Culture, an excuse?—A critical analysis of essentialist assumptions in cross-cultural management research and practice

Abstract

The essentialist cross-cultural management paradigm legitimizes a discourse that undermines the agency of people with different cultural backgrounds. The assumptions that underlie the essentialist conceptualization of culture are investigated from an attribution theory perspective. The assumptions are largely based on making culture a valid predictor of action at the expense of the actor's agency. The manifestation of the essentialist discourse in an international management context is investigated through an attribution theory framework on project professionals' accounts of intercultural encounters in large-scale construction projects. The analysis shows that culture is used as the cause of actions but also as a means to excuse that actor for his actions. The analysis further shows how the essentialist conceptualization of culture creates a framework for using culture as both a cause of actions and an excuse. The article provides a nonessentialist conceptualization of culture and shows how the assumptions it rests on undermine the assumption that culture is a valid predictor of action. The essentialist assumption of culture can shroud the issues that underlie the challenges currently attributed to culture. Therefore, managers are encouraged to move from an essentialist conceptualization to a nonessentialist conceptualization of culture.

‘Maybe it’s culture and maybe it isn’t’: An ethnographic study of sensemaking, culture and performance in a multicultural team

“…Our research also contributes to scepticism around providing or indeed tolerating rigid cultural frames in organisations (Vaara et al, 2021; Venaik and Brewer, 2016). Training offered to leaders and members of multicultural teams should be re-oriented, away from describing difference, all too often essentialised and employed as ‘cause and excuse’ (Långstedt, 2018), to providing opportunities for more complex, nuanced critical reflection and appreciation of wider cultural, organisational and social contexts. This recognises and challenges the phenomenon whereby cultural differences may be used as a ‘convenient explanation’ for a variety of other organisational and interpersonal issues: power and politics, failures of respect, resentment at subordination, poor communication, absence of means of addressing problems (Kanter and Corn, 1994).…”

Who are these emerging markets anyway? A taxonomic approach integrating institutional and culturalist perspectives

“…Utilizing both culturalist and institutional perspectives, the application of the SPES framework offers a more holistic approach. Furthermore, our approach attempts to represent culture as pervasive, having both essentialist and non-essentialist factors, that importantly, allow for individual agency (Långstedt, 2018; Nathan, 2015). This analysis resulted in eight different categories of emerging markets.…”

Diversity on the blackboard: the nexus between teaching, diversity, and awareness

“…We base our own take on culture on Elphinstone's constructivist take on culture, about which she noted that 'I favour a constructivist cultural perspective, recognising that not all members of a cultural group will behave in similar ways or hold the same values, and that identity refers to what we do, not simply who we are' (p. 50, drawing on Hassim & Sedick, 2016). Thus, this differs from the essentialist view focusing on what a person 'has' or 'belongs to', rather than what is 'done' (see discussion in Långstedt, 2018). Moreover, Hong and Mallorie (2004) argued that an individual could hold more than one cultural meaning system, overlapping with social identity theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1979) and its work on multiple and dynamic identities.…”