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INTRODUCTION
A longstanding conceptualization of international differences in the workplace and consumer behavior centers on values: A society socializes its members into distinctive value priorities, and individuals are driven by their internalized cultural value orientations to behave in the ways that are characteristic of the society. The most influential value framework in international business (IB) research is that of Hofstede (1980), which scores countries on several value dimensions. Hofstede's (1980) dimensions are parsimonious and broadly encompassing; they have proved useful for organizing research on cultural differences in a wide range of business behaviors (Taras, Kirkman, & Steel, 2010), including modes of foreign investment (Kogut & Singh, 1988), consumer behaviors such as online shopping (Lim, Leung, Sia, & Lee, 2004), and sourcing services from different countries (Peeters, Dehon, & Garcia-Prieto, 2014). At the same time, many researchers have identified empirical patterns that do not fit the assumptions of the value approach, and have called for studying alternative mechanisms of cultural influence (e.g., Kirkman, Lowe, & Gibson, 2006).
In this article we review the limitations of the value account, that people in different nations pursue different ends, and then introduce two alternative approaches: The constructivist account that culture influences behavior through the schemas or cognitive lenses people use to make sense of ambiguous information, and the intersubjectivist approach that culture influences behavior through the social norms that direct typical or appropriate behavior in a given situation. While these different approaches have been developed in separate research traditions, recent findings increasingly point to connections and parallels in the functioning of values, schemas, and norms that give rise to cultural differences. Drawing on these different streams of research, we propose a situated dynamics framework to integrate these three explanatory mechanisms and identify the conditions under which each mechanism explains cultural patterns in behavior.
Our article makes three major contributions to theory and methodology concerning the culture-behavior nexus. First, while there is clear evidence that the value approach fails to account for a wide range of cultural influences, a systematic attempt to address its limitations is still lacking. In the past two decades, research on schemas and norms has substantiated their validity as alternative explanatory mechanisms. For instance, schema research elucidates how and when bicultural individuals effortlessly mesh with a...