INTERNATIONAL COMPARATIVE
MANAGEMENT
SUMMARY OF THE PAPERS
,OVERVIEW OF THE PAPERS:
A review of cross-cultural methodologies for organizational research: a best practices approach
By Bryan S. Schaffer and Christine M. Riordan
Japanese lifetime employment: a century’s perspective
Chiaki Moriguchi and Hiroshi Ono
Crafting an analytic framework: three pillars of institutions
By Scott
Multinational enterprises and local contexts: The opportunities and challenges of multiple
embeddedness.
By Klaus E Meyer, Ram Mudambi and Rajneesh Narula
Comparative and International Corporate Governance
By Ruth V. Aguilera & Gregory Jackson
Trust, Growth, and Well Being: New Evidence and Policy Implications
By Yann Algan & Pierre Cahuc
Corruption from a cross‐cultural perspective
John Hooker
,A REVIEW OF CROSS-CULTURAL METHODOLOGIES FOR ORGANIZATIONAL
RESEARCH: A BESTPRACTICES APPROACH
Bryan S. Schaffer and Christine M. Riordan
As business practices become more global, many theoretical constructs commonly used in domestic
research are being applied in new cross-cultural arenas. This trend has prompted researchers to
highlight potential methodological issues associated with conducting this type of research. Some of
these issues include whether the researchers take an emic or etic perspective, whether they treat or
define culture appropriately in the development of their research questions, and whether they
establish equivalence in their selection of samples, their administration of surveys, and in their
operationalization of constructs across different cultural groups. If researchers ignore the
methodological issues common to cross-cultural research, they risk interpreting findings that may
actually be meaningless, inconclusive, or misguiding.
STAGE 1: DEVELOPMENT OF CROSS-CULTURAL RESEARCH QUESTIONS
Researchers must first establish whether their studies will have an emic or etic perspective, and they
must determine the way in which they will define or treat culture.
The Emic-Etic Issue
The emic approach focuses on examining a construct from within a specific culture and understanding
that construct as the people from within that culture understand it. They can be considered cross-
cultural when they take other cultures into account. This type of research often takes constructs,
theories, or measures that have been developed in one culture and adapts them for use within other
cultures.
An important issue for researchers to consider when using an emic approach is that shared frames of
references may not exist across cultures. The unique features of a particular culture are incorporated
into the theory, hypotheses, measurement, and analyses, and therefore generalizability across
cultures may be limited. A comparison between two cultures is made in this research design, despite
the fact that the analyses are conducted in only one culture.
Whereas the emic approach captures important aspects of the particular culture under study, the etic
approach employs broader comparative analyses involving two or more cultures. Specifically, etic
cross-cultural research involves developing an understanding of a construct by explicitly comparing it
across cultures using predetermined characteristics. The main assumption with this type of research is
that shared frames of references (same meaning for a construct) exist across culturally diverse
samples. Thus, key constructs (and construct measurement) are usually applied to all samples in the
same way, ultimately allowing for more generalizability.
Cross-cultural researchers often use the etic approach because of certain features that are thought to
facilitate the research process. For example, differing events around the world might be viewed with
broader perspectives, providing a basis for which similarities and differences can be recognized.
Researchers may also consider this approach to be the most practical in terms of financial limitations
and time pressures. If constructs are perceived to be generalizable across cultures, resource
expenditures will likely decrease because researchers will not have to study the emic aspects of each
culture individually.
Despite such advantages, researchers often inappropriately use the etic approach to make cross-
cultural comparisons without fully taking into account some relevant culture-specific emics, which is
called imposed etics. This is problematic because it can influence researchers to generalize
comparative findings to other settings when true differences or similarities may actually be due to
underlying cultural factors.
, Best practice
As a best-practice approach, we suggest a combined emic-etic or a derived etic approach. Researchers
should first attain emic knowledge about all of the cultures in the study and then make cross-cultural
links between the emic aspects of each culture. Researchers should search for universal (or derived
etic) components of constructs by assessing whether the emerging dimensions are unique to one
culture, comparable across cultures, or overlapping.
Treatment of culture
Another important issue in the development of the cross-cultural research question is determining or
understanding how culture will be treated in the research design and how it will be operationalized.
Often, country is used as a proxy for culture. However, many countries have distinct subcultures
within their borders and this will be overlooked when using country. So ultimately, the construct of
culture should have a theoretical role in the cross-cultural research framework.
Many researchers rely on Hofstede’s cultural value dimensions, instead of measuring values directly.
An additional issue regarding the treatment of culture is the level of analysis at which relationships are
to be observed. One problem in cross-cultural research is that there are often two levels of theorizing
that if not coordinated effectively into a research design, may actually compete with one another.
These levels include the individual level, where psychological processes, attitudes, and values are often
studied, and the societal level, where political and anthropological trends are common.
Three methods for dealing with level of analysis issues, which can be utilized in cross-cultural research,
are the interrater agreement index (rwg), within and between analysis (WABA), and hierarchical linear
modeling (HLM).
Best practices
To ensure the integrity of their cross-cultural research, researchers should pay attention to whether
their treatment of culture is appropriate. First, researchers should minimize the use of country as a
proxy for culture. Cultural determinants that can help with this issue include language, proximity and
topography, religion, economic development, technological development, political boundaries,
industry type, and climate. These differences separate cultural groups.
Second, researchers should incorporate culture into their theoretical frameworks.
Finally, related to the important role of theory in cross-cultural research, researchers should take care
to reflect on the nature of cross-cultural differences found in their studies.
The final best practice recommendation for this section concerns Hofstede’s cultural value
dimensions. We urge researchers to directly measure these dimensions in the specific research
context. We believe efforts to operationalize these dimensions in the particular research setting will
be more fruitful than relying on pre-established categorizations based on Hofstede’s research.
STAGE 2: ALIGNMENT OF RESEARCH CONTEXTS
This stage is about aligning of research contexts and refers to establishing congruence between
studied cultures. There are two issues.
