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

Abstract

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

Conceptualizing and measuring culture in international business and management: From challenges to potential solutions

“…This research highlights the need for richer measures of culture in internationalization studies and consideration of how individuals interpret, understand, and use culture. The focus on cultural differences at the national level (an essential premise of the research on cultural distance) has been criticized for limiting our ability to consider the true nature of the culture construct (Gould & Grein, 2009).…”

“…The debate on what "culture is" continues (see Gould & Grein, 2009;Leung et al, 2005Leung et al, , 2011, as does the debate on how to measure it. Alternatives to Hofstede's model have been proposed and backed up by large-scale research efforts -for example, the GLOBE Project (House, Hanges, Javidan, Dorfman, & Gupta, 2004).…”

“…Ten years ago, a review of advances in culture and IB (Leung et al, 2005) revealed that most research took a somewhat limited view of culture, dominated by the use of Hofstede's dimensions. The review also triggered an interesting debate (Gould & Grein, 2009;Leung, Bhagat, Buchan, Erez, & Gibson, 2011) on the way culture is conceptualized (i.e., national culture vs culture per se) and operationalized (i.e., positivist vs interpretive perspectives), reconfirming that, in spite of the significant and admirable progress on the matter, there is still much work to be done.…”

Where Global and Virtual Meet: The Value of Examining the Intersection of These Elements in Twenty-First-Century Teams

“…Ironically, then, a nationally diverse team may not necessarily be culturally diverse. As of the writing of this article, national groups are still useful units of analysis because they are well defined for many real-life applications; however, the nation-state is a relatively new concept in world history, and it may cease to function as a key feature denoting culture in the future (Earley & Gibson 2002, Gould & Grein 2008. Regional cultures, ethnic cultures, organizational cultures, and discipline-based cultures are also valid sources of cultural differences and similarities in cognitive sensemaking systems (Gibson & McDaniel 2010).…”

Urban destination loyalty drivers and cross-national moderator effects: The case of Barcelona

“…Numerous earlier studies of crossnational differences in consumer behaviour in different consumption sectors have verified that cultural differences have a strong influence on consumers, to the extent that the same product or service may be perceived differently according to the culture of origin and determine individual behaviour (Mok & Amstrong, 1998;Mattila, 1999;Weber & Villebonne, 2002;Cunningham, Young, Lee, & Ulaga, 2006;Jin, Park, & Kim, 2008;Suiden & Diagne, 2009). Though it is true that the members of national communities have a wide diversity of individual cultural identities, it is also true that, over and above the individual cultural identity, there exists the national cultural identity (Tipton, 2009), although globalization and the internationalisation of markets has brought with it a process of transfer and construction of the meaning that implies new processes of identity formation, cultural hybridisation and "glocalization" (Gould and Grein, 2009). These in turn imply global values, lifestyles and consumption habits (Arnett, 2002), which fill "vacuums" in national cultures (Cornwell & Drenan, 2004).…”