Culture and Hofstede (1980) in international business studies: a bibliometric study in top management journals/Cultura e hofstede (1980) na investigacao em negocios internacionais: um estudo bibliometrico em periodicos internacionais de administracao /Cultura y hofstede (1980) en la investigacion de ...
| Autor | Ferreira, Manuel Portugal |
| Cargo | Artigo--Gestao de Pessoas em Organizacoes - Report |
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INTRODUCTION
Competition and firms' operations are increasingly international in nature, and, being aware of the opportunities and threats emerging in foreign countries, managers can hardly fail. Indeed, many executives monitor what their foreign competitors are doing, how the industry is evolving and how the economy in foreign countries is progressing as they do in their own country. Therefore, be it launching a new product, setting a new subsidiary, engaging in an additional cross-border acquisition or broadening their business network taking one more partner, executives are required to understand the challenges of operating in foreign locations. We often refer to this growing interdependence as globalization, but despite the terminology used, these changes have also spurred International Business (IB) research to delve into new domains, or simply dig deeper into reasonably known phenomena. National culture and how countries differ in their cultural traits, norms, values, beliefs, behaviors and ways of doing things (KOGUT; SINGH, 1988; MOROSINI; SHANE; SINGH, 1998; BROUTHERS, K.; BROUTHERS, L., 2001; SHENKAR, 2001), has thus captured substantial research attention.
The influence of culture in international business (IB) studies is well established. Culture and cultural differences seem to permeate a wide array of IB decisions. Over the past three decades, culture has been an important facet when researching such IB decisions as the selection of entry modes (KOGUT; SINGH, 1988; BARKEMA; VERMEULEN, 1997, 1998; MOROSINI et al., 1998) and location (ERRAMILLI; AGARWAL; KIM, 1997). However, its influence also extends to research on such phenomena as expatriation and human resource management (AYCAN et al., 2000), management and performance of multinationals (GOMEZ-MEJIA; PALICH, 1997), to point only a few.
Perhaps the most notable contribution to the current state of development of our understanding on how much does culture actually matter was that of the Dutch scholar Geert Hofstede's work and more notably his 1980 book on Culture's consequences. In several of his following publications, Hofstede refined and extended his original contribution. Hofstede (1980) created a cultural taxonomy for the study of how cultures differ. Specifically, he advanced four cultural dimensions of national culture (albeit later expanded to five and updated). Arguably, one of the hallmarks of Hofstede's work was to make quantifiable cultural attributes that were previously taken as an undefined broad understanding of how people in different countries behaved, their attitudes and cultural traits. Ferreira and colleagues (2009) noted that a majority of the extant IB research had included cultural dimensions or considerations either as the dependent variable, the independent or as a controlling one.
Our primary purpose in this paper is not to fully review Hofstede's cultural dimensions, as such reviews may be found in other papers (EARLEY; GIBSON, 2002; TARAS; KIRKMAN; STEEL, 2010). For instance, Hofstede (2001) himself examined how has culture been included in empirical studies and Boyacigiller and Adler (1991) claimed the need to overcome the parochialism in IB research concerning how we deal and treat culture. We specifically aim at understanding what has truly been the impact of Hofstede's work (which we use as a proxy for culture) and what can we learn from it. Methodologically we conduct a bibliometric study of the articles quoting Hofstede's (1980) work that were published in eight top ranked business/management journals that are either IB specific or that are known for publishing IB research: Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Administrative Science Quarterly, International Business Review, Journal of International Business Studies, Organization Science, Strategic Management Journal and Journal of World Business. We identified 665 articles quoting Hofstede (1980) over the thirty-one years from 1980 to 2010, published in these journals that comprise our sample. This selection allows us to identify IB specific articles but also international strategy and international management.
This study has thus the value of contributing to our understanding of how has culture been included on IB research over the past three decades, and contributes beyond existing literature reviews (LEUNG et al., 2005; KIRKMAN; LOWE; GIBSON, 2006; MINKOV; HOFSTEDE, 2011) by not only the methodology employed but also as it provides an overall perspective on the field. This perspective is captured by not restricting the analysis to a single journal, using a large dataset, and three procedures of analysis. The co-citation analyses permitted a better understanding of the intellectual ties among scholars. The longitudinal analysis of how the research themes in the articles published evolved using Hofstede further allowed to detect research shifts.
