Conceptualizing and Measuring Culture in International Business and Management: From Challenges to Potential Solutions

Understanding the influence of culture on business operations has been one of the most enduring components of international business and management theorizing and empirical investigation. While several critiques and debates questioned the significant progress made in this domain, the special issue we introduce here is meant to demonstrate that further advancement on how we conceptualize and measure culture is not only needed, but also possible. We provide an overview of past and current approaches in the measurement of culture in IB/IM and the challenges associated with these approaches, and emphasize the important, yet insufficiently acknowledged, link between the theoretical conceptualization of culture and its measurement. We then introduce the four papers included in the special issue and highlight how they break away from the “addiction” to approaches that have been very useful in getting where we are today, but that might not always be useful in advancing knowledge beyond what we already know. Last but not least, we offer our own perspective on promising directions in conceptually and methodologically rethinking the study of culture in international business and management

Think glocally, act glocally: a culture-centric comment on Leung, Bhagat, Buchan, Erez and Gibson (2005)

Culture is a critical variable in international business (IB), and Leung, Bhagat, Buchan, Erez and Gibson (2005) enrich our understanding of its role. However, that said, their framing of this variable conflates the role of national culture (NC), a particular form of culture, with culture itself, a more pivotal, holistic and central construct. This paper, by commenting on and critiquing their approach, seeks to shift the theoretical center of gravity from a NC-centric paradigm to a culture-centric, constructivist one, and from a top-down, bottom-up view to a flatter, glocalized one. Implications are provided which suggest that research should address cultural processes of patterning and production, as well as cultural forms, such as global communities and global culture (GC), which share with or even capture the spotlight from NC as a focus for studying and developing IB cultural theory. Journal of International Business Studies (2009) 40, 237–254; doi:10.1057/palgrave.jibs.8400410