Social Anthropology, Business Studies, and Cultural Issues || Preface: Social Anthropology, Business Studies, and Cultural Issues

Preface: Social Anthropology, Business Studies, and Cultural IssuesAuthor(s): Malcolm ChapmanSource: International Studies of Management & Organization, Vol. 26, No. 4, SocialAnthropology, Business Studies, and Cultural Issues (Winter, 1996/1997), pp. 3-29Published by: M.E. Sharpe, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40397353 .

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Int. Studies ofMgt. & Org., vol. 26, no. 4, Winter 1996-97, pp. 3-29. © 1997 ME. Sharpe, Inc. 0020-8825 / $9.50 + 0.00.

Malcolm Chapman

Preface Social Anthropology, Business Studies, and Cultural Issues

Social anthropology - Some background notes

This issue of ISMO concerns "culture." It is only fair to say that this could mean virtually anything. The following discussion makes some attempt to specify the range of interests and ideas that emerge from the articles. It may be useful, and I hope not too self-indulgent, to begin with some autobiography - to explain my own position and give some background to my comments. I began learning in the field of social anthropology in Oxford in 1970, guided by Edwin Ardener, whom many (including myself) consider one of the outstanding intellects in British postwar social anthropology (see, for example, Chapman, 1989; Hastrup, 1989). Social anthropology in Oxford at the time was in the full flush of a theoretical revolution that has often been summarized as a shift from the study of "function" to the study of "meaning" (Ardener, 1971a; Pocock, 1961).

Social anthropology in Great Britain had been institutionalized in the period between the wars under two major figures - Bronislaw Malinowksi and A.R. Radcliffe-Brown. These two were not, in their own view, in the same theoretical camp, but they are perceived, in retrospect, as sharing some important characteristics of the period. In particular, both conceived of their subject as a "science of society." Radcliffe-Brown, in 1957 (late in his career), published a collection of essays from previous decades and called it A Natural Science of Society. Malinowski, in 1944, published a theoretical manifesto called A Scientific Theory of Culture. There is neither space nor need to go into the detail of the arguments, but the message was clear enough - societies were to be studied objectively, as if they were biological species or bits of the physical world; they were to be observed, classified, and detailed in such a way that a closed and determinate science would be developed - a science that, bit by bit, would

Malcolm Chapman is Lecturer in International Business in the Centre for International Business, University of Leeds (CIBUL), School of Business, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK (e-mail: [email protected]).

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4 MALCOLM CHAPMAN (UNITED KINGDOM)

come to encompass and explain all possibilities. The tremendous success of the natural sciences over the previous two centuries in carrying forward such a research program gave driving energy to a similar ambition in the social sphere.

Within this program, the anthropologist was an objective observer, a scientist. He or she might "participate" in order to get a close view, but that was only the better to achieve objectivity. This idea of social inquiry bore a close familial resemblance to the development, in other spheres of inquiry, of behaviorism. "Behavior" in men and women was, so it seemed, objectively available to the onlooker, just as it was in animals (for conceptually related behaviorist manifes- tos, see Watson [1919] for psychology and Bloomfield [1933] for linguistics).

The "scientific" ambitions of social anthropology were vigorously pursued through ethnographic research. Various fashions in theory coexisted (tending to be rooted in individualistic psychology in the United States, following Franz Boas and Margaret Mead, and in collectivist social inquiry in Europe, following Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown, and through them Durkheim, Weber, and others), but adherence to an objective, progressive, and scientific program ran through the various fashions (functionalism, structural-functionalism, and so on). After a few decades of activity, however, it seemed that the science, which had long been promised, should have been emerging in a coherent form. It was not, and some of the younger postwar practitioners became disaffected. The first signs of revolt were visible in the early 1960s (e.g., Leach, 1961; Pocock, 1961). Through the 1960s, a series of polemic incendiaries were exploded (e.g., Evans-Pritchard, 1962; Needham, 1962). By the end ofthat decade, the notion of social anthropology as an objective science was in full conceptual retreat. Mature statements of the changes involved became possible (Ardener, 1971b).

The "science of society," as originally conceived, had been objectivist and behaviorist. It is not surprising that this science had not dealt in any convincing form with language (Ardener, 1971a), for you do not "observe" language but participate in it. It is not solely an object to be measured and described, but a discourse to be understood. Attempts are commonly made within the behavioral literature to disguise this, with language sometimes being called "verbal behavior" (e.g., Triandis and Berry, 1980), but such expressions serve only to demonstrate how steeped in behaviorism their users are. A phrase like "verbal behavior" adds nothing to conceptual clarity, but serves instead as an evasion of a problem. It is not surprising, therefore, that it was essentially through exploration of language, linguistic analogies, symbolism, and metaphor that social anthropology con- fronted the inadequacy of its own "scientific" self-definition Ardener, 1971a; Crick, 1976; Douglas, 1966; Lévi-Strauss, 1963a, 1963b; Turner, 1967).

An intellectual revolution occurred. Social anthropology moved quite rapidly from being a (would-be) science of society to being (once again) one of the humanities, concerned with interpretation and meaning. By the early 1970s, the conceptual arguments had been largely won (although, of course, there were pockets of resistance). It was into this social anthropology that I was initiated.



PREFACE 5

The Oxford Institute of Social Anthropology, at the time, still contained the recently retired E.E. Evans-Pritchard (whose 1941 publication The Nuer became for many the archetypal ethnography), many of whose students and junior colleagues were making the running in the arguments - Godfrey Lienhardt (1961), Edwin Ardener (1971a, 1971b), Rodney Needham (1962), Mary Douglas (1966), and others. It came to be recognized that Evans-Pritchard's work had long contained the seeds of developments that were then considered avant-garde (Witch- craft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande [1937], was particularly cited; see Ardener, 1971a; Douglas, 1970).

This recent intellectual revolution has already been summarized as "a shift from function to meaning." Under the "functionalist" theory of the previous era, every social phenomenon was given a "function" by the analyst, and fine heights of tautology were reached. Aspects of social life that seemed divorced from crude material well-being - like a great deal of speech, ritual, symbolism, and the like - were reduced, in this theoretical perspective, to the rank of mere sup- porters or validators of other systems ("the function of myth is to validate the incest taboo," for example). Under the new scheme of things, expressive systems were to be studied in their own right, as systems of meaning.

