ABSTRACT
The paradox of culture is that language, the system most frequently used to describe culture, is by nature poorly adapted to this difficult task. The rhetoric of a discipline both advances and constrains the development of a field. Early stirrings of the contemporary field of Cross-Cultural Management (CCM) arose in response to a desire on the part of developed nations and corporations for trade expansion and the ensuing need to understand how attributes of business practice in export partners might differ from those in the home country. By the 1980s, however, “culture” had become the surrogate for nation-state, and the label for the discipline had shifted from Comparative to International Management. In research and in practice, it is no longer appropriate for the term “culture” to reflexively release the response “nation” and for the concept culture to be unconsciously assumed to be equivalent to nation-state.
