Global Mindset: Theoretical Backgrounds

Although the term “global mindset” only surfaced in the American literature in the last decade of the twentieth century, its conception as a certain “worldview” had already appeared in the 1920s. Sampson and Smith (1957) developed the “Worldmindedness scale” that involved a value orientation, a frame of reference, or interest in a worldview of problems of humanity. Based on the idea of “world citizenship” (Murphy, 1945), they distinguish the concept of “worldmindedness” from “international mindedness,” the latter referring to interest in or knowledge of international affairs. Sampson and Smith consider international mindedness to be a narrower concept than worldmindedness, although they leave a discourse on the differences to other authors. The worldmindedness scale resembles, to a certain extent, the notion of “global awareness” as described in Chapter 2. In the decade after Sampson and Smith’s article, the ideas of global awareness and worldmindedness appeared in the economic and business literature. Aharoni (1966), Kindleberger (1969), and Fayerweather (1969) all describe the notion of global mindset in terms of cognitive abilities and a predisposition of senior managers in multinational companies in relationship with firm performance. However, it is Perlmutter’s (1969) typology of managerial mindset that is widely regarded as the starting point of global mindset studies (Govindarajan & Gupta, 2001; Kedia & Mukherji, 1999; Levy et al., 2007a).