanced “associated partners”. In the following discussion, the European University Alliance will be used to illustrate ways in which different “paradigms” can help shed light on different aspects of an organisation. The purpose of this illustration is purely to clarify the implications of the theoretical discussion in a way which may be more accessible to the reader, since the respective “paradigms” are applied to a practical case. It should be noted, however, that the article does not draw on an empirical study per se, and that the illustrations simply reflect what might be considered plausible lines of enquiry, in the light of what each “paradigm” tends to emphasise. The main objective of the article, in the context of the special issue, is thus to advance scholarly debate surrounding “multi-paradigm” research, through a theoretical discussion deconstructing the supposed “boundaries” between “paradigms” or perspectives, by placing them within a coherent conceptual framework.

Paradigm interplay, reconciling discourses, swapping hats or changing perspectives?

The preceding discussion of the four “paradigms” identified within CCM has sought to illustrate their potential complementarity when applied to a concrete example, while discussing their alleged incommensurability. Already at this stage, we can note the importance of discourse and communication in at least the three non-positivist approaches, which reject the idea of regularities in the social world that can be established objectively by impartial outside observers. The idea that culture is an emergent social construct, negotiated intersubjectively and anchored in (shifting) structures and situations, fraught with power issues, seems to be shared, to differing degrees and with different emphasis, by the interpretive, postmodern and critical perspectives. Even if the positivist / functionalist perspective logically supposes stable regularities in behaviour and representations which can be identified empirically, these regularities are invariably seen to be created and maintained through discourse and social interaction (i.e. socially constructed), rather than innate. ⁶ On the basis of this reasoning, we will now look more closely at the supposed “paradigmatic” nature of these different approaches, in order to then shed light on the discussion of “multi-paradigm” research, as it is presented in this special issue.

Most texts dealing with paradigms consider that individual scholars work most of the time within one paradigm, and that it is important for them to identify this explicitly in their work. Personally, I tend to adopt an interpretive stance, interested in sensemaking during interactions, not in the pre-modern sense (Deetz, 1996; Romani, Mahadevan, et al., 2018b), but with a resolutely postmodern approach to the use of multiple identity resources, which are enacted through discourse. Individuals’ communication is shaped by projected shared and negotiated norms and representations (i.e. what they believe that others know and think), but at the same time, they may instrumentalise culture when making identity claims for themselves and others. Although this might be seen by some as a “multi-paradigm” approach, I do not have the impression that I am working across two different paradigms. Although I strongly avoid positivist approaches to cultures in terms of methodology and research design, I fully recognise that individuals that such representations of culture are widespread in the population, and as such that people very commonly relate to each other as if cultures were solid and somewhat deterministic of behaviour (Holliday, 2015). I will further argue that supposed common references along the lines of social groups are a prerequisite for interpersonal communication, and that cultural regularities can indeed be observed statistically, even if this would tend to mask more complex social mechanisms also at work on the microsocial level (infra).

According to a recent article by Henriett Primecz and colleagues, presenting what they see as the merits of a “multi-paradigm” approach, “these paradigmatic distinctions and illustrations are used as sensitizing devices.” (Primecz et al., 2023: 8). From a pedagogical or even a research perspective, the heuristic division of the field into “paradigms” can indeed help to rationalise and make sense of different approaches, to give the field an appearance of structure, of maturity, and an illusion of consensus within “sensitizing” “paradigms” which can be simplified and presented to students and clients. I myself have used this distinction both in teaching and in recent publications, for these very reasons. Yet, at the same time, Sina Grosskopf and Christoph Barmeyer warn that scholars should “take care that multi-paradigm studies do not become a standard of mixing paradigms without reflection.” (Grosskopf and Barmeyer, 2021: 16). Burrell and Morgan go further and state that paradigms are “mutually exclusive, in the sense that one cannot operate in more than one paradigm at any given point in time, since in accepting the assumptions of one, we defy the assumptions of all the others.” (Burrell and Morgan, 1979: 25). In order to establish some limits, we need to pay attention to how we define and use what we consider to be “paradigms”, and how and whether they can be used profitably to provide alternative viewpoints on a given object of study.

