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Introduction
The field of cross-cultural management (CCM) – and the wider discipline of international business (IB) of which it is part – has produced a vast and ever-growing body of studies examining the ways in which “cultural differences” matter in corporate globalization. Concomitantly, there has been a proliferation of literature challenging the field’s assumptions and methods (McSweeney, 2002; Shenkar, 2001) and critiquing its essentialism (Ailon-Souday and Kunda, 2003; Vaara et al., 2003) and orientalism (Ailon, 2008; Jack and Westwood, 2009). Unsurprisingly, several scholars have suggested the field has run out of steam and is now “at a crisis point” (Brannen, 2015, p. 35) and thus in need of a new research agenda, if not an entirely new raison d’être. As Holden et al., (2015, p. 14) put it, “[o]ur discipline seems to be at crossroads, possibly implying that cross-cultural management scholars need to rethink and reposition the entire subject area” (Søderberg and Holden, 2002). Similar concerns have been raised in the wider field of IB where it is increasingly recognized that the study of culture has become “stuck in a theoretical-methodological rut and more radical thinking is necessary […] to advance beyond ‘more of the same’ science that simply reiterates repeatedly that culture matters” (Devinney and Hohberger, 2017). In short, the field finds itself in an intellectual cul-de-sac.
In this paper, I argue that a potentially fruitful way forward is to develop a line of inquiry focussed on the study of cultural globalization. By cultural globalization, I am here referring to collective efforts by multinational enterprises (MNEs) and related actors to create and diffuse norms, practices, identities on a transnational scale in accordance with the imperatives of corporate globalization (Boussebaa, 2020a; Boussebaa and Faulconbridge, 2019). The field of CCM/IB has given limited attention to this issue, which is surprising given the long-standing tradition of international management research tracing the development of MNEs and highlighting their sustained efforts to transcend national-cultural divides through cultural-normative means (Bartlett and Ghoshal, 1989; Nohria and Ghoshal, 1997). It is also surprising considering the extensive debates in the wider social sciences about the cultural dimension of globalization and the role of international organizations, including MNEs, in producing transnational norms, practices and identities (Drori et al., 2006; Faulconbridge...