A Linguistic and Philosophical Analysis of Emic and Etic and their Use in International Business Research

The purpose of this paper is to examine ways in which cross-cultural research in international business can use emic–etic approaches more effectively. The majority of research conducted in the field has been etic, while the cross-cultural data used by the researchers have been emic in nature. This resulted in producing ethnocentric results which are biased towards Western perspectives. We call for a re-evaluation of the importance of in-depth qualitative analysis in international business research. We go back to the origins of emic and etic in linguistics and conduct a linguistic and philosophical analysis of these terms to demonstrate that the emic–etic distinction is not helpful for adequately studying cross-cultural data. We provide examples from linguistics, kinship, and from international business research on German-Polish acquisitions. We demonstrate that what conventional etic cross-cultural research perceives to be a problem is often an opportunity to gain deep insight. We find that emic matters in some cases more that etic, and that the emic can often add value beyond the etic. We conclude that a research strategy employing emic and etic approaches is a vital step to enable cross-cultural researchers to obtain more adequate and meaningful results. While most of researchers have treated emic and etic as dichotomous, we demonstrate the benefits of treating them as complementary approaches.