Global Cities: A Perspective on Cultural Differences at the Sub-national and Supra-national Levels

Abstract

There is a rising sense amongst scholars that our understanding of culture lacks nuance particularly in the context of differences across geographic space. More specifically, international business scholars have viewed culture most often as being homogeneous within national boundaries yet there is a growing realization that this conceptualization misses as much as it reveals. We contribute to the stream of literature that explores the nature of culture by examining it as both a sub-national as well as a supra-national phenomenon. Further, our second contribution is to introduce the concept of “global cities” as an important perspective in the analysis of cultural differences in the global economy. We test our ideas on a sample of 12,935 individuals across eleven countries and our findings provide support for both a supra-national as well as a sub-national perspective on cultural differences. Moreover, our results confirm that global cities are an important element of a more nuanced view of national and global cultures.