From a distance and detached to up close and personal: Bridging strategic and cross-cultural perspectives in international management research and practice

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Abstract

Despite its remarkable achievements, the field of international business (IB) is under attack; its legitimacy and importance are challenged. Structural weaknesses, in particular the existence of two subfields – one drawing on economics and strategy, the other on cross-cultural studies – have contributed to IB, but have failed to build the micro-process bridges that would have united and distinguished the field. The sociology of the field with its dominant positivist research paradigm also has not helped. We propose a multi-method, paradigmatic interplay approach to IB research for building intellectual bridges that would draw on the unique demographics of IB researchers and allow the field to be more united and hopefully produce stronger, more relevant research.

Section snippets

A critical summary of the IB field from the strategy and culture perspectives

The richness and variety as well as the scope of IB as a domain for research makes any attempt at a full summary of each perspective within the limits of a single article at best a schematic caricature, and at worst a Quixotic attempt. Let's however, knowing full well the difficulty of such an exercise, attempt to highlight a few historical points that made the dialogue between perspectives difficult and the emergence of an integrated IB paradigm fairly impossible. A core starting weakness of

Lost opportunities: missing the full force of the wave

By riding the crest of rapidly emerging IB phenomena the researchers following the economics and strategic perspective were seldom able to pause long enough to develop an enduring paradigm that would pull together their various conceptual contributions and widen their interest to organizational and cultural issues. By focusing on understanding important national cultural differences and alerting parochial managers to their critical consequences, cross-cultural researchers inadvertently were

Further limitations from the sociology of the field itself: damned if you do…

And so, IB has remained dominated by two distinct perspectives, neither of which has been able to contribute much to an in-depth understanding of contexts and cultures, or even to a practical appreciation of their relevance in terms of guiding effective collaboration across differentiated contexts. Moreover these perspectives were fragmented into subfields and remained far from one another—the strategy perspective made no true research effort to connect with the cross-cultural studies

An opportunity for integrating and defining the field: riding the full wave

Between the “bird's eye” view economists and strategists provide and the individual level analysis which provide its theoretical underpinnings to international HR, stemming from cross-cultural management frameworks, lies a critical void, or, perhaps more aptly put, a missing link. To provide that missing link IB researchers could reconcile the two hitherto separate perspectives on IB. What we need here is a deeper process understanding of the interplay between culture(s) and context(s) in

Toward multi-methods paradigmatic interplay in IB research

Rather than comply with approaches that make us hostage to other fields often relegating us to their trailing edge (Buckley & Casson, 2001), combined with our sometimes naïve ambition to be “scientists” (with all the universalistic assumptions this word carries that prove self-defeating for contextually sensitive research) what we, IB researchers need to do is to reclaim, leverage and exploit our unique capabilities and perspectives. We need to bring our distinctive identities and competencies

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