Under the old dispensation, the analyst was objective: It was he or she that defined the relevant categories of observation. Once language and systems of

meaning were under consideration, however, this confident objectivity also nec-

essarily foundered; the study of meaning requires, beyond any argument, close attention to the point of view of the social actors. In a dialog between, say, observer and observed, there was meaning to be perceived from both sides, and there was no guarantee that the observer had any unambiguous access to the meanings attached to phenomena by those that were observed. In consequence, social anthropologists came to perceive that a great deal of their previous practice had involved imposing observer-defined categories upon the data, and that this had often been mistaken - it had been conceptually ethnocentric, it had traduced native meanings, and so on. As a result, close attention to the structure and meaning of

indigenous categories and classifications, once an eccentricity within the anthropological enterprise, became central to it (Heelas, 1970). Behavior could no longer be "observed"; rather, it had to be understood and experienced from within, and inter-

preted. Behavior itself could no longer be conceived as material action, accessible to the observer; instead, all "behavior" had meaning, and unless the observer had access to the systems of meaning (which access could not be had merely through "observation"), then observations were useless. The very category "behavior" came to seem unhelpful (Ardener, 1973). As Ardener said:

The structuralist approach encroaches upon an established mythology about ordered thought itself, and echoes bigger battles in the philosophy of science. For this reason, there is, I suggest, a life-or-death note about the various debates. That the small subject of anthropology should have been called upon



6 MALCOLM CHAPMAN ßJNITED KINGDOM)

to house its most powerful statement in the humane studies may be an accident of academic history. [Ardener, 1989, p. 59; originally 1971b]

Accident or not, it happened. "The small subject of anthropology," particularly in Britain, was where structuralism and everything associated with it first flourished in an Anglophone environment. All the influences flowing from Saussure (1916), through the Prague school of structural linguistics and through Lévi- Strauss, appeared in Oxford at this time. Some of the first translators of the works of Lévi-Strauss were Oxford anthropologists (Lévi-Strauss, 1963b); the same people also translated and reassessed the works of the Année Sociologique school, which now seem so fundamental a part of the intellectual background of modern anthropology (Durkheim and Mauss, 1963).

Just as Oxford was (among the places) where structuralism first flourished in an Anglophone environment, so, too, it was the place where many conse-

quences of structuralism were first felt - where the term post-structuralism (some would argue) was coined (Hastrup, 1978), where the riot of deconstruction was given empirical application, and so on. As a young graduate student in Oxford in the early 1970s, I was engaged with a group of people who edited a journal called the Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford (indeed, for several years, I was one of the editors). It is worth noting that we had, by the early and middle 1970s, fully internalized Saussure and Lévi-Strauss; that we were reading and criticizing, often in the original French versions, Althusser, Foucault, Barthes, and Derrida.

One would, of course, now want to add "for what that is worth," to this boast of erstwhile glamorous reading. The point is not that we were reading unambigu- ously valuable work but that we were, early, reading sources that a decade or two later became fashionable within business and management studies. Having gone through some of this work and come out the other side, one can afford to be

sceptical about some of it. Ardener said, in a presentation in 1983:

For "intellectuals" many "structuralist" themes, and ideas like "deconstruction," are being treated as "post-modern" novelties. From social anthropology we can see that this is a misconception. They are, of course, in a sense novelties outside social anthropology . . . [1989, p. 253, n.l; first published 1985]

... We may ignore the embarrassing party going on in criticism around the corpses of structuralism and its congeners. [Ardener, 1985; see 1989, p. 254, n. 16]

When, therefore, Gareth Morgan addressed the British Academy of Manage- ment (BAM) in 1993 at its annual conference on the general subject of metaphor, and the BAM newsletter reported that this "just leaves a few crusty old positiv- ists wondering where this extreme philosophical relativism is going to get us"

(Stony Stratford, 1993, p. 15), we are clearly in a different time zone (this is not to criticize Morgan, who has done a remarkable job of carrying the arguments to a new public; see 1986, 1993).

The arguments, very crudely, had opposed two models. One was positivist,



PREFACE 7

objectivist, behaviorist, scientific, based on observer categories, concerned with measurement and function; the other was interpretive, nonpositivist, based on indigenous categories, concerned with meaning. Social anthropology developed itself in the 1960s and 1970s into a sophisticated expression of the second of these two models, on the basis of a long-lasting and sophisticated critique of the first

Social anthropology and business studies

It is a commonplace observation that business studies of all kinds have been heavily influenced by North American thought and practice. It is also easy to demonstrate that the positivist, scientific model has been overwhelmingly dominant in management education (Mulligan, 1987; Pierson et al., 1959). Redding has recently said of comparative management theory that "there is one central challenge which dominates the field in an intellectual sense and that is the bankruptcy of empirical positivism" (1994, p. 345). As a social anthropologist, coming into a leading British business school in 1989, 1 was genuinely surprised to find that many intellectual developments I had taken for granted for almost two decades had apparently passed by unnoticed. The research paradigm that was promulgated was well and rigorously conveyed, but it was unselfconsciously positivist - unself-consious in the sense that there seemed to be little sense that an alternative even existed, never mind that in some spheres of research the alternative had effectively taken over.

Various issues are relevant here. One should note that social anthropology had grown up as a discipline specializing in the study of (what were then termed) "primitive societies." This gave the discipline many strengths. Multicultural and cross-cultural considerations were built into the subject from the outset, and considerations of meaning became inescapable, as they did not for monocultural subjects. Because the anthropologist was often the only academic studying his or her particular community, the subject was driven, of practical necessity, to methodological holism (the anthropologist was linguist, theologian, agronomist, polit- ical scientist, and so forth). The technique of participant observation, using locally relevant languages, over a multiple-year period, generated a commitment to deep understanding, next to which other methods and disciplines sometimes seemed superficial.

There were problems, however. While the restriction to "primitive societies" had brought rewards, it was difficult to shake off. British anthropologists re- treated only slowly from the old colonies of the erstwhile British Empire, "coming home" (Cole, 1977; Jackson, 1987) via the geographical fringes of Europe. Modern business, the business corporation, the multinational enterprise seemed far away from traditional preoccupations, and it was and is clear that social anthropologists in general found it difficult to focus on them (the directories of interests of members listed by the Association of Social Anthropologists of the Commonwealth, for example, or by the American Anthropological Assocation




provide clear enough evidence of this). My own move in 1989 into a business school was regarded, both among fellow anthropologists and among the receiv- ing community, as eccentric - perhaps laughable, perhaps reckless, probably interesting, but certainly not normal.

If anthropology has wielded little influence on business studies, then anthropology is greatly to blame. Nevertheless, we can note that those features that have been drawn out as the strengths of anthropology in its "primitive" guise - concern with cross-cultural and multicultural issues, concern with language and meaning, visceral commitment to holistic analysis and long-term ethnographic study - read today like a litany of avant-garde methodological virtues as they might be rehearsed at a business studies conference (for example, and in my own experience, at conferences of the Academy of International Business, the Euro- pean International Business Academy, the British Academy of Management, and the Association for Consumer Research).

