EDEN PhD and Post Doc Seminar in Cultural Studies in Comparative Empirical Business & Management Studies

EIASM, Brussels, 29-31 May, 2024

Application Deadline

1st March 2024


Faculty


Course coordinator

Mikael Soendergaard, Aarhus University

 


Prerequisites

The seminar is designed for participants with different backgrounds who have interests relating to country and regional culture in business and management and its applications. Although a basic knowledge of management, international business, and comparative study methodology (culture studies) is helpful, no specific prerequisites are required. Participants are expected to attend the entire seminar, present a paper based on their own research interests, and submit a “final exam” explaining how the seminar has contributed to improving their paper.


Aim

The seminar aims to provide the most recent ideas, methods and topics from a multidisciplinary background that include societal culture for doing empirical international business and comparative organizational research.


Course content

This is a discussion‐based seminar. Participants are expected to attend and be prepared for every session. Session preparation includes reading all required assigned material for the session. During each session, the discussion will be based on the assigned papers.


Teaching style

Lectures and workshops where participants are expected to present and discuss pre‐assigned readings.


Lecture plan

Lectures and workshops where participants are expected to discuss pre-assigned readings. 

 

S1 – 29/05/2024 - Faculty: Mikael Søndergaard & Ute Stephan     
Fundamental Assumptions in Cross Cultural Management Research

Cross cultural management research begins with the observations that theories and evidence from one country need not apply elsewhere, that cultural geography includes countries, civilizations larger than countries, and within-country regions, and that generalized theory and local experience complement one another.

 

S2 - 29/05/2024 - Faculty: Ute Stephan & Mark F.  Peterson          
Cross Cultural Management Research Sources: Psychology

The psychological sources of cross-cultural management research include the innovation of adapting societal theories of values to organize disparate studies of attitudes, recognizing the non-consciously embrained aspects of thought, and making applications to management topics.

 

S3 - 29/05/2024 - Faculty: Mikael Søndergaard          
Cross Cultural Management Research Sources: Anthropology

Anthropology, the original home of cultural research, provides cross-cultural management scholarship with insights about basic culture concepts, ways of studying culture, and considerations about justifying the dependability of qualitative analyses.

 

S4 - 29/05/2024 - Faculty: Mark F. Peterson & Ute Stephan 
Cross Cultural Research Management Sources: Sociology

Sociological conceptualizations and analyses of culture have sought explanations for qualities of larger scale societies and more industrialized societies than those that anthropologists traditionally study. In so doing, sociologists have developed questionnaire-based research methods and culture explanations based on modernization.

 

S5 - 29/05/2024 - Faculty: Mikael Søndergaard           
Culture’s Consequences

Distinctive country characteristics had been a topic of interest to organization scholars at least since WWII, but scholarly dissatisfaction with ad hoc concepts and explanations for these differences grew through the 1970s. Hofstede offered what proved to be an influential framework for country culture analysis that did much to shape the field. 

 

S6 - 30/05/2024 - Faculty: Mark F. Peterson                    
Comparative Organizational Research since Hofstede

Although very influential in organization studies and other fields, Hofstede’s framework has been continuously modified by analyzing geographical areas larger than countries and by using alternative ways to represent culture dimensions similar to some of his.

 

S7 - 30/05/2024 - Faculty: Ute Stephan & Mikael Søndergaard
GLOBE

Among several efforts to build on and overcome perceived limitations in Hofstede’s framework, project GLOBE has been the most influential despite several limitations.

 

S8 - 30/05/2024 - Faculty: Mark F. Peterson
Theorizing Societal Values and Personal Values: Level of analysis.

Most management approaches to analyzing societal culture design country-level measures that derive from individuals’ responses to questionnaires. Hofstede, GLOBE, and several other frameworks explained that individual-level and country-level measurement structures (e.g., reliabilities and factor structures) differed, lack of careful theorizing about how individuals are influenced by societal culture has generated considerable confusion about levels of analysis.

 

S9 - 30/05/2024 - Faculty: Ute Stephan & Mikael Søndergaard            
SVS and Tightness

The first two afternoon sessions cover other potentially useful culture dimension frameworks. The Schwartz Value Survey (SVS) approach to assessing societal culture has strongly influenced cross-cultural psychology for several decades and is the basis for several management studies by Ralston and colleagues. Unlike the Hofstede and GLOBE approaches, SVS research started as an analysis of personal values and has carefully comparing personal values with societal values developed from the same data set. Gelfand and colleagues’ study of cultural tightness and looseness builds from Triantis’s earlier conceptualization of individualism and collectivism.

 

S10 - 30/05/2024 - Faculty: Ute Stephan & Mark F. Peterson       
Aggregating Personal Values and Psychological Dimensions

Other potentially useful culture measures that rarely appear in business research derive societal culture measures from personality characteristics and measures of the self to further document and explain why societies have sufficient influence on individuals to construct aggregate measures.

 

 

S11 30/05/2024 - Faculty: Mark F. Peterson & Ute Stephan    

Methodology in Comparative Organizational Study: Multilevel Modeling

Level of analysis issues extend beyond the differences between individual and societal level measures to issue of how best to model relationships between levels. To deal with such issues, multilevel modeling is increasing used, especially in strategy applications of culture characteristics, and the proliferation of different, not fully appreciated methods are generating new issues.

 

 

S12 30/05/2024 - Faculty: Mark F. Peterson, Ute Stephan & Mikael Søndergaard        

Boundaries Defining Cultural Units of Analysis

The use of countries as the primary level of analysis for culture research in business has long produced questions about the correspondence of countries with cultural groups and whether some alternative cultural groupings, notably within-country cultural regions, might be more useful.

 

S13 31/05/2024 - Faculty: Mark F. Peterson    

Adjusting Culture Scores and Measuring Distance

Once decisions are made about which culture dimension framework is most useful for a particular research application, other choices are needed about whether to update the framework, adjust measures for country culture heterogeneity, or to instead study cultural distance between countries.

 

 

S14 31/05/2024 - Faculty:  Mark F. Peterson, Ute Stephan & Mikael Søndergaard        

Discussion Panel: Dos and Don’ts in Publishing Culture-Related Research

 

S15 31/05/24   Paper development workshop

Tentative schedule

Morning sessions: 8.30 -12

Afternoon sessions: 13:00-18.00

 

Paper development

One week before the seminar begins each participant is expected to hand in a 5 - 10-page proposal of a paper that the participant will present during the seminar. Peer and faculty feedback will take place during the paper development workshop portion of the seminar. At the end of the seminar, each participant is expected to hand in a 3 – 5-page summary of how the seminar has contributed to further developing the research question, theoretical framing, and hypotheses of their presented paper. The summary will be assessed on a pass/no-pass basis.

 

ECTS: 5

 

Fee

EUR 930. For PhD students/post doc/junior faculty who are currently enrolled at an EIASM member institution, there is a reduced fee. 3 scholarships are provided per EIASM Academic Council Member.

Maximum number of participants: 20

 

Contact information

For questions regarding the content of the course:

Course Coordinator: Mikael Soendergaard  [log in to unmask]

For application, registration, and practical queries:

the EDEN team - [log in to unmask]

 

EIASM information and application

www.eiasm.org/frontoffice/eden_announcement.asp?event_id=1728

 

 

 

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