Cross-cultural Studies Revisited in International Business

국제비즈니스에서 비교문화 연구의 재검토

Growth of researches addressing cross-culture in international business is exponential. This article reviews the extant researches around the national culture and describes the various conceptualization of culture through discussion of some of popular models of national culture. This article presented some of the most important issues in international business surrounding globalization, especially convergence and divergence of cultures and cultural changes. Global rapid changes in international business environment request the reconsideration of the assumption of cultural stability and the simple view of culture, which tends to examine the static influence of a few cultural factors in isolation form other cultural factors and contextual elements. This paper identifies a valid cultural grouping and proposes the following typology of the possible methodologies in international business; Ethnological description, Use of proxies, Direct values inference, and Indirect values inference. Rather than selecting a single methodology, it appears to be more appropriate to use multi-method in the cross-cultural international business research. It has been shown that cultural change is intertwined with socioeconomic-institutional variables, and that these variables may also add to determine culture contemporarily. This paper also explained the dynamics of culture as multi-level, multi-layer constructs. According to this model, we may understand how the dynamic nature of culture conveys the top-down-bottom-up processes where one cultural level affects changes in other level of culture.