Ardener, as we saw, considered it a "historical accident'9 that social anthropology had briefly become the crucible within which a major intellectual revolution in the humanities had taken place. A case could be made, on the basis of comments in the previous section, that some features of anthropological activity (cross-cultural and holistic by nature) made social anthropology fertile ground for the new ideas. But there is no wish or need to claim pride or precedence. It is, however, interesting to consider how these ideas penetrated other academic areas, and over what time frame. Literary studies took to the ideas with enthusi- asm. So, too, did some aspects of sociology, which shared a good deal of its early intellectual lineage with social anthropology. Within the broad field of business and management studies (those things, say, that get studied, taught, and researched in business schools), it was in organization studies, with its own close links to sociology, that the ideas were first developed. Manning (1979), Morgan (1980), and Smircich (1983) are all good examples; we might note the characteristic titular concentration, within these references, on "metaphor," where meanings have become insecure and indeterminate (see also Burrell and Morgan, 1979). It is no accident that the analogous debates within social anthropology twenty or so years previously had also raged around the problems of metaphor, so clearly an affront to positivist truth (see the debate concerning the reality status of the Nuer statement that "twins are birds," in Man, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, between 1966 and 1969). Consumer behavior, with its material crying out for considerations of meaning and performativity, was also quite quick off the mark, coming to these issues in the early and mid-1980s (see the Journal of Consumer Research and Advances in Consumer Research). However, within large areas of marketing, finance and accounting, human-resource management, and production and operations management, the ideas in question have had either limited or little effect (this statement is controversial only to be brief; plenty of reservation and nuance would be required for a full discussion). It seems to be generally true on the business and management



PREFACE 9

studies circuit that the positivist research program, with its theory, hypotheses, data collection (questionnaires), multiple regressions, and tests of validity, re- mains the standard fare.

Within the general attention to cross-cultural differences, we need to notice a local difference of emphasis between Europe and the United States. These are

deep waters, and it would never do to suggest that one led or lagged the other, although in certain areas and for limited periods such a case might be made. It has often been noted, however, that anthropology in the United States has had, and retains, a much stronger psychological and behaviorist streak than anthropology in the United Kingdom. This derives partly from founding figures such as Boas, and partly from the enormous energy that has gone into the positivist psychological project in the United States. From Europe, the United States looked behavorist:

The cultural anthropology of the U.S. also provides parallel modes of looking at our problem: the linguists and analysts of categories of cognition and the like. The behaviourist obsession characteristic of the American school sits ill upon them. [Ardener, 1989, p. 62; first published as 1971b]

From the United States, European concerns sometimes looked, by contrast, "pre- scientific" (see Householder, 1957, p. 156).

One trajectory of ideas growing out of structuralism has been toward post- structuralism and deconstruction. This has been avidly taken up in the United States from its French sources, particularly at Yale. This, however, has only recently started to have a major effect (mercifully, perhaps) on business and

management studies. The United States also had its own anthropological linguistic tradition, cen-

tered particularly on the figures of Whorf, Sapir, and Pike. Many of the concerns of the European tradition can be found in the work of Whorf and Sapir, while Pike's work remained, as Ardener regretfully noted, "a theory of 'behavior' "

(Ardener, 1989, p. 35; citing Pike, 1954, 1955, 1960). There is no longer any great conceptual risk or originality to be had in point-

ing out that business and management studies have tended to be ethnocentric in their development and application. Business and management studies are, indeed, largely North American creations; it is not surprising, therefore, that they should be more readily applicable to the social context from which they have

grown than they are to the rest of the world. From a social-anthropological point of view, analytic ethnocentrism of this kind, once acknowledged, is an entirely honorable feature. Unrecognized and unacknowledged, it is disabling.

Given their North American origin, it is also not surprising that business and management studies have been strongly influenced by the behavioral and positivist tendencies in North American social sciences. This has had particular relevance for the development of cross-cultural business and management studies, which have typically grown not out of anthropology but out of social psy-




chology. Earlier studies have been discussed by Boddewyn (1969, 1970), and there is not space here for any detail. Boddewyn notes, however, that a major concern for the immediate postwar interest in "comparative management" was the role of management in economic development; this naturally brought econo- mists and industrial-relations scholars (among others) into the field, and some valuable contributions were made (Farmer and Richman, 1965; Granick, 1962; Harbison and Myers, 1959). This work was in itself varied, and it would be dangerous to characterize it too simplistically; nevertheless, it had the virtue, from our current perspective, that it tended to treat societies as systems and to aspire to some kind of methodological and empirical holism (also under the influence of academic sociology). Significant European contributions were also made (see, e.g., Crozier, 1964; Hofstede and Kassem, 1976; Lammers and Hick- son, 1979). Culture also became incorporated into the strategy literature, particularly through the work of Child (198 1).

In the United States, however, the reorganization of business schools in the 1950s and 1960s under the aegis of basic disciplines had the effect of putting academic psychology at the center of business and management studies. The first systematic scientific attempts at the study of "cross-cultural management" were made, with positivist pyschology the driving force and anthropology nowhere in sight. Central here is the work of Haire, Ghiselli, and Porter (1966), who said:

We are psychologists, and we tend to approach problems and do research as psychologists do. In this case, it has meant, methodologically, the conviction that only the most precise and quantifiable knowledge possible is knowledge in the proper sense, [p. v]

This, a British anthropologist might reflect, is five years after Leach published Rethinking Anthropology; the methodological and disciplinary ambitions of anthropology and psychology are here seen to be a quarter of a century and more out of step. Roberts, in her influential paper of 1970, echoed Haire and his colleagues and seemed to speak for the majority of workers in the field of "culture and management" when she said: "The point of view taken here is necessarily psychological. The author's biases determine the kinds of questions covered and the methodological strategies discussed." (p. 327)

Social anthropology and cross-cultural equivalence

Why does the absence of anthropological sources matter? We can go back to Haire, Ghiselli, and Porter: In discussing the design of their research instrument (a questionnaire administered to 3,600 managers in 14 countries in 1 1 languages), they said:

This form of tapping attitudes [the questionnaire] has real drawbacks - among them being that it makes it harder to go into great depth in the exploration of



PREFACE 11

attitudes. Its virtue, however - and the consideration that seemed overriding in this case - is that it is possible to assure oneself that each respondent answered exactly the same questions, and that the results are strictly comparable from one group to another. [1966, p. 2]

The tradeoff between depth and breadth is an inevitable feature of social-scientific research, and no criticism is due. What fascinates here, however, is that the authors are insisting that it is precisely lack of depth that allows them to be sure that "each respondent answered exactly the same questions," and that "the results are strictly comparable from one group to another." They secure this result, in their own view, by careful attention to translation, while remarking:

a study of cultures that approaches the comparative problem through language is immediately trapped in the fact that language itself is part of the culture. To whatever extent one disregards the differences in connotation in the interest of comparability, one may be spuriously removing true cultural differences which are germane and important to the study itself. Questions in this study had to be rephrased or eliminated to meet this difficulty, [p. 4]

This is the search for "equivalence" in cross-cultural questionnaires. It is later echoed by Berry, who, at the beginning of a major compendium of "cross-cultural

psychology," says: "If the divisions and structures of concepts and categories are different, then it may be argued that conceptual equivalence does not exist"

(Berry, 1980, p. 10; see also Adler, 1983, p. 34). It is noteworthy that neither Haire et al. nor Berry takes their own caveat seriously. Haire et al. said "to whatever extent one disregards the differences in connotation," and Berry said "if the divisions and structures of concepts and categories are different," but the "whatever" and the "if" remain unexplored possibilities, ironed out by a claim to

equivalence. It is no exaggeration to say, however, that if these possibilities had been explored, the results of the respective works might have been profoundly different. The "if" reverberates, by its absence, throughout The Handbood of Cross-Cultural Psychology (see Triandis and Berry, 1980; Triandis and Lonner, 1980).