In his seminal text, first published in 1962, Kuhn defines paradigms as “universally recognized scientific achievements that for a time provide model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners.” (Kuhn, 1970: vii). ⁷ He further states two conditions for paradigms to be accepted: that they are “sufficiently unprecedented to attract an enduring group of adherents away from competing modes of scientific activity” and “sufficiently open-ended to leave all sorts of problems for the redefined group of practitioners to resolve” (Kuhn, 1970: 10). Paradigms are to be explored, tested, challenged. “In a science […], a paradigm is rarely an object for replication. Instead, like an accepted judicial decision in the common law, it is an object for further articulation and specification under new or more stringent conditions.” (Kuhn, 1970: 23). Paradigms are not composed of and do not constitute rules. According to Kuhn, scientists can “agree in their identification of a paradigm without agreeing on, or even attempting to produce, a full interpretation or rationalization of it. Lack of a standard interpretation or of an agreed reduction to rules will not prevent a paradigm from guiding research.” (Kuhn, 1970: 44). Finally, paradigms are, if not exclusive, at least significantly different, so as to be contradictory in important ways. Kuhn was writing mainly about conflicting theories in the natural sciences, such as the shift in astronomy from geocentrism to heliocentrism, or Newton’s Laws of Motion and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. When it comes to the social sciences and humanities, such opposition was indeed encountered in the twentieth century between Parsonian functionalism and emerging social constructionist thought, as exemplified in symbolic interactionism or ethnomethodology. More recently, Bruno Latour’s rejection of previous paradigms of social action when introducing Actor-Network Theory (Latour, 2005) might signal a similar paradigm shift. However, at least when it comes to the three social constructionist paradigms discussed in the previous section, I would argue that we do not in fact appear to be dealing with strictly contrasting and “mutually exclusive” sets of principles of social behaviour.

Moreover, given that in what Kuhn describes as “normal science”, paradigms, when sufficiently challenged, are rejected, we can legitimately wonder how the “functionalist” and “interpretive” paradigms have apparently been able to co-exist and encounter success in the fields of intercultural communication and CCM for over a quarter of a century, with little sign of decisive evolution towards one or the other from the majority of scholars, and even if given individuals may identify strongly with one or another. In the words of Hatch and Yanow, cited by Primecz, “The fundamental assumption of interpretive research differs from functionalist insofar as the former does not assume that social science follows the same rules as natural sciences” (Primecz et al., 2023: 6). However, researchers identified with the functionalist paradigm do not appear to assume that national cultures have an objective existence in the same way that gravitational forces do, or different states of matter, for example. From the perspective of social science, this would be a form of radical positivism consisting in (i) attributing individuals to national cultural groups in an absolute way, and/or (ii) assuming that said national cultures, however they are attributed, determine individual behaviours. Indeed, neither of these positions is assumed by any of the major proponents of functionalism, and they have been clearly deconstructed by the interpretivists, the postmodernists and most critical theorists.

When, in the development of a natural science, an individual or group first produces a synthesis able to attract most of the next generation’s practitioners, the older schools gradually disappear. In part their disappearance is caused by their members’ conversion to the new paradigm. But there are always some men who cling to one or another of the older views, and they are simply read out of the profession, which thereafter ignores their work. (Kuhn, 1970: p. 18-19)

