Innovative Trends in Culture in International Business Literature: Toward Multiparadigmatic and Nonlinear Studies of Culture

Culture in International Business (CIB) literature has traditionally been dominated by the objectivist tradition, resulting in the following three problems: (1) grounded in the realist ontology, these studies detach culture from its social context, (2) since every paradigm has “blind-spots,” an excessive reliance on one paradigm results in a body of knowledge that is partial at best, and (3) such studies oversimplify culture by reducing it to linear cause–effect relations. Consequently, some scholars have shifted from this dominant trend toward multiparadigmatic studies of culture, some of which are grounded in post-positivism and facilitate nonlinear and asymmetrical analyses of culture. This conceptual article offers four examples of multiparadigmatic studies of culture, which, it argues, offer more innovative insights into cultural phenomena than is possible through monoparadigmatic and linear cause–effect studies. Insights gleaned from this article are geared toward CIB scholars, but they are just as relevant to scholars in other management subdisciplines.