Peter Berger (1929) is an American sociologist best known for his collaboration with Thomas Luckman in writing The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. That book argues that human reality, and knowledge of it, is a social construct, emerging from the individual or group’s interaction with larger social structures (institutions). Social structures, once widely adopted, lose their history as social constructions (objectivation), and come over time, by the people who live within them, to be deemed natural realities independent of human construction (reification). Berger predicted, in his later book, The Sacred Canopy, near-term all-encompassing secularization of religion, which prediction has proved false, especially in the third world (as Berger himself has acknowledged in his later work, Desecularization).

神圣的帷幕 : 宗教社会学理论之要素 = The sacred canopy elements of a sociological theory of religion

The paper provides a state-of-the-art review of several innovative advances in culture and international business (IB) to stimulate new avenues for future research. We first review the issues surrounding cultural convergence and divergence, and the processes underlying cultural changes. We then examine novel constructs for characterizing cultures, and how to enhance the precision of cultural models by pinpointing when cultural effects are important. Finally, we examine the usefulness of experimental methods, which are rarely used by IB researchers. Implications of these path-breaking approaches for future research on culture and IB are discussed.

/pdf/culture-and-international-business-recent-advances-and-their-3dgtkyvtjo.pdf

Culture and international business: recent advances and their implications for future research

This article reviews research on cross-cultural organizational behavior (OB). After a brief review of the history of cross-cultural OB, we review research on work motivation, or the factors that energize, direct, and sustain effort across cultures. We next consider the relationship between the individual and the organization, and review research on culture and organizational commitment, psychological contracts, justice, citizenship behavior, and person-environment fit. Thereafter, we consider how individuals manage their interdependence in organizations, and review research on culture and negotiation and disputing, teams, and leadership, followed by research on managing across borders and expatriation. The review shows that developmentally, cross-cultural research in OB is coming of age. Yet we also highlight critical challenges for future research, including moving beyond values to explain cultural differences, attending to levels of analysis issues, incorporating social and organizational contex...

/pdf/cross-cultural-organizational-behavior-3yg1o1b6nh.pdf

Cross-Cultural Organizational Behavior

A. L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, "culture: A critical review of concepts and definitions"

This paper explains why GLOBE used a set of cultural values and practices to measure national cultures. We show why there is no theoretical or empirical basis for Hofstede's criticism that GLOBE measures of values are too abstract or for his contention that national and organizational cultures are phenomena of different order. We also show why Hofstede has a limited understanding of the relationship between national wealth and culture. Furthermore, we explain why Hofstede's reanalysis of the GLOBE data is inappropriate and produces incomprehensible results. We also show the validity of managerial samples in studying leadership. Finally, we explain why Hofstede's claim that GLOBE instruments reflect researchers psycho-logic reveals ignorance of psychometric methodologies designed to ensure scale reliability and construct validity.

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1057%2Fpalgrave.jibs.8400234.pdf

Conceptualizing and measuring cultures and their consequences: a comparative review of GLOBE's and Hofstede's approaches

Leung and colleagues have revealed a five-dimensional structure of social axioms across individuals from five cultural groups. The present research was designed to reveal the culture level factor structure of social axioms and its correlates across 41 nations. An ecological factor analysis on the 60 items of the Social Axioms Survey extracted two factors: Dynamic Externality correlates with value measures tapping collectivism, hierarchy, and conservatism and with national indices indicative of lower social development. Societal Cynicism is less strongly and broadly correlated with previous values measures or other national indices and seems to define a novel cultural syndrome. Its national correlates suggest that it taps the cognitive component of a cultural constellation labeled maleficence, a cultural syndrome associated with a general mistrust of social systems and other people. Discussion focused on the meaning of these national level factors of beliefs and on their relationships with individual level factors of belief derived from the same data set.

/pdf/culture-level-dimensions-of-social-axioms-and-their-4fmyyh5nvr.pdf

Joseph O. T. Odusanya

Papers

Culture-Level Dimensions of Social Axioms and Their Correlates across 41 Cultures