Purpose: Culturally bound communication styles affect the length of verbal and written messages. Legal contracts are no exception. This paper aims to explore the relationship between cultural communication style and the level of written detail in international joint venture (IJV) contracts. Using a database of actual IJV contracts, we empirically test the relationship between the parties’ cultural communication styles, cultural distance, and the textual length of contracts. We apply Edward T. Hall’s high- and low-context communication construct and find that contracts are longer when made between parties of low- and high-context cultures and shorter when both parties come from high-context cultures relative to when both parties are low context. Additionally, we find that the higher the cultural distance in terms of individualism versus collectivism between partners, the shorter the text of the contracts. The results highlight the influence of culture on contract text length and, as such, on contract negotiation and design costs. This article contributes to the culture and strategic alliance literature by going beyond the assumption that low-context culture contracts are longer and high-context culture contracts shorter by testing it empirically.

This study gauges the development of an historical thinking skill we term reflexive historical thinking and its relationship to economic ideology among a group of undergraduate business students in an introductory history course at a Colombian private university. A survey was conducted twice during a semester in which students answered questions regarding historical agency, personal agency, and economic ideology. We measured the relationships and changes in responses regarding these factors. We hypothesized that students with greater awareness of broad social and economic forces as determinants of historical events would also be aware of an array of social and economic forces informing their personal outlooks. Moreover, we expected such awareness – both historical and personal – to increase during the course. Finally, we wondered how economic ideology influences such awareness. We found little support for the expectation that reflexive historical thinking developed over time, but interesting correlations between historical thinking and economic ideology.

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