THE 2016 JIBS DECADE AWARD

The Selection Committee for the JIBS Decade Award is pleased to announce that the article “A quarter century of Culture's Consequences: a review of empirical research incorporating Hofstede's cultural values framework” by Bradley L. Kirkman (North Carolina State University), Kevin B. Lowe (University of Auckland) and Cristina B. Gibson (University of Western Australia) has been selected as the winner of the 2016 JIBS Decade Award.  

The award, sponsored by Palgrave Macmillan, is designed to recognize the most influential paper published in the Journal of International Business Studies ten years prior and is presented at the annual AIB conference. In order to be considered for the JIBS Decade Award, an article must be one of the five most cited articles published in JIBS for the year being considered.  

This year’s Selection Committee members were Kendall Roth (Chair, selected by the JIBS Editor-in-Chief), the current AIB Program Chair Charles Dhanaraj, and immediate past AIB Program Chair Ram Mudambi. JIBS Editor-in-Chief John Cantwell was an ex officio, non-voting committee member. The Selection Committee examined total citations, total number of journals citing the paper, and total number of leading journals (excluding JIBS) citing the paper to determine the top five most cited articles. The Committee read and discussed the top five nominees and then voted on the winning article.

In recommending the award-winning article, the Committee noted that: “The Kirkman, Lowe, and Gibson paper provides a comprehensive review of empirical research on Hofstede’s cultural framework. They skillfully organize studies around twenty wide-ranging research topics, at three different levels – individual, group, and country. Using a wide canvas, they are able to synthesize the influence of culture in a number of fields beyond international business, including leadership, team behavior, and others. One of the major contributions of the article is to critically assess culture research to raise fundamental questions regarding the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of Hofstede’s work. The authors advocate the need for studies that examine multiple levels and extend the analysis to the within-country context. Further, they also highlight issues of sample equivalence and effect size in culture studies. Over the last decade, scholars from within and outside IB have responded, undertaking research in precisely these areas. Given the impressive breadth of the fields that have cited Kirkman et al.’s work, it is truly an outstanding JIBS paper that has had influence beyond the IB research community.”

A session will be held at the upcoming 2016 AIB Annual Meeting in New Orleans, in which Profs. Kirkman, Lowe and Gibson and invited discussants Kendall Roth (University of South Carolina; 2016 committee chair) and Timothy Devinney (Leeds University) will comment on the paper. A reception honoring the Decade Award winning paper and its author will also be held as part of the closing reception at the conference. We hope that you will join us in New Orleans to attend these events; the date and times will be available at http://aib.msu.edu/events/2016/ when the conference program is finalized.

A retrospective by the authors, together with the discussants’ commentaries, will be published in the first issue of the 2017 volume of the Journal of International Business Studies.