The Usefulness of an Ethnographic Approach to the International Comparison of Organizations

Project management and national culture: A Dutch–French case study

“…Deriving from symbolic anthropology (Geertz, 1973) this current mobilizes in-depth qualitative inductive studies in order to unravel indigenous (native) categories of interpretation of the reality. National culture is defined as a singular way to interpret the reality, a set of symbolic categories, a context of meaning (d'Iribarne, 1996). This stream has a high potential for management studies and has already accumulated substantial results.…”

Interpretive Frames as the Organization’s “Mirror”: From Espoused Values to Social Integration in MNEs

“…We wanted to capture the views and experiences of each informant, and allow each person to use his/her own narrative to describe how they interpreted the stated organizational values across foreign subsidiaries rather than compare potential differences based on pre-determined dimensions (d 'Iribarne 1997). Qualitative methods are well suited to obtain fine-grained data and to capture organizational members' accounts and interpretations (Maitlis 2005).…”

Entrepreneurship and Culture

“…Neutrality refers to the fact that while two cultures may have the same level of uncertainty avoidance they may have different ways to cope depending upon their culture (Schneider and de Meyer 1991). For example, in Italian culture the letter of the law is taken less seriously than in American culture, which causes Italians to take for granted the qualifiers in the question "rules should not be broken, even when the person thinks it is in society's best interest" while the Americans would not (D'Irbarne 1997). For example, in Italian culture the letter of the law is taken less seriously than in American culture, which causes Italians to take for granted the qualifiers in the question "rules should not be broken, even when the person thinks it is in society's best interest" while the Americans would not (D'Irbarne 1997).…”