Conceptualizing and measuring culture in international business and management: From challenges to potential solutions

Abstract

Understanding the influence of culture on business operations has been one of the most enduring components of international business (IB) and international management (IM) theorizing and empirical investigation. While several critiques and debates questioned the significant progress made in this domain, the special issue we introduce here is meant to demonstrate that further advancement on how we conceptualize and measure culture is not only needed, but also possible. We provide an overview of past and current approaches in the measurement of culture in IB/IM and the challenges associated with these approaches, and emphasize the important, yet insufficiently acknowledged, link between the theoretical conceptualization of culture and its measurement. We then introduce the four articles included in the special issue and highlight how they break away from the “addiction” to approaches that have been very useful in getting where we are today, but that might not always be useful in advancing knowledge beyond what we already know. Last but not the least, we offer our own perspective on promising directions in conceptually and methodologically rethinking the study of culture in IB and IM.