For this is precisely the issue, that "the divisions and structures of concepts and categories are different," which social anthropology, from Saussure, Durkheim, and Mauss through Malinowski, Evans-Pritchard, Lévi-Strauss and on to Leach, Douglas, Needham, Geertz, Ardener, and Bourdieu, has made central to understanding. The answer to Haire et al. 's "to whatever extent" is, from an anthropological perspective, "to a considerable and unpredictable extent"; the answer to Berry's "if" is "yes, they are, and well documented too." These are not the implied answers with which these authors subsequently worked, however, and this has driven a wedge between the psychological and anthropological literature that the development of "cross-cultural psychology" has done little to remove.




There is a pleasingly complete polarity of perspective here. Faced with "differences in connotation" or "different divisions and structures of categories," the instinct of a psychologist has been to try to remove these in order to ask cultur-

ally neutral and "objective" questions. To the anthropologist, by contrast, any "lack of equivalence" is precisely where research should focus and precisely where objective knowledge must be sought.

In 1983, a special edition of the Journal of International Business Studies addressed cross-cultural matters. It contained some useful articles by, among others, Nancy Adler, who has been a pioneer in this field. The articles were remarkable, however, for the sparse citation of anthropologists. Negandhi, as has since become almost ritual in the field, referred to two American anthropologists of a previous generation, Kroeber and Kluckhohn, in search of a definition of "culture" (Neghandi, 1983, p. 25, citing Kroeber and Kluckhohn, 1952). He also mentioned the sociologist Talcott Parsons (1956). Adler referred to Malinowski, but at the time gave the impression that she had experienced him through the filter of other modern writers on management studies (Adler, 1983, p. 34) and cited him only in support of a quip, rather than as the author of revolutionary changes in the thought and practice of cross-cultural understanding. Sekaran referred to a work by the anthropologist Naroll, but this seems to be derived from a primer of readings in the social sciences (see Sekaran, 1983, p. 61, citing Naroll, 1968). Sekaran made a rigorous attempt to discuss different forms of

"equivalence" that the seeker after cross-cultural certainties might pursue; this

attempt, although firmly based in the literature of cross-cultural psychology, seems only naive from an anthropological perspective. Sekaran discusses various kinds of equivalence, among them:

experiential equivalence or the equivalence of the inferences drawn by the respondents in various cultures from a given statement (Sechrest, Fay, and Zaidi [1972] give the example of how the statement "I would like to be a florist," which may be meaningful in the U.S., [but] may not be useful for countries which do not have flowershops); and, finally, conceptual equivalence, where the meaning of certain concepts such as love may differ in different cultures. [1983, p. 62]

There is a certain bathos in using the "absence of flowershops" as a figure for the great Babel of cross-cultural work. There is, of course, an infinite sequence of other examples. Sekaran says that "certain concepts such as love may differ in different cultures," This, in the first place, seems to suggest that the concept of love is present in all cultures, but that it "differs" - an anthropologist would

probably find that suggestion unacceptable. There is also, however, a disabling lack of vision in Sekaran's expression, suggesting as it does that problems of this kind only arise in the case of "certain concepts" (in this case, a concept that American campus-dwelling students have discussed extensively). The problem that Sekaran raises in relation to "love" is one that can be generalized to all



PREFACE 13

language. If she took her throw-away comment here seriously, all the rest of her analysis would need to be revised. A social anthropologist, faced with the concept "love," would regard that as a possible entry into an intricate world of translation, interpretation, and understanding.

The desire for culturally equivalent research instruments goes along, as we have seen from Haire et al. 's statement, with a tension between breadth and depth. The apparent generation of a culturally neutral question allowed them to believe that they had achieved "exactitude" at the expense of depth. To an anthropologist, there is no logic in this. The exactitude is purely formulaic, a paper certainty, fodder for statistical analysis and numerical results, but distant (perhaps disablingly distant, along multiple uninvestigated parameters) from the empirical reality. This problem relates to the notion that, by achieving equivalent translations, "each respondent answered exactly the same questions." One does not need to go very far into the philosophy of language to see the fallacy here; one does not even need recent developments in literary criticism, which would be stern on this issue. My inclination would be to keep things simple, avoid postmodern turmoil, and go straight back to Saussure: Words (and so questions) derive their meaning from their context - from the pattern of oppositions and substitutions surrounding them; if this context differs, even slightly, then a different question is being answered even if "the same question" is apparently being asked. A social anthropologist makes the visceral assumption that the context, in this sense, does differ, and that this is always important. The cross-cultural psychologists, by contrast, have wanted to methodologize this problem away.

There is some modest humor to be had from looking at some of Haire, Ghiselli, and Porter's questions in this light. Using the "Semantic Differential Method" (drawn from Osgood, Suci, and Tannenbaum, 1957), they ask a variety of questions to elicit cognitive maps relating to managerial characteristics. This is not an easy thing to do, and their attempt is to be admired. Thinking of "equivalence" and "exactitude," however, some of their questions merit consideration. For example, they ask Indian managers (Hindus, perhaps?) a question that, phrased in direct verbal form, might read "How broad or narrow do you think a bishop is?" (see Haire, Ghiselli and Porter, 1966, pp. 42-43). The answers to this (and other similar questions) might or might not be interesting and useful, but we have surely left behind "equivalence" and "exactitude."

These criticisms of Haire et al. must be set in context. Their work was, in their own words, "the barest scratching of the surface," "tentative methodologically, and only titillating in terms of content" (1966, p. vi), and "the merest beginning" (p. 181). Their work was original and ambitious, and meticulous in its own terms; it inspired other researchers and imitators; its very excellence, paradig- matic of a disciplinary style, makes it a fit subject of criticism of the kind that has been attempted here (Hofstede [1980], comparing his own later findings with Haire et al., brings another range of methodological criticisms to bear).




Objectivity and exactitude

The features in the work of Haire et al. to which attention has been drawn - spe- cifically, the search for equivalence and the illusion (from an anthropological perspective) that objectivity and exactitude can be achieved at the expense of depth - march through the literature of cross-cultural management. At least to the eye of an anthropologist, multiple examples can be found in the core journals - in, for example, The Academy of Management Review, or the Journal of International Business Studies. Indeed, the Journal of International Business Studies provided a case that looked something like a reductio ad absurdum of the tendency. The article "When in Rome? The effects of cultural adaptation on intercultural business negotiations" (Francis, 1991, p. 423) had the intention of finding out how American managers react to Japanese managers when the latter have made various degrees of effort to "become American" in order to ingratiate themselves. In a conference presentation in 1992, 1 said of this paper:

"To the social anthropologist ... the most striking (indeed, almost incredible) feature, is that the article contains no real information about any naturally occurring social event. The author gives little indication that she knows anything about Japan, the Japanese, Japanese manners, or the Japanese language; nor does she give any indication that she regards this as a deficiency. The article is ostensibly about negotiation between U.S. and Japanese managers, but the author gives no indication that she has ever taken part in, or observed, such a negotiation; and again, she gives no indication that this might be thought desirable. The entire work is based upon her own imagining of what such a negotiation might be like - an imagining which is then projected upon an experimental group who share her background and perceptions, and who (unsurprisingly) confirm her hypotheses back to her, through a welter of statis- tics. [Chapman, 1992b; see also Tayeb, 1994, p. 434]

