Organizations and national culture: methodology considered - Special Issue on Cross-National Organization Culture

Organization Studies, Summer, 1994 by Monir Tayeb

Introduction

After a lull of nearly a decade, the success of Japanese managers in the past few decades has contributed to the revival of interest in cross-cultural studies of organizations and awareness of the cultural contexts of business organizations in the 1980s and 1990s.

In a survey of academic and professional journals, Adler and Bartholomew (1992) found that 70 percent of all international organizational behaviour (OB) and human-resource management (HRM) articles included the concept of culture. Of the articles including culture, almost all (93.8 percent) concluded that culture was important and made a difference to the organizational behaviour and human-resource management issues being studied.

For years, researchers argued about the impact of culture on management. One group maintained that managers' behaviour worldwide was becoming more similar (e.g. Cole 1973; Form 1979; Hickson et al. 1974; Kerr et al. 1952; Negandhi 1979, 1985), while others concluded that it was maintaining its dissimilarity (e.g. Hofstede 1980; Laurent 1983; Lincoln et al. 1981; Meyer and Rowan 1977). As Adler and Bartholomew point out, the verdict now appears to be cast in favour of divergence.

The major strength of cultural perspective as a whole is its recognition of (1) the fact that cultural values and attitudes are different in degree at least, if not in absolute terms in some cases, from one society to another, (2) the fact that different cultural groups behave differently under similar circumstances because of the differences in their underlying values and attitudes, and (3) the important role that culture plays in shaping work organizations and other social institutions.

However, it is one thing to be aware of cultural contexts of organizations and to be interested in carrying out comparative cultural studies; it is another to devise appropriate research designs and adopt suitable methodological tools to accomplish the task.

The difficulties of studying management across cultures have frequently been noted (Adler 1983; Peng et al. 1991). They are matched by the growing urgency of the need to find ways of effectively carrying through such studies. The increasing dominance of multinationals and the globalization of world markets ensure that those who do address the question of culture will gain substantial advantages (Smith 1992).

The present paper surveys major methodological problems and inadequacies of cross-cultural research and reviews some of the studies which do not run away from them. The paper does not purport to suggest solutions for the problems and difficulties experienced by cross-cultural researchers; rather it intends to increase our awareness of the seriousness of the issues as a step on the way to putting them right one day. The discussion is centred around four areas: conceptualization, operationalization, data collection and interpretation, and study focus.

Conceptualization

The concept of culture has recently proved attractive not only to those who seek to understand world-wide variations in organizational behaviour (e.g. Ronen 1986; Adler 1990), but also to those who attempt to delineate contrasts between different organizations in the same part of the world (Schein 1985).

Roberts and Boyacigiller (1984) suggest that the most fundamental problem in this area has been the lack of any agreement as to how to define culture, and the consequent lack of a currency within which to conduct studies.

As researchers in comparative cross-cultural management, working within a positivist approach, we seem to be obsessed with definitions, operationalization and measurements. As Chapman (1992a: 9) points out:

'the literature on management and culture is rich in assertions of the need to define culture. If it is not defined, how can it be operationalized? If it is not operationalized, how can it be measured? If it is not measured, how can it take its place in the scientific literature, with its multiple regression, its patterns of causation, and its ambitions of rigour?'

The literature abounds with definitions of culture. Culture, to some researchers, is some combination of norms, values, feelings, thinking, roles, rules, behaviour, beliefs, attitudes, expectations, meanings, and so on. To others, culture is understood by what it does not include: economics, politics, law, religion, language, education, technology, industrial environment, society or the market.

Whatever 'culture' is or is not, the problem, as Chapman (1992b) points out, will not be solved by making further efforts in the same direction. It is too fundamental to be solved through tighter definition. 'Culture' resists operational definition, not because it is a particularly intractable area of human affairs, but because the idea is tied to a particular context.

Cross-cultural researchers, a vast majority of whose training and educational background is anchored in Anglo-American tradition and perspective, treat the concept of culture as something universal and therefore definable in universal terms.