ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the cross-cultural management literature overwhelmingly uses nation as a proxy for culture, and that non-cultural values have a role to play in advancing, paradoxical as this may sound, our knowledge as to the nature of culture in today’s business world. The point here is that, when the findings of their Hofstede-influenced studies were published in English in mainstream journals, readers would probably grasp the significance of those findings as a genre of national–cultural assertiveness. In support of those propositions, Tsui and her co-authors make the case for a polycontextual approach for the appreciation of culture in international business practice, by which they mean ‘the process of incorporating multiple contexts for holistic, valid understanding of any phenomenon’ in the quest for more nuanced understanding of cultural impacts on international business. The 1980s and the early 1990s saw the fissuring of the socialist bloc, with the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the almighty Soviet Union.