Francis's "theory" is based primarily on the work of the social psychologist H. Giles (Giles, Taylor, and Bourhis, 1973; Giles and Smith, 1979; for some related critical comments on this work, and also on Giles [1977], see Chapman, 1992a, pp. 293-294, n. 54, and Edwards, 1985, p. 155). To the social anthropologist, work such as that presented by Francis seems close to an abdication of responsibility for real social understanding. It also seems like a kind of naive tautology - succinctly rendered, perhaps, by the solemn assertion "being liked appears to induce positive reactions" (Francis, 1991, p. 409). What is all the more remarkable is that the author comes close to congratulating her method for these very features:

This study used a scenario-based written manipulation to operationalize the cultural behavior of target individuals. Given the difficulty of conducting research with real target individuals from different cultures, the success of this approach could contribute to more efficient and effective research designs. [Francis, 1991, p. 423]



PREFACE 15

Does that not mean "the less we know about real life, the more internally consis- tent our research can be made"? To the social anthropologist, this seems like a looking-glass world. The indifference to real life is made all the more incongru- ous by the trappings of statistical analysis, hypotheses, levels of significance, and the like - apparent evidence that truth, positivist truth, is being sought. It should be stressed that Francis's article must be considered, in its own lights, excellent; it must also be stressed that the criticisms made here are directed at a genre of academic output, not (apart from the exigencies of illustration) at an individual.

The influence of culture on behavior

Social psychology, along with its derivatives in management studies, makes frequent use of phrases such as "the influence of culture on behavior" or "the effect of cognition on behavior." Such formulations are not considered theoreti- cally problematic; social psychology still typically sees itself as a "theory of behavior" (and there are many implicit extensions of this in business studies -

"organizational behavior," "the behavior of the firm," "consumer behavior," etc.). Within social anthropology, by contrast, behavioral formulations are viewed with great suspicion. There is no space here for full discussion of this; we might note that "behaviorism" has suffered a great deal of disabling criticism, within the more general reappraisal of scientific method within social studies, as already mentioned (see, e.g., Ardener, 1971a, 1971b, 1989). We could take, for illustration, an article from the Academy of Management Review - "Scripts as determinants of purposeful behavior in organizations" (Lord and Kernan, 1987). The authors say that "the emphasis is on showing how cognitive systems guide the output of purposeful behavior" (1987, p. 265, emphasis in original). Their approach "addresses a fundamental and general psychological problem - linking cognitions and behavior" (p. 265).

For a social anthropologist, this is attempting to link two things that should never have been divided in the first place; the theoretical re-attachment of cognition to behavior, presented by Lord and Kernan as a triumph of analysis, seems to the anthropologist only like a bandage over a self-inflicted wound. Social anthropologists are no longer able to conceive of a domain of "behavior" that is not always and already "cognitive" - those things that might be called "behavior" are, in the human domain, drenched in cognition beyond the possibility of separation. The field of action is fully conceptualized. This has been fully demonstrated in many excellent ethnographies (for example, Evans-Pritchard, 1956; Lienhardt, 1961). When Lord and Kernan say that "behavior is guided by comparing feedback to goals" (1987, p. 271 , emphasis in original), one is tempted to a sharp intake of breath at their daring - so they, too, have played darts (adjusted the shower temperature, driven down a motorway, etc.). Mechanistic naïveté of this kind is genuinely surprising to anyone from outside its conventions. Within its conventions, it is, one must suppose, compelling. The conventions seem to




owe a great deal to a largely spurious analogy with animal behavior studies (where "behavior" is, of course, the human observer's only access to order).

Kernan and Lord finish by requiring that "future research should attempt to verify the content, structure, and processes described in this paper by using data from actual workers*' (Lord and Kernan, 1987, p. 275). Here is another example ofthat curious indifference to real empirical material.

George Murdock and cross-cultural research

It is interesting, bearing in mind the slow pace of interdisciplinary communica- tion, that the work of George Murdock (1955, 1965) is often cited within the management field as a central source in cross-cultural research (e.g., Ferraro, 1990, p. 122). Berry came close to regarding Murdock as the source of cross-cultural comparison:

Historically, cross-cultural comparison in anthropology became an important methodological tool with Tylor's presentation (1889) of a paper on the development of social institutions. The approach was not used for nearly fifty years (Whiting, 1968) until it was revived by Murdock in 1937. [Berry, 1980, p. 2]

There are interesting consistencies of citation throughout the cross-cultural psychological literature, and the use of Tylor is part of this consistency; there is probably no need to suppose that those who cite Tylor have consulted him or looked at the intellectual environment from which he derived and to which he contributed. Berry cites Whiting as his source for Tylor's contribution and for the view that Tylor inaugurated an approach that was then "not used for nearly fifty years." An anthropologist might wish to observe that Berry's summary of the problem is a strangely cavalier dismissal of the fifty years between Tylor and Murdock, filled with assiduous ethnographic work and theoretical debate. Whiting, although his intention is admittedly ambiguous, seems in fact to be making a slightly different point, which is that Tylor "was the first to use statistical methods for this purpose" (1968, p. 693). He then says that, in Tylor's analysis, "the basic assumptions and problems of cross-cultural research were touched upon" and that "for the next fifty years the method was almost completely neglected" (1969, p. 693). If Whiting means that "statistical methods" were not used in cross-cultural studies, this might be defensible up to a point; the argument that cross-cultural methods of any kind were not used for fifty years is, by contrast, entirely indefensible, although it is just this point that Berry seems to draw from Whiting. Part of the problem seems to be that Berry's use of Tylor relies too much upon secondary sources (even the first page of secondary sources!) - this seems to be a common fate for anthropological work in cross-cultural management studies, and it leads to some rather uncritical tertiary citations (the case of Kroeber and Kluckhohn has already been noted).

Murdock's technique was essentially to generate what he considered cross-



PREFACE 17

culturally valid categories of description and to fill in data from all available ethnographic work; thus, a society exhibited this or that feature, not others, and so could be compared systematically with other societies. This would have worked if the categories of description were indeed cross-culturally valid, and there is the rub. The effect of going from Berry, through Whiting, to Murdock, as our access to the "cross-cultural method," is to divert us from the major progressive features of the anthropology even of Murdock's own time. To be sure, the diversion takes us into a channel where statistical techniques and purportedly reliable cross-cultural categories of analysis are the common currency; it is not surprising that modern business and management studies should find this congenial. We should note, however, that Murdock, within the British tradition, was thoroughly repudi- ated within the shift from "function to meaning." Needham, in 1971, offered a characteristic summary of the problem. He first cited Murdock to this effect: "In

anthropology, the initial classificatory task has now been substantially accomplished in the field of social structure" (Murdock, 1955, p. 361). He then commented:

Well, I do not wish to disparage Murdock's decades of industrious application to these matters, but I am bound to say that I think these statements are mistaken in every particular. The notion of a finite and total classification is logically indefensible; and this methodological ambition has achieved no results which might give it a pragmatic justification. [Needham, 1974, pp. 60-61, citing Murdock, 1955, p. 361]

Ardener, in similar vein, said in 1976 that "Murdock [1965] . . . speaks with the voice of another age" (1989, p. 157). The cross-cultural classification and

typologizing of the kind that Murdock carried to their highest development have

generated the Human Relations Area Files; the criticisms of both Needham and Ardener could equally be regarded as directed at this entire enterprise. Ferraro

regards the Human Relations Area Files sympathetically, noting that they have

gone "largely unnoticed and unused by most people outside of the field of

anthropology, particularly in the area of international business" (Ferraro, 1990, p. 122). One can be sympathetic to the desire to direct scholars in international business toward anthropological sources, and even have some sympathy with Ferraro's comment that:

In recent decades cultural anthropologists have glutted conventional libraries with a vast and largely indigestible number of books, articles, and field reports on specific world cultures. The major significance of the HRAF [Human Rela- tions Area Files] is that they organize this unwieldy quantity of cultural data into a form usable by nonanthropologists. [Ferraro, 1990, p. 123]

Nevertheless, the sophisticated rejection of Murdock's approach by leading British anthropologists in the late 1960s must be borne in mind. We are here, in a sense, on the cusp between what are often called the "emic" and the "etic" approach, a cusp that has been experienced in different subjects at different times and in different ways. The relationship between d'Iribarne's work (see below) and that of




Hofstede is in many respects similar to an emic/etic contrast, as this is commonly understood; as we look back to anthropological debates concerning the work of Murdock, we see that the same issues repeatedly arise. The relatively recent emer- gence of these debates within the field of business studies is particular to the subject, and there is plenty of help to be had from earlier recensions of the arguments.

Geert Hofstede and comparative management

It is not possible to deal with "culture" in the area of business and management without becoming aware of the long shadow cast by the work of Geert Hofstede (1980, 1991). Hofstede's work is often regarded as "anthropological" by those within business and management studies. This is not necessarily a misnomer, for no one definition transcends others. It is worth noting, however, that most British social anthropologists have not, in my experience, even heard of Hofstede.1 This may not be to their credit but it is interesting as a gauge of the academic-institu- tional status and lineage of Hofstede' s work, which is firmly rooted in the North American social-psychological tradition and grew out of, and was developed within, a firmly business- and organization-oriented research perspective. These are compelling reasons why an anthropologist, even one exclusively concerned with European matters (such as myself), would not readily find Hofstede in view on the intellectual horizon. For myself, when I first came into temporary posses- sion of Culture's Consequences in 1990, 1 found it strange and quirky and well outside the research and intellectual traditions with which I was familiar (Hofstede himself notes that, when he submitted his work for publication, one publisher's reader, an anthropologist, rejected it on similar grounds; with my own prejudices of the time, I might well have done the same). It was with growing surprise that I discovered that Hofstede's work, far from being strange and quirky, was central to academic dealing with cultural matters in the business and management arena.

This is not the place for a studied consideration of Hofstede's contribution, of its strengths and weaknesses. A few comments, however, may be appropriate. First, I should note that I, like many others, have found Hofstede's work invalu- able in introducing students, undergraduate and graduate, to cultural issues. Like the work of Harbison and Myers (1959) or of Haire, Ghiselli, and Porter (1966) half a generation earlier (to which it can in some ways be regarded as a succes- sor), Hofstede's work became a dominant influence and set a fruitful agenda. There is perhaps no other contemporary framework in the general field of "culture and business" that is so general, so broad, so alluring, and so inviting to argument and fruitful disagreement (for significant developments, see Hofstede and Bond, 1988; Bond and Hofstede, 1990; for appreciation and criticism, see, inter alia, Kieser, 1994; Sondergaard, 1994; Yeh and Lawrence, 1995). Second, although Hofstede's work invites criticism on many levels, one often finds that Hofstede, in self-criticism, has been there first. Third, although Hofstede's work



PREFACE 19

is based on a questionnaire drawn from social psychology that was not expressly designed for the purpose to which it was later put, Hofstede brings to his discus- sions such a wealth of expertise and erudition from outside the questionnaire that many criticisms of "narrowness" are withered on the tongue.

Hofstede' s work has become a paradigm for other research. It is not Hofstede's fault that he has become so widely imitated, or that his four "dimensions" have become key variables or explanatory features in a wide variety of research. At the current state of research in cultural issues in business and management, any paradigm that commands respect and drives additional research is to be welcomed. There are grounds for concern as well, however. Too much research takes Hofstede's dimensions and index scores as if they were a posi- tively and finally established feature from which other research could grow, and Hofstede does not always discourage this. It might be better to regard Hofstede's findings as highly provisional and open to criticism on all the intellectual fronts that can be opened between questionnaire-based psychology and ethnographically based social anthropology. In this, it is welcome to find, in the work of d'Iribarne and of Aram and Walochik, as represented below, major steps taken in this direction.

Hofstede's work is used and admired at a very high level of generalization. Those who take country scores in the various dimensions as given realities, informing or confirming other research, do not typically inquire into the detail of the procedures through which specific empirical data were transmuted into generalization. Hofstede, of course, provides all the background one could wish for about these procedures, and that is another reason for admiring his work. Never- theless, for many commentators, it is the country results that matter, and the existential status of these is not doubted; there is an understandable thirst in this difficult area for certainties, which many have believed they have found in Hofstede (Haire, Ghiselli, and Porter's questionnaire was imitated with a similar uncritical abandon). In two of the articles in this issue (d'Iribarne and Aram and Walochik), Hofstede's results are scrutinixed on the basis of more ethnographically based work, which is, as Hofstede has stressed, a necessary complement to questionnaire-based work.

Social psychology, social anthropology, and the articles in this issue

Between social psychology and social anthropology, there is something of a gulf. Social psychology, even in its "cognitive" forms, has tended to be strongly positivist. Anthropology, by contrast, has reacted strongly against positivism, particularly in Europe. Social psychology has grown to strength in North Amer- ica ("its present flowering is recognized to be characteristically an American phenomenon" [Allport, 1985, p. 2]), the home of business and management studies. It has been the dominant social-science standing behind these studies, and positivism and behaviorism, tacit or overt, have never been far away. How-




ever, because social psychology was originally a monocultural subject born out of and concerned with North American thought and life, it was ill-prepared for the exercise of multicultural or cross-cultural analysis (Smith and Bond [1993], in looking at the cross-cultural validity of standard social-psychological theory and constructs, demonstrated this point thoroughly). Business and management, however, became international, and so, too, in the wake of this, did business and management studies. Cross-cultural management studies, as they developed, were strongly influenced by the social-psychological models that lay behind monocultural management studies. Social anthropology, with a far deeper experience of cross-cultural and multicultural analysis, was for a long time more or less ignored as a source of inspiration. Its ethnographic, descriptive, and interpretive style was not easy to build into the positivist models that dominated the journals in business and management studies; its profound concentration upon single examples ("ethnographies") did not lead to generalizing or predictive conclusions of the kind that were required in the journals, on the conference circuit, and in M.B.A. seminar rooms; and social anthropology had made only limited attempts as a subject to reconcile itself to the modern world, as opposed to the "primitive" world of its traditional practices.

