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International management andethnographyWhat and why?

■ Gavin JackUniversity of Leicester, UK

The point of departure for this response is a broad sympathy for theauthors’ aim to broaden the methodological basis of international manage-ment inquiry, and more specifically the study of multinationals, throughethnographic research. As noted by previous commentators (Adler, 1984;Boyacigiller and Adler, 1991; Chapman, 1997; Jack and Westwood, 2006;Redding, 1994; Westwood, 2001, 2004), comparative/cross-cultural/insti-tutionalist research in international business and management has long beendominated by functionalist and positivistic approaches which provide ahighly partial understanding of the lived experiences, the complex andcontradictory meaning-making systems and the political and ethical inter-actions of human agents. Any writing which brings attention to these‘forgotten’ facets of human life under the constant re-structuring of globalcapital is, in principle then, an important rejoinder to the prevailingepistemological consensus of international management research (IMR).Despite my sympathies for this piece, however, it is my aim in this responseto suggest a number of ways in which the authors might have furthernuanced and supported their arguments, and thus crafted a more persua-sive case. The response is structured around a critical discussion of two keythemes which emanate from my own idiosyncratic reading of the article:first, the authors’ object of critique; and second, the authors’ turn toethnography.

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The object of critique?

To begin, it is not always clear to me exactly what the authors’ object ofcritique is. In the abstract, the ‘discipline’ of international management iscontrasted with the ‘varieties of capitalism’ approach to understanding thenature of MNCs. The authors suggest that both ‘approaches’ are epistem-ically suspect since they under-emphasize ‘the subjective interpretations ofhuman actors’ as well as the ‘ideologies and philosophies’ that give textureand meaning to life under global capitalism. Later in the text, however, thedistinction between the two approaches is less well sustained, with theauthors (controversially) suggesting that the varieties of capitalismapproach has attained a dominant conceptual position in comparative inter-national management. It seems that, to be precise, the foil for this piece isthe national business systems literature, and the argument is one about theimportance of ethnographic research for better understanding the impactof changes to national business systems, and multinational firms, on localcommunities of practice.

Whilst any attempt to map the contours of an academic area of study isinevitably partial – that is to say selective in its choice of frames of refer-ence and always grist to a particular rhetorical mill – the representationalwork in this article did raise some troubling issues. In this regard, thecomment above about the lack of precision on the object of critique istelling. What exactly counts as international management? Is it a discipline?Can the varieties of capitalism approach stand in for all inquiry aboutMNCs? What is left out of the frame? In reading these questions backthrough the article, I found that the authors might have done more toimprove the scope of their coverage of the literature, and to substantiateand finesse many of the claims.

With regard to the question of what constitutes international manage-ment, first, I think there are limitations to what the authors have in mind.If we accept that there is some meaningful sense in which we can talk about‘international’ management as an area of inquiry separate from ‘domestic’or ‘national’ management (and for some management researchers this is nota given), then a number of differently labelled research areas are conven-tionally deployed to map out the terrain. For example, a line is often drawnbetween the typically economic focus of the international business litera-ture and the broader sociocultural and institutional focus of internationalmanagement; another line might be drawn between culturist and institu-tionalist views of international management, the former typically articu-lated via the work of Geert Hofstede, and the latter through the nationalbusiness systems literature and more recent developments in institutionaltheory; and finally, a line is also often drawn between comparative andcross-cultural management, where the unit of analysis differs between the

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former’s focus on separate national cultural/institutional managerial ororganizational forms and practices, and the latter’s focus on the nature andimpact of the interaction and/or intersection of at least two cultural/insti-tutional systems. To me, international management is highly contestedterrain, like most areas of social and organizational research.

With this particular sketch in mind, I found a number of ways in whichthe authors might have developed their argument. First, they might havebroadened the literature base of their article to throw light on these well-established divisions. I was very surprised at the lack of coverage of theculturist perspective, and its articulation in the cross-cultural managementliterature, be it the Hofstede-inspired functionalist and positivist variety, orthe more recent interpretivist concerns of qualitative IB/IM research. Iwould certainly point to the cross-cultural management literature as acounter-argument to the authors’ (unsubstantiated) claim that:

In recent years the ‘varieties of capitalism’ approach has come to dominateresearch into comparative international management. (p. 329)