How, then, can we explain the continued success of functionalist approaches to CCM? It may have felt to many that they had been superseded from the 1990s onwards by interpretivist or postmodern perspectives. But, in practice, they showed themselves to be particularly resilient to criticism and alternative approaches. Their longevity can be explained in various ways: the simplicity and intuitive character of the models, grounded in social stereotypes; their existing notoriety and popularity, notably among trainers and businesspeople; and finally, the business model driving them, particularly effective in promoting them as simple fixes to complex problems through short training sessions. However, at best, these features should buy an outdated paradigm a short reprieve, once it has been rejected by the scientific community. Again, this has not clearly happened. To understand why, we should note that, from a social constructionist perspective, by trying to single out national (or organisational, etc.) cultures, this type of approach reflects the way the layman tends to think about the social world, divided into categories which we simplify to make sense of them through social representations (Abric, 2001; Moscovici, 2000). It mirrors the way that the majority of us use macro-level cultural knowledge in our interactions: we act towards one another based on approximations of how we believe that others will think and (re)act, given the various identities we attribute to them, including national identities. Particular models in the functionalist “paradigm” may still be criticised in terms of the methodology they employ (McSweeney, 2013) or because they seem fixed in time, yet the idea that social actors operate, in their interactions, by projecting supposedly common references onto particular social groups, appears to be a valid one, even from a social constructionist standpoint. The end result can thus be reconciled with interpretive or postmodern perspectives, on condition that this “paradigm” is seen not as the deterministic study of people’s behaviour, but as the study of their representations of national cultures and alterity. Where there is, however, still room for debate between a truly functionalist scholar and a non-functionalist, is when it comes to determining whether these regularities actually “exist” independently of individuals and in some kind of stable form, or whether they are simply projected by individuals onto different groups, and as such are partly unique to each individual. The ontological stance thus adopted (opinion about the “nature” of culture) has obvious repercussions on the epistemological posture of the researcher (how we can apprehend culture) and on the methods used to examine and document the said regularities.

In his reassessment of Burrell and Morgan’s paradigms, Deetz (1996) claims that functionalist models as applied to social science lack objectivity (Deetz in fact recuses the subjectivity-objectivity debate as self-legitimising/stigmatising and misleading). ⁸ Moreover, he sees them as a manifestation of an “elite / a priori” posture towards knowledge (vs a “local / emergent” one), which is also social constructionist in character, insofar as it defines social “facts” through a particular conventionally-produced methodological framework. He comments that:

Conventional practice and methodological determinism have in most cases replaced any strong allegiance to the positivist philosophy of science that grounds many of the methods and assumptions. The “objects” constructed by the practices of this science are given qualities of constancy and permanence as if given specific attributes by nature. The combination of a priori conceptions and focus on consensus leads the artifacts of these practices to be described as facts. (Deetz, 1996: 201)

Arguably, pure positivism is indeed exceptionally rare among scholars employing such approaches. When discussing the impact of national cultures or their “dimensions”, they invariably use hedging techniques and disclaimers to avoid accusations of determinism, explaining for example that the “ecological fallacy” prevents any causal link between the statistical averages they calculate from declared responses to questionnaires, and the actual behaviour of individuals in given situations (Hofstede, 1991: 112).

In the light of this discussion, we can now return to the question of whether the different perspectives identified in the previous section indeed constitute different “paradigms”. Doubts about this have been expressed by leading scholars in the field of CCM, including Terence Jackson who suggests, in an editorial in this journal, that “there is much overlap […] between the three paradigms that makes me question the usefulness of such paradigmatic distinctions.” (Jackson, 2021: 176). Referring to the work of Jurgen Bolten, Dominic Busch makes similar arguments in another article of this special issue (Busch, 2024: 4). Already in 1996, Deetz refutes that the four perspectives or “discourses” that he himself discusses (functionalist, interpretative, dialogic and critical) should be called paradigms.

Calling these discourses paradigms would be a mistake for several reasons. First, each of these four discourses, which are provisionally held apart for viewing, are filled with internal conflict and strife - including theory debates, moments of incommensurability, dilettantes and tyrants. Second, the edges are not demarcated. Most researchers and teachers do not cluster around a prototype of each but gather at the crossroads, mix metaphors, borrow lines from other discourses, and dodg [e] criticism by co-optation. Often, practicing researchers happily move from one discourse to another without accounting for their own location. They operate like other organizational members borrowing on discourses that suit their immediate purposes and fashions of the moment. (Deetz, 1996: 199)

Applying this same reasoning to the (similar) perspectives presented above and, moreover, in the light of the preceding discussion of the considerable overlaps between perspectives, I would suggest that it is not appropriate to distinguish them as separate “paradigms”, in the sense that Kuhn has given to this concept.