Given what has already been said, the coming together of social psychology and social anthropology is of the keenest interest. The two subjects bring with them a complementary set of strengths and, of course, a complementary set of weaknesses, on the basis of the history and experience already adumbrated. The remainder of this issue presents four papers, two of which might very roughly be described as European and anthropological in inspiration (d'Iribarne, Usunier), and the other two as more nearly social-psychological and North American (Salk, Aram and Walochik). The issue is balanced, therefore, between two of the major regional and theoretical tendencies in western academia. French thought has been of great importance to the development of European and British anthropology, so it is not surprising that the two French authors, d'Iribarne and Usunier, should both provide, each in his own way, a critique of the more unreflective positivism of what (in France) is often regarded as the "Anglo-Saxon" tradition.

Two of the articles in the present issue approach, from different empirical standpoints, Hofstede's findings in relation to particular countries. There are various features of Hofstede's country scores that typically are found intuitively anomalous or striking, and groups of students (in my experience) tend to notice the same examples (Hofstede, again, has been the first to draw attention to many of these anomalies). Among the perceived anomalies are, for example, the high position of France and Belgium on the power-distance index, the extreme positions of Greece and Singapore on the uncertainty-avoidance index, the low position of Spain on the masculinity index, and the high position of Spain on the uncertainty-avoidance index. D'Iribarne takes a close look at the French case. His approach is ethnographically based, pays close attention to the specific questions that underlie Hofstede's generalizations, and is steeped in understanding of the



PREFACE 21

cultural issues involved. The time is ripe for precisely this kind of work in comparative management studies. From the point of view of an anthropologist, it is no surprise that, as one reaches further into specific cultural understanding, the securities of cross-cultural generalization seem to recede. British anthropologists would probably welcome this as confirmation of their most deeply held disciplinary sentiments.

While anthropologists would typically welcome the detail and sophistication d'Iribarne brings to his discussion, other toilers in the field of cross-cultural management research might regret this renewed evidence of the inherent difficulty of their subject. It must surely be accepted, however, that certainties without substance are not desirable. Hofstede's work has opened an agenda, not closed one. The desire for certainties in cross-cultural management practice and consultancy, of course, will persist, and Hofstede's work looks set to remain the most prominent feature in this landscape. One way forward, then, as d'Iribarne shows, is through a critical discussion and refinement of the issues that Hofstede has brought to the fore.

Aram and Walochik also orient their discussion around problems raised by Hofstede's work. Here, too, they find that the detailed material that they gathered does not fit readily into Hofstede's model. Aram and Walochik take their theoretical inspiration from social psychology, and, as noted above, the bent of this subject is a positivist one. From a positivist point of view, the disparity of data, as between their own study and the conclusions reached by Hofstede, is a serious problem: Somebody must be wrong. Aram and Walochik, however, are secure in the integrity of their own data; whatever methodological complaints they might or might not make of themselves, they know that they have recorded what was said: The data are, in their own terms, sovereign. Does this make Hofstede wrong? No, of course, since the responses to the questions that were posed in the IBM survey, two decades or so before, have their own social reality. From a post-positivist, or at least non-positivist, point of view, we can take a fairly relaxed attitude toward these disparities; it is only to be expected that different methods would reveal different perspectives and that there might be dissonances between these. Our task becomes one of interpretation of these dissonances, without necessarily being methodologically censorious in any particular direction. Aram and Walochik make some interesting suggestions in this area; I would like to add one or two comments.

Aram and Walochik are addressing a cultural difference of great and growing importance to the North American psyche - that between (with all necessary apologies for the terminology) Anglo-Saxon and Latin (see, e.g., Amado, Faucheux, and Laurent, 1991; Knouse, Rosenfeld, and Culbertson, 1992). This is also, of course, as the terms imply, an opposition whose North American realiza- tions are cognate with a longstanding North/South European contrast. In the course of work on a similar intra-European culture meeting - the meeting of the Celtic peoples of northwestern Europe with their neighbors (essentially the




French and the English), I found many of the themes adumbrated by Aram and Walochik to be clearly present (see Chapman, 1992a).

There is clearly an incongruity between Hofstede's description of Spain as a

place of high uncertainty avoidance and the popular (British) perception of Spain as a place ruled by creativity, passion, and intuition, where people do not keep their appointments on time (see Mole, 1990, p. 94; Mole also says that "forecast-

ing and planning [are] not a salient feature of Spanish business practice" [1990, p. 86]). Some similar issues arise in the Greek context: Greece, in Hofstede's tables, is at the extreme of high uncertainty avoidance, and again this fits ill with some aspects of the Greek image, both self-generated and as perceived from the outside. In collaboration with a Greek manager working in a Greek-German

company, we have applied some basic anthropological principles to this problem and attempted to show that "uncertainty avoidance" is not unidimensional and unilinear (such that one could have more or less of it); rather, the areas where

uncertainty is feared or accepted are specific to a particular social classification of experience. Depending upon the particular subdomains of culture that are

interrogated, one could, for every culture, find both high and low uncertainty- avoidance domains. We have tried to show how it is that, in Greece, Hofstede's

specific questions tapped a high uncertainty-avoidance area (Chapman and Antoniou, 1995). Our assumption is to regard all societies as containing (provisionally) the same amount of order but to expect that this will be differently distributed in the different social media - language, different domains of action, and so forth -

such that any one society is likely to perceive absence or superabundance of orderliness when it looks at another society (this last point is very clearly demonstrated through the Celtic examples [Chapman, 1992a]).

Aram and Walochik note that the Spanish perception of themselves as "individualist" by comparison with the North Americans contradicts the relative positions on the Hofstede collectivist/individualist dimension. Here again we are obliged to regard both sets of data as sovereign in their own terms, while at the same time looking at the problem more closely to see where and how it might be resolved. In this case, it may well be that we could profit by pursuing further our ecumenical theme and bring together the ideas of social psychology with those of social anthropology. Various anthropologists have looked closely at the moral

systems through which reputation is built and sustained in Spain (the work of Pitt-Rivers [1954, 1977] deserves particular mention; the area is controversial, but see Gilmore, 1987; Herzfeld, 1980; and Peristiany, 1965). From this perspective, one could begin by deriving the argument that, in the Spanish case, one has a system of reputation-seeking (of "honor and shame," as some anthropologists would have it) that is in some senses "individualist" - an individual pursues his (or her) agenda and feels few loyalties to some of the more obvious "collective" entities (the state, the large nonfamily company) that might assume great importance elsewhere. At the same time, reputation is pursued in a context of shared

understanding with those around and indeed can have no meaning unless it is



PREFACE 23

collectively recognized and endorsed - in this sense, Spain is both more collectivist and more individualist, than the United States. Here again, just as for uncertainty avoidance, we may be moving away from a view of the individualism/collectivism dimension as unidimensional and unilinear and toward a more complex and heterogeneous conception of the phenomena in question.

