Conceptualizing Culture as Communication in Management and Marketing Research

Decades of management and marketing researchers are grateful to Geert Hofstede for bringing an empirical approach to studying culture in the workplace. Since Hofstede’s (1980) original publication of the cultural values of IBM employees in 40 nations, hundreds of researchers have used the Hofstedean framework to understand culture’s influence on managerial, consumer, and organizational behavior. This includes conceptualizing culture as a nation-level construct capturing a set of shared values and measuring culture empirically through self-reports of value statements. For managers and marketers, this approach has proven fruitful. When our goals are to explain and predict the behavior of employees, managers, and consumers in an increasingly global workplace, we agree that there is utility in measuring culture empirically at the individual level, in describing and categorizing individuals from different nationalities when shared values are apparent (though some authors in this volume might question the value of such an approach), and in empirically testing the relationship between cultural values and organizational outcomes. At the same time, we believe that it is time to move beyond the empirical study of cultural values to address other facets of culture that have the power to predict marketing and management behaviors.