A broader issue which my point raises is how, through writing, (all)researchers do not so much ‘discover’ a gap in the literature that needs tobe addressed as much as fabricate novelty through various rhetorical twistsand turns (Clifford and Marcus, 1986). I read the quote above as a purelyrhetorical move by the authors which allows them to suggest that, sincemost comparative international management is about understandingvarieties of capitalism, and since most of this is a kind of abstracted func-tionalism, comparative IMR is clearly lacking a feel for the subjectiveinterpretations and experiences of local actors. It is then only a short stepfrom this view to the next where ‘institutionalist comparative management’(which by this stage in their argument seems to now stand in for all inter-national management) is ‘relatively weak in its coverage of culturalinterpretations of what goes on inside business organizations and theirassociated communities, especially during times of change’ (p. 330). Basedon this rhetorical strategy, the authors can then go on to ‘re-discover’ thatwhich is lost through this putatively dominant research approach byrecommending anthropological sensemaking.

But why, to re-iterate the point above, did the authors not then look atcross-cultural management, especially of the qualitative variety? It hasplenty of insight into the interpretative schema and affective dimensions oflife in and around multinationals. One answer might be that if it had beencovered in any depth, then their forthright argument about the lack of asubjective element in IM research would necessarily be compromised. Thisbecame apparent to me when the authors explained (p. 328) that the successof the Japanese economy, and concomitant attempts by researchers toexplain its success with different governance structures to the leading

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western economies of the time, led to the emergence of the varieties ofcapitalism approach. This is only half the story! The success of Japanesecorporations, and the intensification of their internationalization in the late1970s and 1980s, was also a key impetus for the cross-cultural manage-ment literature and the culturist perspective more generally. Given theauthors’ previous and current research interests in Japanese employmentsystems, I would have expected the well-developed cross-cultural manage-ment focus on the transferability, or otherwise, of Japanese managementpractices not only to feature in this text more prominently, but to act as aninstance of international management research interest in the subjectiveexperience of multinational activity. It would seem that because of theframing of international management, and the ambiguous and changingsignification of this conceptual territory throughout the article, that theculturist perspective rather fell out of view.

However, it is not just the issue of what is ‘missing’ or marginalized thatprovides food for thought in this response piece. There are also some inter-esting questions related to arguments about the literature that is covered.For instance, central to the argumentative spine are the following sorts ofclaims, repeated in several places from the start to the end of the article. Atthe outset, where a distinction is drawn between international managementand the varieties of capitalism approach, the authors suggest:

epistemic developments in the field of comparative international manage-ment have been methodologically limited, with both the mainstream inter-national management discipline and the heterodox ‘varieties of capitalism’approach remaining heavily reliant on functionalist explanations of firm andmarket behaviour. (p. 325)

Later, they describe comparative international management as a body ofknowledge of an ‘abstract and schematic nature’ (p. 330). And further on:‘Perhaps the major criticism that can be levelled at the field of internationalmanagement research’, they claim, ‘is that it tends to be unitarist in itsunderstanding of what a firm is and how it behaves’ (p. 334).

My reservation with such statements is that the authors never actuallypresent any evidence of the assertions they articulate, and therefore fail tosubstantiate them in any great depth. Whilst I do recognize in these state-ments descriptions of the various approaches to which they allude, theirportrayals would perhaps have more rhetorical power if backed up by someform of evidence. We are asked to take these statements on trust. Onaccount of this, the authors leave themselves open to rather easy challengesto their authoritative renderings. I am sure, for instance, that researchersfrom institutional theory, old and new varieties, would complain about theauthors’ ascription of unitarism to their views of the firm, and about theirblanketing of the competing explanations of firm behaviour.

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Interestingly, and to be fair, the authors do qualify their claims in places,with words like ‘predominantly’ and ‘usually’, suggesting they are awarethat their representations cannot stand in for everything, and that counter-positions do exist within the bodies of literature in which they have aninterest. I am puzzled, then, as to why these openings to more nuancedrepresentations of the field are not pursued, even through the use ofendnotes. There is much recent writing in international management whichsuggests that research in the area, however we place boundaries around it,is a little more substantively and conceptually diverse than some of the boldassertions indicate (adverbs aside).