Salk's contribution has its intellectual background in social psychology. There is an evident methodological tendency, however, to move toward more realistic and ethnographic research settings. This tendency derives from within social psychology itself in reaction to longstanding dominant trends within the discipline. Schein, in 1989, remembering his own training, said: "I was trained ... in the experimental traditions of social psychology The experimental method was very precise, but as I look back, it dealt with trivia" (1989, p. 103). He concluded: 'Our field [organizational studies] is still in its infancy, and we can advance it best by learning this lesson. Get out in the field, find out what is going on, learn to describe it to test your own understanding" (p. 104). The result is an appeal for something interestingly close to ethnographic fieldwork, in methodological terms. Salk's concern is to reveal to us the understandings of the social actors in the naturally occurring social events that she has observed and investi- gated. This is very much in the anthropological spirit, and, given this common interest in "native interpretations," it may well be that the discipline-based differences (psychology versus anthropology, for example) will prove in the long run to be less important than oppositions such as positivist versus interpretive (while remembering that such oppositions have tended to be congruent with important disciplinary-based differences, hence their disciplinary feel).

A lot of ink has been spilt over the concept of "culture" (see Tayeb, 1994, citing Chapman, 1992b). The positivist approach requires definition, measurement, and operationalization; positivist researchers have ransacked the anthropological literature in search of definition (it is thus that Kroeber and Kluckhohn [1952] appear so frequently in the bibliographies). An anthropologist might typically find this rather strange: while anthropologists certainly talk of "culture," there is very little effort put into defining it. On the basis of much experience of the imposition of theoretical observer-defined categories, an anthropologist might expect that any definition would be either so all-inclusive as to be vacuous or inappropriately narrow - and this does indeed seem to be the case. We can take the standard anthropological view here and consider that any attempt at definition of culture would be tied to the cultural context from which it came and would need to be understood in that context. The concept of culture, from such a perspective, might be useful cross-culturally, but it might not: There is no reason to suppose that, because the term has cross-cultural ambitions, these will necessarily be fulfilled. Starting with this in mind, we would then look at how the concept of culture is used and lived - this is precisely what Salk does. We are dealing here with a concept, of course, that has an academic life as well as a folk life; these two interact, and Salk's study of the folk discourse of cultural differ-




ence among her informants is a fascinating one. One of the major logical objec- tions to objectivist positivism in the human sciences is that the human actors are "reflexive," reinterpreting themselves in the light of would-be objective interpretations: Salk shows us some of the fine detail of such processes at work.

Usunier's contribution begins in marketing. There is, of course, a great deal of interest in international marketing and in cultural problems that are raised by this enterprise. Marketing as an academic subject, however, has been very strongly influenced by the positivist and objectivist models that have dominated the world of postwar management academia, such that marketing academics have aspired to turn their discipline into a "science" within which they could predict and control. Marketing has also, as a subject, been primarily "made in the USA." It is interesting, therefore, that recent developments within marketing echo the more general intellectual revolution that the social sciences have undergone. The ever- greater focus on the customer requires that customer meanings (for which read the anthropologist's "native perceptions") become central to the enterprise. The perception that all relationships both within and without a company have a "marketing" element has led to an aspiration toward holism in analysis (again, an element common to the anthropological perspective). It is perhaps not surprising that Usunier's lucid challenge to some of the orthodoxies of marketing comes from a French context, since he is both close to and at the same time capable of keeping a wary distance from the Anglo-Saxon tradition (Usunier, 1992). There is, as already mentioned, a conceptual relationship here with the position of d'Iribarne.

In some ways, Usunier's piece can be regarded as a discussion of some of the same methodological and epistemological issues that have already been broached. Usunier looks at the issues through the discipline of marketing, however, while I have attempted to use the contrasting images of social anthropology and social psychology. Usunier's discussion brings together, in a reflexive way, the subject matter of the discipline of market research and the academic discipline of marketing itself. This self-conscious meeting of modes of study and of the material studied (where the two can no longer be considered independent) is a characteristic of thoughtful work in the humanities today. Usunier's discussion is, in consequence, both theoretical and practical since the inputs (data) and outputs (marketing plans) are not the data and predictions of an idealized positivist science but, to some degree at least, the creations of the theory that is applied to them. It might also be noted that Usunier's discussion is based on his own long experience of practical and applied interventions in the area of marketing.

A final word (or two)

The epistemological tussle between objectivism and positivism, on the one hand, and interpretive approaches, on the other, looks set to continue. There are



PREFACE 25

grounds for arguing, as I have tried to do, that interpretive approaches have been having the better of things in some areas, but there is a long way to go and no destination. Roberts and Boyacigiller, in 1984, made an interesting summary of the state of play in cross-cultural management studies at the time. The positivist social-psychological ethos is still strong, although they were pushing hard at the frontiers of possibility within its terms. They withdrew, however, gratefully and with self-conscious humor, from the full implications of the argument:

Perhaps we are fortunate that social science research is conducted in few countries of the world. Imagine the vast heterogeneity of philosophies and approaches one would have to consider if the nature of modern scientific research were not determined by Western tradition. [Roberts and Boyacigiller, 1984, p. 431]

In a conference paper delivered in 1992 (Chapman, 1992b), I added a rider:

"Imagine indeed!" From a truly cross-cultural point of view, this "vast heterogeneity" is precisely where operations need to be conducted, and the disclaimer of Roberts and Boyacigiller is pleasingly frank and self-aware. It is very instructive, therefore, to look at a more recent article by Boyacigiller and Adler (1991), both of whom seem to have traveled far and fast. This article takes a very much more radical view, analogous to the anthropological views to which I have drawn attention - something rather like an abandonment of the positivist enterprise and an acceptance of the need to analyze social phenomena in the terms of the social actors: The "vast heterogeneity of philosophies" beckons!

It should perhaps be stressed that, in rejecting positivism, we are not throwing ourselves headlong into the routine and callow uncertainties of campus relativism. As Ardener said:

There is endless useless confusion between relativity and relativization on the one hand, and a chimera called (usually by non-anthropologists) "cultural relativism" on the other. Like many contemporaries (cf. Gellner 1983; Edwards 1985), I am not a "cultural relativist" The very act of the comparison of cultures implies the existence of appropriate canons of comparison. By those canons judgements can be made. The relativity of social worlds is a mere fact, beyond all judgements: they are constructed differently, not equally. [Ardener, 1985; see 1989, p. 254, n. 4]

Note

1. This assertion is based in part on many one-to-one conversations and in part on the experience of organizing a session on "social anthropology and business studies" at the 1993 decennial conference of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the Com- monwealth at St. Catherine's College, Oxford (the session was organized jointly with Peter Case, of Oxford Brookes University). Those who came to this session were, by self-selection, interested in business issues and so were already leaning toward certain kinds of specialized knowledge. Even so, when asked explicitly if they had heard of Geert Hofstede and his work, none said yes.




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Social Anthropology, Business Studies, and Cultural Issues || Preface: Social Anthropology, Business Studies, and Cultural Issues