Abstract
Editor-in-Chief
One perverse consequence of MAGA (Freedman, 2016) and Trump’s immigration policies in the United States and the reemergence of the far right in Europe, is that critical scholars can no longer argue that ‘Whiteness’, as defined by such as McDermott and Samson (2005) is ‘invisible’, when they wrote: ‘Much of the research on white racial identity during the past ten years has focused on how whiteness, and the privileges associated with whiteness, remain invisible to many whites, especially those with limited interracial contact … Instead, whiteness is normative …., an unexamined default racial category. Although many non-whites, especially African Americans, are confronted with their race on a daily basis …., many whites do not think of themselves as really having a race at all. In this respect, white is an unmarked identity, such as heterosexual or middle-aged ….’. (2005: 248: original authors extensive references in this quotations have been removed).
Russell (2023) contends that in the era of Black Lives Matters, Whiteness is increasingly defensive and disturbed. It has been ‘named and shamed’. Its invisibility is under threat.
The issue of Whiteness now appears to be at the fore, not only in America, but within the anti-immigration riots recently in Northern Ireland and other parts of the UK and similar racially stimulated demonstrations in other parts of Europe.
One of the doyens of Whiteness Studies in America, Ruth Frankenberg (2001) in her essay ‘Mirage of an unmarked whiteness’ writing about the situational nature of whiteness, prophetically notes that changes in American society has brought racial groups more into contact with each other, urging that the idea of Whiteness as invisible should be changed. Yet its normative quality still appears to persist. ‘Race’ only applies to those who are not ‘white’.
America, like Britain and countries in Western Europe have changed significantly over the last few decades, rendering both the concept of one American identity, and the basis of cross-cultural studies such as Hofstede’s, GLOBE and others almost facile. It is interesting that in the GLOBE studies, South African samples were taken of both White and Black, and in Canada samples are taken from English and French speakers, yet the much larger and more populous USA is taken as one sample (House et al., 2004).
It is also interesting that one of the major reference books of the GLOBE studies with its opening chapter (House, 2004) justifies the need of studies on cross-cultural and international management, by writing that: ‘Ample evidence… shows that cultures of the world are getting more and more interconnected and that the business world is becoming increasingly global’. He goes on to say that. ‘…more than 70% of American industry was facing stiff competition within the US market…’ that ‘…worldwide exports of merchandise were almost $6 trillion US dollars.’ And that ‘There are other aspects to globalization besides foreign customers and competitors.’ (p.4). This, and many other cross-cultural management studies, including those published in IJCCM have used this raison d’être for such studies. It is the basis of the foundational texts of cross-cultural management studies: Minority World countries becoming more in contact with other ‘cultures’ as globalisation extends the international reach of large enterprises. It is a White justification, ignoring the multicultural nature of America following a history of colonialism, centuries of immigration and, not always happy, cross-cultural interactions within society and organisations. It particularly ignores the experiences of societies within the Majority World. Societies (around the world) are not becoming more multicultural necessitating cross-cultural management, as often societies have centuries of living and working across cultures both exogenous (e.g. colonial, migratory) and endogenous (e.g. coexisting indigenous). Rather, White society is becoming more conscious of the need to work externally interculturally and internally multiculturally, and therefore needing better cross-cultural management and leading to the construction of (White) concepts such as cultural intelligence (Jackson, 2022).
Imagine, growing up in a society where, if you had a black skin, you were shuffled off to live in parts of cities and the countryside where there was not much infrastructure and you had to build your own home with bits of wood you can find and some scrap pieces of corrugated iron if you were lucky. Image if you had slightly lighter skin, but still a bit brown, being shuffled off to another part of the city, maybe slightly better but not much so. Image you have a pinky-creamy complexion and have a bit more money than most, and having to live behind a high wall with razor wire at the top as you are just a bit scared that the worse might happen and you might be burgled or worse by people poorer than you and a much darker complexion! How did, and do, people manage in their day-to-day lives? How do people manage at work? There are some good examples of cross-cultural management in action in South Africa (e.g. Human, 1996, written by a ‘white’ academic while South Africa was emerging out of apartheid), and other African countries and Majority World countries that have centuries of experience of working across different cultures groups, in very complex contexts that have not always had a happy history. There is a lot we can learn from this, but generally we do not as this is not a feature of (White) cross-cultural management textbooks.
There is of course much we can also learn from societies in the Minority World which are the result of European colonisation, the slave trade, migration, segregation, for example in the American experience, as well as within the resultant multicultural societies of Europe and Australasia, yet whose stories are often written by White scholars, or not written at all.
However, there have been little introspective studies of, for example, American society within cross-cultural management studies, where ‘American culture’ has quite often been taken for granted, with an assumption that this is what is done everywhere. As cross-cultural management studies have grown as a sub-discipline of management studies, these views may be questioned by studies that investigate if particular theories, principles or practices work in other countries (quite often with reference to Hofstede in terms of exploring the differences between the US and other countries being studied). Yet ‘American-ness’ is still very much taken for granted. Similarly, there are few contemporary studies by management scholars from other countries that specifically examine American management from a (cross-)cultural perspective. In other words, American culture (in cross-cultural management studies) has largely been invisible.
This is not in itself strange as America has been a dominant economy within the world, and most management academics are in the US. But the assumption in management studies of a unified ‘culture’ is curious given the history of the US, despite the ‘melting pot’ thesis. One of the few explicitly cross-cultural studies of the United States (Stewart and Bennett, 1991) felt able to describe the American culture as an homogeneous whole, for example: ‘Americans naturally assume that each person is not only a separate biological entity, but also a unique psychological being and a singular member of the social order. Deeply ingrained and seldom questioned, the dominant American self, in the form of individualism, pervades action and intrudes into each domain of activity.’ (p. 129).