International management is one area in which there are regular attemptsto document the state of the field. Such ‘survey’ work, perhaps indicative ofthe need of researchers in the area to bring into existence their field of study,involves exercises in the categorization, codification and tabulation ofpublished research into international management in terms of substantivethemes, conceptual foci, country and context of study and methodologicalpreference (for instance, Peterson, 2004; Thomas et al., 1994; Wright andRicks, 1994). Even a cursory look at some of these surveys suggests an everemergent diversity in IMR, a diversity which can also be seen in methodo-logical terms in the growing number of publications/calls for papers/researchemphasizing the need for qualitative research methods and broader construc-tionist epistemologies in international business. This includes, to name a few,a Blackwell Handbook (edited by Punnett and Shenkar, 1996), an EdwardElgar Handbook (edited by Marschan-Piekkari and Welch, 2004), a specialissue of Management International Review (2006), numerous individualjournal articles, wider writings on ethnography and international manage-ment (Brannen, 1996; Sharpe, 2004), and books and articles illustrating apostcolonial critique of (comparative) management and organization studies(Prasad, 2003; Westwood, 2001, 2004). Such surveys of the field and theseindividual pieces together represent some diversity in international manage-ment research and openings to other epistemic and methodological forms.The authors are, I guess, gesturing to such diversity through the qualifyingadverbs in their text. However, the lack of any concerted attention to themdoes create something of a misleading impression of the field to those notfamiliar with it. I am not saying that international management is a site ofepistemological openness and methodological pluralism. There is, however,a growing interest in non-functionalist and non-positivist approaches.

To re-iterate then, in this first section of my response, I am not necess-arily contesting the authors’ labelling of the prevailing epistemological andmethodological preferences of international management, nor arguingagainst the central thrust of this article. I am, however, suggesting that therepresentation of the object of critique might have been nuanced furtherand situated more carefully in ‘the literature’ (sic).


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The turn to ethnography

The second section of this response deals with the authors’ turn to ethnog-raphy as a methodology for garnering the subjective interpretations andexperiences of the new MNC organizational ideology amongst itscommunities of practice. My reading of the authors’ construction of thenature and utility of the ethnographic enterprise for IMR raises a numberof counter-points and a need for further clarification of some of theassertions they make. The first of these points relates to the particularversion of ethnography which the authors wish to stand for, and its onto-logical and epistemological articulation.

The authors suggest that for comparative international management,‘anthropology and ethnography’ represents ‘perhaps an unusual methodo-logical domain’ (p. 337). Again, for those familiar with the literature, therealready exists not only a number of previous ethnographic studies ofinternational management issues (Brannen, 1996; Sharpe, 2004), but alsoregular calls for more ethnographic work. Their claim is therefore hardlynew (leaving the ‘perhaps’ qualifier to one side). So, if not convincing interms of its novelty, how else might the authors persuade us of the ‘valued-added’ of their ethnographic clarion call? To assess this, it is important totry to understand the exact version of ethnography they are promoting, andto isolate the ways it might be considered different from or superior to otherversions.

From the text, it seems that a combination of ethnography as espousedby Anthony Cohen and Clifford Geertz is advanced. In the former regard,Cohen’s argument for ‘self-reflexible’ forms of anthropological inquiry isused by the authors to illuminate two inter-related methodologicalconcerns. First, the need for international management researchers toavoid imposing their own cultural categories onto their subjects of study.And second, for the researcher to engender ‘a deep awareness of the wayactors impose their own meanings on the social situation’ (p. 338). To me,there is nothing especially new here, nor even perhaps specifically reflec-tive of an ethnographic tradition. Both points are now extremely wellrehearsed across a number of different research traditions. In the positivistterrain, for instance, the need to avoid imposing inappropriate culturalcategories onto respondents is prominently discussed as a challenge foraccomplishing good questionnaire design in cross-cultural contexts(Usunier, 1998). Even Hofstede (1983), the arch-positivist of cross-culturalmanagement research, called attention to the ethnocentrism of Americanmanagement theory and its inability to act as a universal conceptualschema for organizational analysis. And in the qualitative terrain, aninterest in how actors impose meanings in social context can be regardedas one of the broadest, and most widely accepted, characteristics of this

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form of inquiry (Silverman, 1993). With these points in mind, I feel thatCohen’s work is under-utilized in suggesting what is distinctive about ethno-graphic inquiry.

And what of Clifford Geertz? Does his work get a more nuanced repre-sentation? Well, no. In fact, there is no attempt to even articulate what aGeertzian approach to anthropology or ethnography might look like. Thisseems strange given his importance to the piece. I would have thought thatthe call for thick description, a term which Geertz takes from Gilbert Ryle,would have encouraged the authors to address his work in much greaterdepth. The authors might well have given readers insight into Geertz’s(1973) The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays, for instance, and acritical discussion of the semiotic view of culture as text described therein.The authors might also have chosen to draw attention to the changing andeven contradictory philosophical stances that characterized the develop-ment of Geertz’s views on culture (essentially, then, the question of hisrelationship to structuralist and post-structuralist thought) and on thenature of the ethnographic enterprise.