I would, however, argue that there was something resembling a paradigmatic shift or “scientific revolution” in the Kuhnian sense ⁹ between early functionalist approaches in the 1970s and 1980s, which were most probably closer to truly positivist understandings of culture, and which were strongly criticised from the 1990s, before giving way to alternative, assumedly social-constructionist approaches in the early 2000s. These were seen as something new and somehow incommensurable with the positivist stance, leading a certain number of scholars to reject functionalism and turn their attention to a different aspect of interculturality. Rather than focusing solely on national differences and misunderstandings, they started to look at the ways in which people sought to make sense of and for one another in their interpersonal encounters, on the microsocial level. This led to the emergence of the interpretivist perspective, and the idea that people do things with cultures (and identities) rather than being simply driven by them, which in turn led to work on the instrumentalization of cultures and the growing importance of postmodern and critical voices. Yet I would again argue that these are perspectives rather than paradigms, given the lack of major theoretical variation between the three, the (current) lack of a common theoretical canon for each, and even the lack of agreement, in many cases, about which studies clearly belong within which perspective (supra). Furthermore, in light of the questions raised as to the truly “positivist” nature of the functionalist perspective, I will argue in the next section that even between this and the three social constructionist perspectives, there is not a truly “paradigmatic” distinction, and that the different perspectives can in fact be reconciled.

We should also note that several factors can explain the continued (mis)use of the label “paradigm” by scholars in the field. These include its heuristic potential, and the fact that having multiple paradigms might seem to add to the field’s legitimacy, suggesting that it has thus reached some kind of academic maturity. A strategic alignment with “hard” science coming from sociology (of organisations) can be seen to strengthen the position of threatened functionalist scholars, while also legitimizing proponents of other approaches, by institutionalising their own “paradigms” (cf. Deetz, 1996: 191). The assumption of incommensurability between paradigms can also contribute to the impression that there is more difference between them than would maybe otherwise be perceived (Busch, 2024: 6). However, if we do recognise that the incommensurability of these supposed “paradigms” is in most cases overstated, it appears all the more justified to call for “multi-paradigm” or “cross-paradigm” approaches, as in this special issue, on condition that we talk about diverging “perspectives” with cross-cutting complementarities, rather than separate “paradigms” as such.

Towards a unified paradigm for cross-cultural management?

If we ultimately reject the existence of different paradigms in the fields of intercultural communication and CCM, the question remains as to whether we actually work within a “paradigm” at all. The lack of consensus around a single approach, but also the lack of clarifying differences between perspectives, might seem to be reminiscent of what Kuhn calls “pre-paradigmatic” theories. “The pre-paradigm period, in particular, is regularly marked by frequent and deep debates over legitimate methods, problems, and standards of solution, though these serve rather to define schools than to produce agreement.” (Kuhn, 1970: p.47-8). However, we also need to situate this reflection in the historical development of the field. From a diachronic perspective, we can see that approaches have evolved over time, and in reference to one another, without a single one imposing itself at the current moment. Moreover, the paradigms of sociology, applied to organisational science, as proposed by Burrell and Morgan (1979) correspond to a formalised snapshot of that field at a given time in its intellectual history. While the positions they identified can still be defended theoretically, they seem much more adapted to intellectual debate in the 1970s than to today (cf. infra). Deetz already attempted to modernise them, by shifting the anchoring perspective from functionalism to postmodernism / dialogism in his 1996 article. Not only do the functionalist precepts seem strongly overstated in relation to today’s contemporary approaches to cultures on the macro-social level, but we should take into account subsequent work, notably Pierre Bourdieu’s Practice Theory (2000), Anthony Giddens’ Structuration Theory (1984), Zygmunt Bauman’s Theory of Liquid Modernity (1999, 2011) or Dominique Desjeux’s Scales of Observation of Culture (2002), among others, which have gone a long way to show how these differing perspectives might in fact be articulated within a single theoretical framework.

