ABSTRACT
Universal or Contingent, context agnostic or context specific, emic or etic, is culture impactful on leaders or not? All these questions are at the heart of management and leadership studies, and scholars as well as practitioners look to understand these equations with no good success rate so far. Understanding how people behave is cumbersome and looking at it from one angle cannot help. Employing one knowledge domain such as anthropology can only provide generalisation which fails against critique, as this is the case with mainstream of leadership studies that dominated over the past three decades such as Hofstede’s work or the Globe to name a few. The impact of national culture on management studies and the debate about how it has been utilised over the past 30–40 years are discussed in this chapter. Douglasian Cultural Theory (DCF), which was developed by Mary Douglas back in 1970s and further developed by Michael Thompson later, is provided as an alternative to national culture in management domain in general and Cultural Intelligence in specific. The use of DCF frees our biases towards race, nationality, or ethnicity and creates a focused bias on five types of cultures.