Instead of engaging with Cohen in any real depth, and Geertz in any wayat all, the authors would seem to offer us a view of a rather broad, and notespecially well articulated, phenomenological conception of ethnography.They suggest that ethnographic sense-making will allow the researcher toprovide detailed descriptions of ‘the life-world of large-scale businesscommunities’, to ‘discover “what it feels like” to belong to a culture’, andthereby to treat community members as ‘occupying their own “worlds ofmeaning”’ (p. 338). Ethnography, they argue, ‘stresses the important ofthe ethnographer employing phenomenological suspension in order to“bracket” existing personal beliefs, preconceptions and assumptions’(p. 338). I would have liked more discussion and explanation of thephenomenological basis of their espoused ethnography, and greater expo-sition of the ontological and epistemological commitments of such a worldview. This becomes especially pressing when, in other places in the text,they talk of having a ‘realist’ view of structuration processes, and of havinga conceptual interest in narrative. I am sensing a little bit of incoherence inthe epistemological position of the authors.

The lack of ontological and epistemological clarity of the authors’ ownposition becomes further evident in the fact that, to my mind, they havefailed to provide any coverage of contemporary debates about ethnographywithin anthropology and sociology. Such debates confront, for instance, thecolonial history of ethnography, the epistemological status of its endeavour,and the rhetorical status of its texts, and have been a feature of these disci-plines for several decades now. It seems a little odd that they have beenomitted. What I fear is created by the authors in their article is a unitaristportrayal of ethnography, that is to say one lacking the colour, texture and


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critique provided by recent vigorous critiques. Such investigations callattention to a number of important issues for IM researchers.

First, the danger of assuming that all ethnography is inspired by somekind of phenomenological or interpretivist spirit. This is not always thecase, since realist ethnography continues to exist, and, it should hardly needto be said, qualitative research should not be conflated with interpretivism.The existence of qualitative positivism (Prasad and Prasad, 2002) does notsit entirely comfortably with constructionist views of ethnographic method-ology. Second, philosophical debates regarding the status of ethnographicwriting and representation, often associated with the publication of JamesClifford and George Marcus’s (1986) edited volume Writing Culture: ThePoetics and Politics of Ethnography. This came to the fore when readingthe following quotation:

Sensitivity to the social interpretation of the community practices of multi-nationals will enable researchers to uncover the ‘everyday reality’ of thedominant ideologies associated with the restructuring of contemporarycapitalism. (p. 326)

If one wanted to be picky about the broader significance of verb choice inthis sentence (assume that is what I am doing right now), then the use ofthe word ‘uncover’ might be taken to reflect some kind of structuralist viewshared by the authors about ethnography. This view might be said toassume that cultural systems, their rationality and sign system, might be‘readable’, discoverable and timeless. It might also be said to articulate someversion of a correspondence theory of culture, the foil for much critique inrecent ethnographic debate. The authors could be read as hinting that it ispossible to capture native member categories in a faithful way, neutrally,by bracketing, and to see these as true and accurate accounts of lived experi-ence. But where is a gesture to the writings of, for instance, James Clifford,George Marcus, or Patricia Clough, just three figures from anthropology andsociology whose collective work on the status of ethnographic texts raisesimportant political questions about the nature of ethnographic representa-tion? Does the very act of writing ethnography not change the co-ordinatesand ontological status of that which we observe as ethnographers? How doesthe status of ethnographic writing as a rhetorical form, with political andpoetic dimensions, force us to become ‘self-reflexible’ of our subject positionsas writers? Is ethnographic writing epistemic violence? Is it an essentiallypatriarchal form of representation, which attempts to mask its own desireto oppress? These questions attending the status of writing, and its philo-sophical articulation through, inter alia, constructionism, psychoanalysis,and postcolonial theory, are conspicuous by their absence from this text.