As discussed and illustrated by the citation from Bauman in the discussion of the interpretive paradigm (supra), these theories focus on the apparent “duality” of culture, which both structures communication and is structured by it, to echo Giddens’ theory of structuration (1984), or even Edward Hall’s initial intuition in The Silent Language (Hall, 1959). ¹⁰ Thus cultures “exist” as socially-constructed, abstract sets of knowledge, behaviour, attitudes, values etc., insofar as we project these as anticipated traits onto particular social groups, and use them, to some extent, in our social interactions, to make ourselves predictable to others and to predict their behaviour, thoughts and reactions (culture structuring communication). Without these more-or-less shared representations of how people act depending on the social categories we assign to them, communication would be much more symbolically hazardous (Blumer, 1969; Goffman, 1967) and anxiety-prone (Gudykunst and Nishida, 2001). It should be underlined that these cultures rely on social convention, in much the same way as language does: the sign is arbitrary, but convention gives it meaning. The languages we speak do not determine what we say or how we say it: as social actors (and within the limits of our perceived autonomy in given social settings) we choose and give form to our utterances, confident that they will be meaningful for others whom we have established as being (more or less) competent in the same linguistic code. In the same way as we learn languages, our socialisation in different groups (family, region, nation, but also school, university, company, sports team, fan-group, etc.) brings us cultural knowledge, which we consider to be more-or-less common with others socialised in the same groups. This knowledge does not determine the way we behave, any more than our knowledge of language determines what we say. However, it gives us a more-or-less common framework of codes, norms, context-bound behaviours and so on, to which we can refer when choosing what to (not) do or say, in the hope that other people will understand what we do or say in a not-too-different way, compared to what we intended. The commonality of cultures is thus a presupposition of social behaviour – we would not know how to act if we did not think that people shared at least some common codes with us, be they national, organisational, generational, etc. We suppose this macro-level regularity in our everyday behaviour and would be literally lost without it. This is what makes the functionalist approach so intuitively seductive: we need to believe in shared cultures, even if we recognise that culture alone does not determine behaviour, that people all behave differently, in different contexts, and so on.

This is where the second part of the duality of culture comes in. Human social behaviour is fundamentally about creating meaning, as underlined by pragmatists and symbolic interactionists from George Herbert Mead (1934) and Goffman (1967) to Herbert Blumer (1969), Sheldon Stryker (1980) and Peter Burke (Burke et al., 2003). People use cultures to create meaning, to behave in a way which makes sense for people, to try and give a positive image of themselves, or whatever, not by simply reproducing cultural rules or norms – we are not programmed like robots – but by playing on these rules or norms. In some instances, I may want to be conformist, and show that I master the codes for a particular role I am playing (a compassionate manager, a decisive leader, etc.), and in others, I may decide to “play things differently”, to rebel, to reject authority, to be creative, inventive, individual. And these behaviours in turn shape the way in people’s expectations of me, as a representative of such and such a culture, evolve (Frame, 2013). Thus, culture exists on the macro-level as a source of regularities (culture shaping communication), but it also evolves on the micro-level through everyday interactions (communication shaping culture). In the same way that we can invent new words or jargon within a language community or social group, it is through our practice that we maintain, challenge or update our cultural references, associated with particular groups.

This approach to the “duality” of culture allows us to reconcile interpretive perspectives, centred on micro-level sensemaking mobilising multiple cultures and identities, with the functionalist focus on macro-level regularities, by reframing these as social constructs and seeing them as “fuzzy” (Spencer-Oatey, 2000), i.e. constantly evolving and not fully consensual within a given population. Postmodern perspectives give insights into how macro-level metanarratives can be reemployed and naturalised by social actors in order to make particular identity claims, often in line with their conscious or unconscious situated interactional objectives (Ybema and Byun, 2009). Critical perspectives go further in trying to make explicit the power dynamics in given social situations or organisational settings. In the same way that Martin (1992) claims that we need to alternate our perspectives on organisational culture to get a better all-round picture (supra), Desjeux (2002) claims that we need to try to take into account these different levels of analysis to have a more complete understanding of cultural phenomena.

I thus contend that the principle of the “duality of culture” can act as a key allowing us to reunite the four major perspectives within one theoretical framework (Frame, 2023), paving the way for the potential recognition of a single dominant paradigm linking work done in the fields of CCM and intercultural communication more generally. This would arguably help dispel some of the tensions currently surrounding the functionalist perspective, both by removing it from a position of clear opposition with the other perspectives, and in making explicit its social constructionist underpinnings, while reaffirming the legitimacy of the intuitive macro-level focus on perceived cultural regularities. The global paradigm would thus approach cross-cultural management through the lens of interpersonal communication and discourse-based social constructionism, as applied to the digital age (Couldry and Hepp, 2016). It would facilitate dialogue between perspectives, as well as multi-perspective studies in the field, carried out in the framework of “normal science”, in Kuhn’s terminology, to strengthen, build, question and challenge the way that the paradigm appears to play out in applied studies.

