What connects positivism and interpretivism in cross-cultural management studies: Genealogy as a method for re-ordering disciplinary knowledge

Abstract

Cross-cultural management (CCM) studies is the discipline that investigates the interrelations between culture, management and organization, and ensuing implications. Like all disciplines, it is built upon certain presumed ‘disciplinary truths’, such as paradigmatic delineations, and assumptions of how culture should be studied differently within different paradigms. Such presumed truths easily become ‘trends’, potentially even disciplinary closures. In this article, I show how the concept of genealogy (Foucault), can help challenge prevalent ideas of how the disciplinary knowledge of CCM studies is ordered, in particular the idea that positivism and interpretivism are opposing CCM paradigms which study culture in distinct ways. It then becomes apparent how positivism and interpretivism, as selectively understood and delineated by CCM studies, are characterized by a shared focus on stable and immaterial selected aspects of culture and, consequently, suffer from the same limitations. Genealogy thus ‘un-fixes’ disciplinary knowledge and, via widening the scope of the analysis, enables CCM scholars to make choices beyond presently taken-for-granted disciplinary delineations.