‘Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast’: Use and Abuse of Culture in International Strategy Research

Abstract

International strategy, as a subfield of strategic management, has too often settled for simplistic and rote approaches to bringing the international setting into the analysis of cross-border strategies and their consequences. We examine the application of national culture in international strategy research as perhaps the most common expression of locational awareness. We begin by considering the many critical assessments of current theoretical and empirical research on the culture-strategy interaction. We summarize multiple meta-analytic studies and examine a sample of empirical articles from the past 40 years more closely to offer our own criticism of the theories, settings, data, models, and variables used and the conclusions drawn by these scholars. We then go beyond critique to offer an extensive set of recommendations for future work that we believe can both correct the ever-clearer problems with extant research and offer innovative and more considered insights on the role of national culture in international strategy scholarship and practice.