Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to conduct a study on the articles published in the four top
international business (IB) journals to examine how four cultural models and concepts – Hofstede’s
(1980), Hall’s (1976), Trompenaars’s (1993) and Project GLOBE’s (House et al., 2004) – have been used in
the extant published IB research. National cultures and cultural differences provide a crucial component
of the context of IB research.
Design/methodology – This is a bibliometric study on the articles published in four IB journals over
the period from 1976 to 2010, examining a sample of 517 articles using citations and co-citation matrices.
Findings – Examining this sample revealed interesting patterns of the connections across the studies.
Hofstede’s (1980) and House et al.’s (2004) research on the cultural dimensions are the most cited and
hold ties to a large variety of IB research. These findings point to a number of research avenues to
deepen the understanding on how firms may handle different national cultures in the geographies they
operate.
Research limitations – Two main limitations are faced, one associated to the bibliometric method,
citations and co-citations analyses and other to the delimitation of our sample to only four IB journals,
albeit top-ranked.
Originality/value – The paper focuses on the main cultural models used in IB research permitting to
better understand how culture has been used in IB research, over an extended period.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
