The Cultures Of International Management

Abstract

In this paper I present an approach based on Cultural Studies to conceive of and pursue cultural inquiry in international management. For this purpose, I first develop a genealogical framework for understanding how the international management literature has engaged with culture over the past forty years. This framework focuses on decisions that international management scholars have made as they attempt to address culture in their research. It also focuses on the consequences of these decisions, which have skewed the field towards certain intellectual positions and have maintained culture as a problematic concept. In the last section I present an alternative approach situated within Cultural Studies to address the problem of culture in international management scholarship.