ABSTRACT
The challenge of researching across cultures has received considerable attention in the international management literature. Discussions have focused on a range of issues encountered by researchers as they work to solve the difficulties with linguistic and cultural translation faced when researching in unfamiliar cultural contexts. The problem remains the central methodological issue in international management research and a significant challenge that requires careful attention to ensure success. For a growing group of researchers, however, the problem is quite
different. More and more, researchers in international management are “locals.” For these people, the research is focused on their own cultures – familiar territory – with the results to be published in an international journal. This phenomenon is driven by at least two trends. First, an increasing
number of business schools outside of North America and Western Europe expect their faculty members to publish in international journals. These researchers naturally look to their own communities for sites to conduct research. Second, more and more researchers in North America and Europe come from diverse cultural backgrounds and find it convenient and attractive to return to their home countries to do research. For these people, conducting research “back home” allows them to collect data from novel settings and display their cultural and linguistic competencies. In either case, they face the problem of culture highlighted by cross-cultural researcher Edward T. Hall (1959): They need
to learn to “see” their own cultures and then translate what they see for publication in international journals.1
