A retrospective on Culture’s Consequences: The 35-year journey

Abstract

Our 2006 Journal of International Business Studies article, "A Quarter Century of Culture's Consequences: A Review of the Empirical Research Incorporating Hofstede's Cultural Values Framework," provided a comprehensive review of 180 empirical journal articles and edited volume chapters published between 1980 and June 2002 that incorporated Hofstede's crosscultural values framework. We examined empirical research that positioned culture as either a main or moderating effect. The review attempted to make sense of the almost quarter century of research examining the impact of culture at the individual, group/organization, and country levels. In the present commentary, we provide: (a) a summary of the progress that has been made in the intervening decade, and most importantly, (b) a new set of recommendations for the next decade to guide those wishing to study the role of national culture in organizations. 3 In August 2002, we submitted our manuscript of the review of research inspired by Culture's Consequences to then Editor-in-Chief, Arie Lewin, with the hopes that he and his team might consider entering our manuscript into the review process at Journal of International Business Studies (JIBS). We knew such a submission was a long shot, considering that JIBS was not publishing many qualitative reviews of research. Further, the framework featured by Hofstede in Culture's Consequences (1980), while certainly influential, had been the subject of a number of both theoretical and methodological critiques (e.g., McSweeney, 2002; Smith, 2002). So, why did we submit our manuscript to JIBS knowing full well that the chances of publication were slim at best? The only reasons we can think of now are that we (a) were much younger then and probably didn't know any better, and (b) felt that it was where the manuscript belonged. In re-reading our initial submission letter to Professor Lewin, we did point out that of the 175 (increased to 180 before the manuscript was published) articles that we included in our review, 37 had appeared in JIBS, almost twice the number that appeared in the next two mostcited journals, Academy of Management Journal (22 articles) and Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology (19 articles), so perhaps that worked in our favor. We certainly had no way of knowing that our manuscript would ultimately be accepted after undergoing two very extensive revisions, and that 10 years later our article would be recognized with the JIBS Decade Award for 2016! We are obviously very delighted that our work has had this type of impact, and we want to credit the late Kwok Leung, our Action Editor, and the three anonymous reviewers who stuck it out through multiple major revisions, and who provided so much constructive and developmental feedback, that ultimately shaped the final result. The road to publishing our review, which originally began in 1997, was a long one and involved a great number of physical library visits and photocopying (because on-line journal 4 article access was still in its infancy). In fact, it took so...

Rapid expansion of international new ventures across institutional distance

“…Different aspects of institutions may exert different effects on corporate decisions at different organizational levels in international business (Chan & Makino, 2007). In particular, this study goes beyond the conventional constructs of country of origin and scrutinizes the roles of subnational region of origin in international business (Kirkman et al, 2017). The findings suggest the importance of research on integrating different dimensions of institutions (Holmes et al, 2013).…”

“…Many formal regulative institutions formulated by central or federal governments are eventually interpreted and implemented by subnational government agencies. The subnational differences in the endowments of resources, culture, and historical legacy also lead to variations in institutions (Chan et al, 2010;Kirkman et al, 2017;Ma et al, 2013a). In particular, subnational heterogeneity in government intervention and legislative environment widely exists in emerging markets (Chan et al, 2010;Ma, Tong, & Fitza, 2013b;World Bank, 2016).…”

“…The generalizability of our findings remains subject to conceptual reexaminations and empirical tests in different contexts. First, future studies can investigate how broader dimensions (e.g., historical and cultural) of institutional distance (Kirkman et al, 2017;Sojli & Tham, 2017), apart from trade openness and the ones used in the robustness tests, affect the performance of rapid export expansion. Second, subnational dimensions of institutions in destination countries should be considered and combined too when one extends the sample from exporters to MNEs.…”

“…Drawing on recent literature (Chan et al, 2010;Gao, Wang, & Che, 2017;Kirkman, Lowe, & Gibson, 2017;Ma, Delios, & Lau, 2013a), we adopt a broad term ''subnation'' for intra-national regions, although different countries use different terms, e.g., provinces, states, prefectures, counties, boroughs, and towns. Most non-tariff measures (NTMs) occur between developed countries rather than between developed and developing countries (WTO, 2012, pp.…”

The Roles of Chinese CEOs in Managing Individualistic Cultures in Cross‐border Mergers and Acquisitions

“…National culture has been a key research topic since the earliest days of international business and strategy research (Hitt et al, 2006;Hofstede, 1991;Kirkman et al, 2006Kirkman et al, , 2017Kogut and Singh, 1988). In particular, the important cultural dimension of individualism-collectivism represents a key distinction across cultures (Earley and Gibson, 1998;Hui and Triandis, 1986;Triandis, 1995;Triandis and Gelfand, 1998).…”