Mapping India’s regional subcultures: Implications for international management

As India continues to emerge as a global economic player, scholars and practitioners increasingly need to understand the cultural heterogeneity within this large and populous nation. Based on Lenartowicz and Roth’s framework of culture assessment, we have identified nine distinct subcultural regions of India and used explanations grounded in functional and neo-institutional theories to account for the origin and maintenance of cultural distinctiveness of these regions. Further, we developed seven cultural value dimensions for the Indian society and used these to hypothesize and empirically test the existence of cultural differences within India. Results supported our hypothesized arguments. This study advances our knowledge of how global functional and institutional forces have combined with national forces to shape India’s overall culture and how more local forces have shaped its regions. Methodologically, it identifies and develops measures that specifically reflect the values of individuals living in India and uses these to assess intra-national cultural differences within this nation. Further, it suggests how use of multiple methods can enable us to understand the simultaneous presence of somewhat contradictory values within a society. The study also provides applications of the proposed cultural value dimensions and advises implications of regional subcultures for various social and organizational phenomena.