Revealing the research potential for the field of cross-cultural entrepreneurship: lessons from an integrative literature review

Culture plays an important role for the study of entrepreneurship. However, whereas cross-cultural research in management (CCM) has strongly evolved in the last three decades and identified different paradigms, paradigmatically diversified research is still lacking in cross-cultural entrepreneurship. To fill this gap, this study suggests an integrative literature review with two objectives: 1) provide an overview of cross-cultural entrepreneurship research with an attention to national culture, different paradigms, and research themes, and 2) point towards possibilities to enrich such research. Through an integrative literature review, 147 studies of cross-cultural entrepreneurship research were identified and regrouped according to two main paradigms in CCM research: positivism and interpretivism. The analysis of all papers led to the emergence of five research themes according to which the papers were regrouped. Based on this matrix of paradigms and research themes, all texts were categorized into 10 areas. Findings show the dominance of cross-cultural entrepreneurship studies based on the positivist paradigm of culture, whereas research rooted in the interpretive paradigm is rather unexplored and offers great potential for future research. Based on these findings, we argue that particularly rich qualitative research designs offer interesting opportunities for developing the field of cross-cultural entrepreneurship.