Working Paper Series,
Lund University, Institute of Economic Research

Abstract: Along with an increasingly globalized business environment and a strongly held corporate belief that the world can be rationally managed, the last two decades have witnessed a growing demand for normative models dealing with cross-cultural management issues. This trend has allowed cross-cultural management to establish itself as a significant research field, with much of the initial inspiration coming from Hofstede and his cultural model from 1980. In this paper, our intention is not to merely repeat the already formulated objections to the latter model concerning its ontology, epistemology and methodology, but rather to focus on the very words of Hofstede himself in his second edition of Culture’s Consequences (2001), which he wrote partly in order to address the criticisms that his work received in the previous twenty years and to demonstrate that his findings are still valid. Our main aim here will be to explore how the discourse generated by Hofstede through his model and his comments on his results constructs the world by dividing it especially according to dichotomies of 'development'/'underdevelopment' and 'modernity'/'tradition'.

Keywords: Critical management studies; cross-cultural management; discourse analysis; Hofstede; postcolonialism.

20 pages, March 17, 2006

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