Dynamic Diversity: Variety and Variation Within Countries

Abstract

National models of social action over-privilege continuity and uniformity. They discount change -which they lack the capacity to explain (other than through exogenous shocks) -and neglect diversity within countries. This paper focuses on the national culture model which it argues requires commitment to illogical arguments and to suppositions which are theoretically and empirically untenable. An evaluation of each, it is argued, points to the existence of, and possibilities for, considerable national diversity and change -not pervasive and enduring national uniformity. Reflecting on the model's rise and fall in anthropology, the paper also provides an outline explanation of its retention within organization studies and speculates about its future within that discipline.In a range of literature each country is said to be characterized by distinctive, pervasive and enduring patterns of practices. The bedrock source of these patterns is either said to be national institutions (Hall and Soskice 2001, for instance) or national culture (Hofstede 2001, for example). This paper focuses on the claim that there is a national cultural imperative, that identifiable national culture is enduring, pervasive and constitutive -a view described here as the national culture model (hereafter 'the model'). It is beyond the scope of this paper to address the critiques of overly determining and unchanging versions of the institutional model and their limited ability to explain behaviour at the organizational level. For these, the reader is referred to the new wave of neoinstitutional literature (Djelic and Quack 2005;Crouch 2005; Streeck and Thelen 2005, for instance; see also Smith et al. 2008).Although once popular in a number of academic disciplines, the model is now employed almost exclusively within the discipline of organization studies and in a small sub-field of psychology -cross-cultural psychology. The paper seeks to demonstrate that the model is unable to explain organizational diversity and change within any one country. The model, it is argued, requires commitment to illogical arguments and to presuppositions that are theoretically and empirically untenable. Each of these is described and analysed. And the logical conclusion in each case, it is argued, points not to a pervasive uniformity, but to the existence of diversity within countries. An adequate theory of social action needs to be able to explain variations over time as well as continuity and variations article title Organization Studies 30(09): 933-957

How much does job autonomy vary across countries and other extra-organizational contexts?

“…It is one thing to say that ICV matters or even that ICV matters more than BCV, which, so far, has been the chief concern in the ICV-BCV literature (Tung 2008;McSweeney 2009;Tung and Baumann 2009;Van Hoorn 2015a). It is another thing to say, however, that firms can easily face more "distance," i.e., more sizeable contextual dissimilarities, when they seek to operate in multiple industries, which is the main finding of our analysis.…”

“…McSweeney (2002McSweeney ( , 2009, for instance, takes issue with the determinism inherent in the Hofstedeian approach of scoring countries' cultures on multiple dimensions (Hofstede 2001), after which the inter-country cultural differences implied by these scores are taken as immutable and inescapable. Particularly, the critique is that when inter-country cultural differences become reified, relevant actors such as MNEs are denied agency.…”

“…Second, concerning international business and cross-cultural management more broadly, we find that our explicit comparison of the importance of country to sub-national extraorganizational units of analysis for understanding dissimilarities in job autonomy enables us to flesh out in much more detail than heretofore the implications of the increasingly popular argument that ICV is more important than BCV (McSweeney 2009;Tung and Baumann 2009;Van Hoorn 2015a). We thereby focus on the concept of inter-country distance, both because this concept has been particularly prominent in the ICV-BCV debate (Shenkar 2001;Gerhart and Fang 2005;Tung and Verbeke 2010;Beugelsdijk, Maseland, Onrust, Van Hoorn and Slangen 2015) and because this concept is so widely applied in international business and cross-cultural management.…”

The Transnationalization of Financial Reporting Standards

“…within countries, or clusters of countries, and differences between them. It is difficult, if not impossible, to credibly explain change on this basis (McSweeney, 2002a(McSweeney, , 2002b(McSweeney, , 2009b. The insistence on national uniformity precludes any theory of change springing from internal dynamics (Archer, 1988).…”

Ambicultural blending between Eastern and Western paradigms: Fresh perspectives for international management research

“…We then compare the different cultural systems in the East and West through different cognitive and linguistic styles. We certainly recognize the limitations of conceptualising 'national' cultures and that neither the 'East' nor the 'West' is homogenous or unchanging (McSweeney 2009). However, we nevertheless feel confident in making some assertions about broad differences in cognition, language and environmental perspective between 'imagined communities', such as nations, that can be subsequently subjected to empirical investigation.…”