Third, in regard to the suggested use of native categories as definitive ofethnographic research, and as a way of capturing the subjective experiences

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of local actors, one does not need to go as far as anthropology to find somewarnings about their use. There are several pieces of management research(for instance, Buckley and Chapman, 1997; Harris, 2000) which drawattention to the dangers of placing too much faith in native informantaccounts of social and organizational realities. That is to say, the danger ofplacing too much store in these accounts as repositories of more ‘truthful’or ‘accurate’ representations of reality. Often there is a tendency to roman-ticize, exoticize and/or essentialize a native informant view, to assume thatit is even possible for the ‘subaltern to speak’. Important debates in post-colonial criticism, notably associated with Gayatri Spivak, should beenough for the interested reader to think through not only the colonialhistory of ethnography, but also of the compromised possibilities of ‘givingvoice’ to those whose experiences of the world had been marginalized andrendered unspeakable by colonial relations.

So far in this section, I have drawn attention to the manner in which theauthors might have provided more concerted coverage of their own onto-logical and epistemological assumptions, and to have situated these betterwithin wider debates on the contested status of ethnography. Further workmight have militated against the tendency of the article, in my reading atleast, to ‘unitarize’ ethnographic methodology. Moving on from this, thereis the question of whether, despite these issues, the authors succeed in oneof the other key objectives of the article: to demonstrate the value of ethnog-raphy as a way of attending to the (tough) local, subjective and ideologicalexperiences of global restructuring.

To demonstrate the value of ethnography for ‘revealing the sharp end ofcorporate ideology’, the authors (pp. 333–8) draw upon data they collectedfrom previous comparative research on the contemporary experience ofwork and employment in MNCs in the UK, USA and Japan. The ‘micro-level evidence’ they present on such experiences allows them to ‘extrapo-late themes that link to broader structural conceptions and economicprocesses’ (p. 335). My concern here is with the initial ambiguity regard-ing the research methods they deployed. On page 365 they suggest that theirevidence is based on ethnographic observation and interviews, but datapresented later in the article take form in their entirety in quotations basedon interviews. As they say, ‘this project was based on interview researchmethods’ (p. 337).

Key to the ethnographic enterprise, and for some its defining feature, areobservational methods. For an article espousing the merits of ethnography,I would have expected this point to appear in bright lights, for the reader’sattention to be drawn to discussions about both the epistemological statusof observational data as much as the practical and personal challenges ofconducting observational research. I would also have expected the point tobe made that ethnographers can, and typically do, make use of multiple


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methods for collecting data, ranging from interviews, journals, and obser-vation, to visual research methods and poetry inter alia. To me, it really isnot at all convincing to ‘demonstrate’ the merits of ethnography throughthe presentation of data purely emanating from interviews. What is beingdemonstrated then is not the value of ethnography, but the value ofinterviews. And the two are not the same.

One can extend this point of critique. Towards the end of the article, Ihad the feeling that I was reading more of a reprise of previously publishedresearch findings than a persuasive case for ethnography. I am more thanhappy to accept the substantive points the authors make about the levelsof convergence found in the dataset regarding governance structures, andmanagerial practices, across the different nations involved. And I am happyenough to interpret this as being ‘strongly associated with the spread of thenew organizational ideology as a community of practice’ (p. 328). But Icould read this in any of their articles. Where I am less persuaded is withthe claim that: ‘We argue that these values and interpretations can mostclearly be uncovered if analysts take on ethnographic approaches’(p. 328–9). The value of ethnography to achieve these interpretations hasnot been demonstrated to me. I could gain an insight into the tough sideof global restructuring just by picking up a newspaper or looking on theInternet! So, what is it I am getting that is different to these forms of ‘news’through ethnographic research? The answer is just not clear.

A final thought

As someone who has previously argued for an international managementdiscipline that shows greater commitment to methodological pluralism,epistemic reflexivity and political awareness, I am very sympathetic to thespirit of this piece. Given the number of previous calls for more interpre-tivist and ethnographic work which pays attention to the subjective experi-ences of MNC global restructuring specifically, and structures and practicesof international management more broadly, I was keen to know what thisarticle would add to extant critiques of the epistemological and politicalbasis of received wisdom. In this respect, I feel that the authors could havedone more. And by ‘more’, I mean more effort to clarify, nuance and situatetheir object of critique in the literature, and more effort to bring to thereaders’ attention debates on the status of ethnography and demonstratemore effectively the insights it can offer researchers.