This paper is organized as follows. Firstly, we very briefly review Hofstede's contribution and more broadly how culture matters in a variety of organizational contexts in international business studies. Secondly, we describe the method employed and the samples. The results, in the third section, are followed by a broad discussion, pointing out limitations and avenues for future inquiry.
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CULTURE AND HOFSTEDE
The influence of Hofstede's work on culture and how it is being compared across countries is recognized beyond the academy. A ranking of the Wall Street Journal, published in May 2008, on the most influential business thinkers, identified Hofstede as the sixteenth most influential scholar, following others such as Hamel, Thomas Friedman, Kotler, Mintzberg, Michael Porter, and ahead of many well reputed scholars, including Clayton Christensen, Jack Welch and Tom Peters. Moreover, citation analyses on the top business/management journals showed that Hofstede's work, especially his 1980 book Culture consequences: International differences in work related values, is among the most cited by scholars.
Traditionally, prior to Hofstede's work, research on cross-cultural issues, but also research on other IB-related subjects, tended to treat culture both as a single variable and as something that was out there, highly complex, multidimensional, largely unquantifiable and that had a somewhat unmeasurable impact on an array of decisions and practices. Put differently, culture was an omnipresent black box that often "explained" why some otherwise unaccounted differences would exist between two countries, their people and firms.
Hofstede's work came to advance research in several ways. It showed that culture could be quantified and actually compared across nations. It showed that researchers could fragment culture into smaller, perhaps more manageable and identifiable pieces. For this purpose, he advanced four cultural dimensions. This disaggregation is important as it allows a better comprehension of the specific cultural traits that may influence a given phenomenon or action. In addition, it contributed substantially to other theoretical advancements that followed. For instance, both Schwartz's (1994) work on values, and project GLOBE's (HOUSE et al., 2004) cultural attributes and measurements have benefitted from Hofstede's work.
Hofstede's studies on culture sought to identify and characterize individual traits that were used as national profiles of a society, to better understand how societies differ. In fact, Hofstede (1991:21) conceptualized culture as "the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one group from another" and much of the research has then emphasized these groups as national identities. Described briefly, Hofstede's dimensions were: power distance (related to the social inequality and how people deal with authority being unequally distributed), individualism-collectivism (and the prevalence of the individual and the group as guiding individuals ' behaviors), masculinity-femininity (and the drive towards achievement versus the concern with others) and uncertainty avoidance (pertaining to how individuals in different countries deal with uncertainty). In later works, Hofstede and Bond (1988) added a fifth dimension--confucian dynamism (also termed as long term orientation)--, and in the 2010 edition of the book Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind, a sixth dimension--indulgence vs. self-restraint.
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METHOD
In this article, we conducted a set of bibliometric analyses based on citation and cocitation data, extending to the examination of the more prolific authors and institutions and the research themes delved into that have used Hofstede's 1980 work on culture's consequences. It is worth noting, however, that albeit we use Hofstede's (1980) as a key marker--his contribution is arguably disputed--we aim at the broader understanding of how culture truly matters on IB research.
3.1. Bibliometric study
In this paper we conducted a bibliometric analysis of the articles published in eight top journals for IB research that cited Hofstede's (1980) work on culture. Bibliometric studies are not novel in business/management research as scholars occasionally have the need to systematize existing knowledge by reviewing the state of the art of the extant research. Therefore, bibliometric studies are conducted to observe trends (WHITE; MCCAIN, 1998), themes examined (SCHILDT; ZAHRA; SILLANPAA, 2006; FURRER; THOMAS; GOUSSEV SKAIA, 2008), GOUSSEUSKAIA publication record of the scholars in a certain field (CORNELIUS; LANDSTRON; PERSSON, 2006), or the impact of a single scholar (FERREIRA, 2011), the research record of authors and institutions (SHANE, 1997), which articles are most cited (RATNATUNGA; ROMANO, 1997), and the intellectual structure of discipline (RAMOS-RODRIGUEZ; RUIZNAVARRO, 2004).
Bibliometric studies rely on the examination of data collected from a variety of documental sources. More often they rely on articles published in...
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