A Structured Snowball Model Toward Cross-level Cultural Analyses

Abstract

The construct of culture has been known as notoriously complex and intangible. Scholars from different disciplines have conducted studies from different perspectives and with different purposes. In this study, we mainly reviewed cultural studies in cross cultural management, sociology and organization management research fields in order to respond the call from cross culture and IB scholars to move beyond culture’s psychological value assumptions and Hofstede’s dimensional measurement of national culture, as well as the construct of culture distance that have dominated cross cultural management and IB studies for decades. Building on some intelligent contributions of seminal works from sociology and organization management research, we proposed our novel culture model, namely structured snowball model to illustrate that culture is a cross-level construct, a learning process with the core originated from its founder group, persistently interacts internally and externally with the other cultures. Culture has its feature of duality, always pursuing the status of dynamic equilibrium. Besides the illumination of our theoretical contributions of this study, we provide a comprehensive taxonomy of factors that may influence cultural changes, followed by our discussion and conclusion as well as our suggestions of future research.