Representational Strategies Two: Establishing a Canon

By the time we enter the 1980s, ICCM has become a significant subdiscipline within MOS, significant enough to suggest that something approaching a canon had emerged. By canon, we refer to: a) a set of core texts that are considered valid and referential within the field, and taken as (virtually) axiomatically central to it; b) a body of knowledge, methods and principles that are held to be valid and taken as a guiding frame for activity within the field; c) as a result of the preceding two, a set of boundaries that can be used to delimit or demarcate the field. The canon is built on the foundations established by Kerr and colleagues as well as other foundational figures such as Richman, Farmer, Haire, Abegglen, McClelland and others. However, it begins to coalesce more visibly and institutionally around the work of Hofstede following the publication of Culture’s Consequences in 1980. This represented a watershed (Boyacigiller et al., 1996); indeed for some, it is taken as the birth of cross-cultural management as a bone fide empirical field of study. We elect, however, not to focus directly on the Hofstede text here, principally because it is already so well known and has received more than adequate critical treatment in the literature (for example Ailon, 2008; Dorfman & Howell, 1988; Fougere & Moulettes, 2006; Kirkman, Lowe & Gibson, 2006; McSweeney, 2002; Søndergaard, 1994; Triandis, 1982).