One of the key challenges of opening up international management isnot just the suggestion of new methodological approaches, or researchmethods, but of encouraging and validating a grammar for philosophicaldiscussion in which issues of ontology and epistemology are seen as

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paramount. Even within the more ‘groundbreaking’ work in internationalmanagement which promotes qualitative inquiry, there is still a naïve beliefat times that new methods are the panacea for the limitations of positivis-tic work. This kind of qualitative work continues a separation of theoryand method indicative of positivist inquiry, and under-emphasizes the needfor greater epistemic reflexivity in the discipline (Jack and Westwood,2006). Whilst the authors do emphasize the need for more epistemologicalwork (p. 338), I think the article needs to instantiate better what this mightlook like. And part of validating this kind of debate, and especially ofconvincing the putative ‘mainstream’ of the need for such debate, lies inmore rigorous representations of the ‘received wisdoms’ which we set outto challenge.

References

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Boyacigiller, N. and N.J. Adler (1991) ‘The Parochial Dinosaur: OrganizationalScience in Global Context’, Academy of Management Review 16(2): 262–90.

Brannen, M.Y. (1996) ‘Ethnographic International Management Research’, inB.J. Punnett and O. Shenkar (eds) Handbook of International ManagementResearch, pp. 115–43. Oxford: Blackwell.

Buckley, P.J. and M. Chapman (1997) ‘The Use of Native Categories inManagement Research’, British Journal of Management 8: 283–99.

Chapman, M. (1997) ‘Social Anthropology, Business Studies, and CulturalIssues’, International Studies of Management and Organization 26(4): 3–29.

Clifford, J. and G.E. Marcus (eds) (1986) Writing Culture: The Poetics andPolitics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Geertz, C. (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York:Basic Books.

Harris, S. (2000) ‘Reconciling Positive and Interpretative International Manage-ment Research: A Native Category Approach’, International BusinessReview 9: 755–70.

Hofstede, G. (1983) ‘The Cultural Relativity of Organizational Practices andTheories’, Journal of International Business Studies 14: 75–89.

Jack, G. and R. Westwood (2006) ‘Postcolonialism and the Politics of Quali-tative Research in International Business’, Management InternationalReview 46(4): 481–501.

Marschan-Piekkari, R. and C. Welch (eds) (2004) Handbook of QualitativeResearch Methods for International Business. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

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Critique and Future Agenda’, in R. Marschan-Piekkari and C. Welch (eds)Handbook of Qualitative Research Methods for International Business,pp. 25–55. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

Prasad, A. (2003) Postcolonial Theory and Organizational Analysis: A CriticalEngagement. New York: Palgrave.

Prasad, A. and P. Prasad (2002) ‘The Coming of Age of Interpretive Organiz-ational Research’, Organizational Research Methods 5(1): 4–11.

Punnett, B.J. and O. Shenkar (eds) (1996) Handbook of International Manage-ment Research. Oxford: Blackwell.

Redding, S.G. (1994) ‘Comparative Management Theory: Jungle, Zoo or FossilBed?’, Organization Studies 15(3): 323–60.

Sharpe, D.R. (2004) ‘The Relevance of Ethnography for International BusinessResearch’, in R. Marschan-Piekkari and C. Welch (eds) Handbook ofQualitative Research Methods for International Business, pp. 306–23.Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

Silverman, D. (1993) Interpreting Qualitative Data: Methods for AnalysingTalk, Text and Interaction. London: Sage.

Thomas, A.S., O. Shenkar and L. Clarke (1994) ‘The Globalization of OurMental Maps: Evaluating the Geographic Scope of JIBS Coverage’, Journalof International Business Studies 25(4): 675–87.

Usunier, J.-C. (1998) International & Cross-Cultural Management Research.London: Sage.

Westwood, R.I. (2001) ‘Appropriating the Other in the Discourses of Compara-tive Management’, in R.I. Westwood and S. Linstead (eds) The Language ofOrganization, pp. 241–62. London: Sage.

Westwood, R.I. (2004) ‘Towards a Post-Colonial Research Paradigm in Inter-national Business and Comparative Management’, in R. Marschan-Piekkariand C. Welch (eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research Methods for Inter-national Business, pp. 56–83. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

Wright, R.W. and D.A. Ricks (1994) ‘Trends in International Business Research:Twenty-Five Years Later’, Journal of International Business Studies 25(4):687–701.

■ GAVIN JACK is Reader in Culture and Consumption at theUniversity of Leicester School of Management. Broadly situatedwithin critical management studies, his research interests include:international, cross-cultural and diversity management;anthropological and cultural studies approaches to consumption;postcolonial organizational analysis. Address: School ofManagement, University of Leicester, Leicester, LE1 7RH, UK.[email: [email protected]] ■

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