Schildkraut (2007) suggested that multidimensional studies of American identity are lacking and are only focused on two components: ‘liberalism (America as a land of freedom and opportunity) and ethnoculturalism (America as a nation of white Protestants)’ (p.597).
Although her empirical study appears to support the melting pot thesis, other studies do not. Massey and Sanchez (2007) for example found that Latin American immigrants see a great contrast in the content of the two identities of whites and Latinos. They viewed American identity as involving bigness and power and saw (white) Americans as being in constant motion and in a hurry, competitive, commercial, cold, distant and impersonal. They saw Latino (American) identity as focused on people and on intimate social relationships. Massey and Sanchez (2007) attempted to render culture more visible by provideing a critique of the assumption of (White) cultural invisibility and that Whiteness is normative. Frankenberg (1993) pointed out that when we say ‘American’ we assume ‘white’. The term ‘race’ has tended not to mean ‘white’. In management studies (and perhaps by implication, cross-cultural management studies), the norm has been American, white, middle class, and often men.
It is these types of assumptions, of invisible cultures, that have been challenged by Whiteness Studies such as McDermott and Samson (2005), but also through an increasing interest in migration within more recent cross-cultural management research (Jackson, 2023; Ozkazanc-Pan, 2026). Also, the current government of the United States is doing a very good job of exposing the social and cultural complexities of American society and the power structures involved. Perhaps this suggests that many cross-cultural management scholars have some catching up to do.
If the United States is the foundational site of cross-cultural management scholarship what about the rest of the world, as we (as cross-cultural management scholars) appear to be focusing on what is best described as the Minority World? This is the richest part of the world, and it is where most of our salaries are paid. What about the Majority World?
This is mostly seen as a business opportunity. It is of increasing interest, but as regions where many of the MNEs we are predominantly interested in are looking towards making money. Yet, this is nothing new. Making money out of resource-rich areas like sub-Saharan Africa, Caribbean, south America, and south and south-east Asia has been going on for centuries. Think of extraction: slaves, minerals, timber, babies (the singer Madonna and Malawi is an interesting story, Jackson, 2011: 206), mobile money (Osabutey and Jackson, 2024; Jackson and Osabutey, 2025) and other forms of digital extraction from the ‘bottom-of-the-pyramid’ (Jackson, 2024) to bring us up to the present century.
Increasingly, cross-cultural and international management scholars are seeing regions within the Majority World as a source of data (George et al., 2016) Our ‘clients’ are working there, and so should we. But,we are told, the problem with areas like sub-Saharan Africa are the ‘institutional voids’ (Bothello et al., 2019). They do not have what we have, strong and effective institutions! So, we need to look at how more effective these countries could be if they had ones like ours, and we tend to ignore the institutions, many in the informal economy, that are already there and functioning very well (Jackson, 2012). They also do not seem to have very good universities and academic staff, after all not many of them publish in our journals. We tend to ignore the (White) institutional and epistemological biases of publishing in Minority World journals. But they might be useful to collect data for us as they have contacts in organisations in their countries. Along the way, we could also put their names on our subsequent publications, and even teach them something about how we do our work, become good academics and publish in our journals. This also works out for us, because we can learn something about ‘their’ culture, and help their country in their development agenda and make sure the consultants who read our publications, and when we consult ourselves, can advise on how to do better business in these countries. We can also feel better about ourselves for being good world citizens!
So, why am I suggesting that this is an aspect of cross-cultural management studies being White? Why, in the world of cross-cultural management scholarship, is the Minority World the site of theory production and the Majority World the site of data collection? This is perhaps the same question as why is the Majority World the site of resource extraction, and the Minority World the site of wealth creation? On the face of it, ‘white’ is a cultural category, but generally it has been a silent one. ‘Race’ is a culturally generated concept (Jackson, 2017), which generally means other than ‘white’. It is a concept that had its cultural creation through economic exploitation: the slave trade, imperialism, colonisation, extraction. Whiteness is still mostly invisible, particularly to those who have it. It is assumed. It is natural. It is as natural as imperialism/globalisation, as modernisation/neoliberalism (Jackson, 2015) and is part of the same process.
Allen (2001) wrote, more than a quarter of a century ago, the final sentence being somewhat prophetic of more recent political movements, and quoted in Andrews’ (2016) excellent critique of Whiteness in the cinema: ‘To be accepted as a member of the white-race-at-large. . . a white person is culturally required to internalize a dysfunctional view of realty. . . We tend to live under the illusions of our own self manufactured image of ourselves: we believe that we are nice, kind, benevolent and caring folk and, more importantly, that is how other racial groups see us. Many whites in the United States have even constructed and internalized the baseless fantasy that we are the most oppressed of all racial groups. (p. 482)
Cross-cultural management studies exist in this same (White) world that has propagated itself as a part of global society (through a particular power dynamic) to be homogenous, mainly ignoring its own cultural and societal complexities, and its global role. Yet the perception of this homogeneity and the invisibility of Whiteness is falling apart, not just in the United State, but also in many European countries and beyond, where societies appear riven with racism and anti-immigration politics. Yet this presents opportunities for cross-cultural management scholars, and editors, to examine the structural and epistemological ways to develop our academic discipline in more critical and inclusive directions.