The success of a paradigm […] is at the start largely a promise of success discoverable in selected and still incomplete examples. Normal science consists in the actualization of that promise, an actualization achieved by extending the knowledge of those facts that the paradigm displays as particularly revealing, by increasing the extent of the match between those facts and the paradigm’s predictions, and by further articulation of the paradigm itself. (Kuhn, 1970: p.23-4)

Such a global paradigm would need to be developed by scholars working in the fields of CCM and intercultural communication, by trying to take into account the ways in which not just one but various perspectives might shed further light onto their object of study (Frame, 2022). The “duality of culture” would be the key to think about how cultures and identities are involved in sensemaking, both on the level of anticipated and projected (often stereotyped) cultural norms and on the level of negotiated, contextualised, emergent meanings. It is my contention that such a multi-perspective approach, in line with calls for “multi-paradigm” or “cross-paradigm” research, has the potential to renew scholarship in a heuristically productive way, while making it easier for researchers to relate their work to that of their colleagues traditionally seen to be adopting other perspectives.

To return to the example of the European University Alliance introduced in the first section (supra), the reader might wonder how we could analyse it from this broader perspective. All the different questions and viewpoints outlined in the first section remain valid: in practical terms, scholars are free pursue those which appear most useful, in line with their research questions, and, as long as they make their epistemological stance clear, are not required to choose between them. Moreover, adopting multiple vantage points can be seen as a potential source of richness, on condition that this multiplication does not lead to them being dealt with more superficially. ¹¹ The added value of such an approach might reside in helping to articulate in the analysis, the way this “duality of culture” appears to play out. For example, if a functionalist perspective tends to focus on the common references shared by individuals of the same nationality, but also, by extension, linked to organisational or professional (academic, administrative, disciplinary…) cultures, a micro-level study could focus on various aspects of how such projected cultural commonalities may seem to relate to actual behaviour. It could do this by looking at how they are discussed and renegotiated through interactions (interpretivist perspective), and how they might seem to feed into an emergent “negotiated culture” (Brannen and Salk, 2000), where individuals seek to deal with ambiguity and uncertainty by referring to overarching metanarratives (postmodern perspective) which might be instrumentalized to impose or seek to counter the domination of particular individuals or groups (critical perspective). Once the epistemological roots and overarching conceptual framework of the posture have been made explicit, the possibility to draw on different, articulated perspectives, arguably opens new, more flexible avenues for research, much in the way that proponents of “multi-paradigm” analyses suggest, but without scholars needing to defend themselves against apparent assumptions of incommensurability.

Conclusion: paradigmatic research in CCM and non-Western perspectives

In the history of ideas, it is important to stop and take stock at certain moments, to clarify and rework (retell, denaturalise…) our conceptions of scientific fields and approaches. The rationalisation of research into different perspectives, considered as paradigms in the light of work carried out in the twentieth century, has been part of this. However, it can be necessary to reassess these heuristic divisions in the light of subsequent research. Just as with Martin’s three perspectives on organisational culture in the 1990s, which helped bring order to the field and were presented as complementary and mutually-enriching, the different perspectives on CCM do not appear mutually contradictory when we take into account the inherent structured and structuring duality of culture (Giddens, Bauman). On the contrary, as calls for “multi-paradigm” research have underlined, multiplying or combining these perspectives can open up new understandings of the social phenomena under study.

Despite the limits of space imposed by the format, this paper has sought to return to the roots of the main theoretical approaches to interculturality, and to show how they can be brought together within a single paradigm, thanks to multi-level perspectives on culture, without contradictions, allowing us to consider various aspects of phenomena under study. Clearly, if this proposal is to be accepted, it appears important to underline that such a paradigm has no vocation to unify approaches within the field, rather it aims to help articulate them and open new spaces for dialogue. Critical scholars working for radical change are not expected to compromise their posture, any more than interpretivists seeking to characterise negotiated team cultures are expected to adopt a permanently critical stance, or functionalists to renounce their focus on (shifting) projected group-level commonalities. However, the idea is that, thanks to a common and overarching theoretical framework, these groups of scholars are better able to discuss and relate to one another’s work. The proposed paradigm is thus not intended to close discussions, but to open them, to allow us to better refine our questions and relate them to one another, while seeking to challenge the limits of this vision, as evoked by Kuhn: “The more precise and far-reaching that paradigm is, the more sensitive an indicator it provides of anomaly and hence of an occasion for paradigm change.” (Kuhn, 1970: p.65).

