Leadership in the Academic Field of Business and Management and the Question of Country of Origin: A Commentary on Burgess and Shaw (2010)

Abstract

With globalization in business academia expanding and deepening, it is timely to question the validity and utility of the concept of country of origin as a base category for comparative cross-cultural research and theory development. In their contribution in the British Journal of Management, Burgess and Shaw (2010) rank the most productive institutions and countries contributing to board membership of top ranked journals on the basis of their country of origin. Taking their findings as a starting point for our discourse, we re-analyse their database, in addition to our own investigations. We contend that while country of origin may be an appropriate category for betweencountries comparison of multinational entities, it is of little use when comparing metanational institutions, such as top tier refereed journal boards and the globalized business/ management schools from which they are drawn. Our findings point towards the need for finer differentiation of what constitutes the concept country of origin, but also that its relevance should be questioned in, at least, globalized contexts. The question we pose extends to any pertinent 'globalized' topic within and without business and management.

Working with Language: A Refocused Research Agenda for Cultural Leadership Studies

“…Such use of ethnography may shed further light on the changing and interactional nature and impact of different cultures on the individual's or group's sensemaking of leadership. This overcomes the previously identified limitations of cross-cultural research studies and their essentialist, static approach to culture, where cultural membership is treated as predominantly definite and largely tied to a geographical country of origin (Ailon-Souday and Kunda 2003;Altman and Laguecir 2012;McSweeney 2002;Tayeb 2001). Adding an auto-ethnographic element to such cultural research may further help 'to illuminate the experience of history' and process through the actors' narratives, as Kempster and Stewart (2010) showed in their analysis of leadership learning as a process of critical reflection on experiences in situ.…”

“…An essentialist view of culture is to see culture as an ontological entity with clearly defined membership boundaries where traits and characteristics are shared equally by all members, enabling the researcher to categorize individuals into identifiable ‘cultures’. Research studies adopting this type of essentialist approach to culture tend to divide the world into separate and mutually exclusive national cultures – often defining cultural boundaries as geographical ‘country of origin’ (Altman and Laguecir ) – and study at group level how people in one culture are different from people in another culture (Holiday et al . ).…”

“…This essentialist approach to culture has received widespread criticism within the field of management studies (e.g. Ailon‐Souday and Kunda ; Altman and Laguecir ; McSweeney ; Tayeb ) for conveying too static and minimalist a view of culture that exaggerates cultural uniformity within geographical boundaries and downplays cultural dynamics, overlaps and multiplicity as well as the historicity of culture.…”

“…Yet, taking an essentialist approach to culture has meant that cultural boundaries are usually associated with a geographical ‘country of origin’ (Altman and Laguecir ), limiting understanding of multiple cultural memberships of one person or a group, the multiplicity of cultures in one geographic location and changes in cultures and cultural membership over time. This focus on national (geographical) categorization of culturally dependent leader behaviours mirrors and perpetuates the focus of mainstream leadership discourse on effectiveness, and implicitly assumes that leaders and followers can be categorized into one distinct culture.…”

“…This should then involve examining the political, historical and cultural roots of ‘leadership’ within specific national, professional, regional and organizational languages as well as the influence of the English language as an assumed, homogeneous business and scholarly lingua franca. Explorations of culture through the lens of language and discourse further help us to overcome the previously highlighted limitations of essentialist approaches to culture (Ailon‐Souday and Kunda ; Altman and Laguecir ) that are tied to fixed cultural memberships and geographical boundaries, promoting cultural stereotypes and essentialist dichotomies (Collinson ). The focus on language multiplicity allows us to recognize and seek meaning from linguistic variation as a means to explore cultural multiplicity.…”