Taking stock of five decades of literature on cross-cultural management. Some preliminary findings.

Cross-cultural research has developed rapidly over the last decades as awareness has grown that cross-cultural research can offer significant contributions to the overall field of management studies by deepening our understanding of the international business context. The purpose of this paper is to examine the literature on cross cultural management and to trace its evolution over time through the analysis of about five decades of research published in leading management journals. Drawing on a database of 317 articles published between 1960 and 2008 in 48 academic journals, we present a detailed analysis of the content and development of cross cultural management studies. Specifically, we first provide a brief overview of cross-cultural management and summarize a number of review studies on cross-cultural management. Next, we describe the methods adopted in our study. We then describe the database of cross-cultural management articles employed in this study in terms of the distribution of the selected articles over time and per subject areas. After this, we provide an analysis of the major themes that have characterized cross cultural management research across the selected decades. Specifically, ‘old, ‘new’, and ‘enduring’ themes are identified. Finally, we present a framework for positioning the different streams of cross cultural management research.