Paradigms emerge with a degree of underlying consensus relating to the general principles which appear to shape a phenomenon under study, among scholars in a particular field. Kuhn presents them as part and parcel of “normal” scientific process and of the sociology of science. They relate to the scientific community, and to the way that knowledge is collectively constructed through concepts, tested on empirical cases with methodology considered appropriate within the particular paradigm. They allow scientific exploration to continue in a more detailed way, until a significant amount of unexplainable anomalies trigger a crisis, a “scientific revolution”, leading to the emergence of a new and contradictory theoretical framework, better able to explain empirical observations, often along with a new set of methodology and new objects of interest, in the light of the new paradigm (Kuhn, 1970). There is no reason to dissociate social science from natural science in this respect, even if paradigms in natural science often appear far more well-established and institutionalised than the often-competing theories of social scientists, which Kuhn might have described as being a characteristic of the “pre-paradigm” state.

That said, there is a distinction between competing theories and total theoretical relativism, in the name of differentialism. Calls to decentre the traditional “Western” vision of science, associated with the anglophone Global North, are fully justified, given the normative sociology of scientific research which tends to reproduce dominant discourses through exclusive publication and promotion practices (Bonache, 2021). However, my belief is that it is necessary to find ways to integrate other voices while remaining within the realm of theoretical discussions, rather than adopting the posture of “supercriticality”, as Fred Dervin and Huiyu Tan recently defined it, and saying that when it comes to interculturality, “No one really knows, but everybody knows” (Dervin and Tan, 2022: 4). Naturally, there is a distinction to be made between the pedagogical posture the authors were proposing and the principles of scientific debate. Avoiding dogmatism in education and encouraging learners to reflect on their own experience are clearly positive steps towards creating more inclusive debates around interculturality, in the classroom. However, I believe that it is by working to clarify the theoretical underpinnings of dominant postures in the field, through scientific debate and contradiction, that we can create the space and conditions to allow the emergence of other voices. Indeed, it is also through periods of momentary paradigmatic closure that scientific innovations occur. It is thus my belief that working on a common paradigm between the multiple perspectives which are currently dominant or clearly emergent in the field will also make it easier to hear dissonant voices, be they from within or from outside the established scientific community of the Global North / West, by adding precision to the paradigmatic framework, hence making it easier to challenge and develop. This is not to deny or underestimate the significant barriers to non-mainstream research which are constituted by norms of journal publication, academic promotion, etc., but rather to suggest that awareness of these limits among journal editors, reviewers and scholars in general needs to be combined with a clearer and more explicit formulation of the theoretical principles which structure work carried out in the field of CCM, in order to allow new positions to emerge.

I thus wish to end this article with a call for further work to explore, challenge and question the possible paradigmatic underpinnings of the multiple perspectives commonly mobilised in the field of CCM, at the current time. Notwithstanding Kuhn’s warning that paradigms are rarely made explicit and cannot be reduced to simple sets of rules (supra), I would argue that it can be a useful endeavour to try to elaborate some common founding principles, shared by different scholars and perspectives. Which problems, which examples might the paradigm encourage us to study (and which has it tended to avoid)? With which methods? What might be the difficult questions, revealing the most tensions between approaches? How might a common paradigm help the different perspectives to develop in new and possibly unexpected ways? The increasing number of multi-perspective studies that have been published in the field in recent years, including the papers in this special issue, would tend to indicate that at least some scholars see potential in trying to articulate these different approaches. On the basis of the argumentation presented here, working together towards a common paradigm would be a logical next step to test this intuition. It might reveal clear limits or incommensurable differences between perspectives, or that the only common principles formulated are too superficial to be of use heuristically. But it might instead constitute a positive step forward in theory formation for the study of CCM, helping to clarify and develop scientific work in the field.