ABSTRACT
The terms "emic" and "etic" that were originally developed in linguistics have been used in cross-cultural psychology and organizational research for the past three decades. These terms have been adapted and modified from their original use in linguistics in a variety of ways in order to address the specific conceptual and methodological issues most pressing in other fields. This chapter describes the original derivation of emic and etic, reviews the ways they have been adapted and used in organizational research, discusses the implications of some omissions and departures from how the terms were originally coined, and suggests specific steps that can be taken to constructively use them in cross-cultural survey and ethnographic studies of organizations. We recommend that the field progress from using these ideas for promoting efforts to develop globally equivalent concepts and measures to using them to develop an etic science that includes some concepts and measures that are globally equivalent, some that are useful only within a few societies, and even some that are locally unique.
