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With the globalization of business, a relevant question is how might people deal with others from fundamentally different backgrounds (cultural, ethnic, functional, etc.)? Many authors (Rhinesmith, 1992; Paul, 2000; Gupta & Govindarajan, 2002; Kefalas, 1998, just to mention a few) suggest that managers working in international contexts require a specialized way of thinking about the environment in which they operate, a so-called “global mindset.” In the current chapter, we discuss the evolving notion of a “global mindset” and contrast it with extant work on the related concept of “cultural intelligence” (Earley, 2002; Earley & Ang, 2003; Earley & Mosakowski, 2004; Thomas & Inkson, 2004).

In this response to the commentaries of Alutto, Morris and Young, we explore several important issues raised by the authors. The points raised in the commentaries highlight several important directions for cross-level and cross-cultural organizational research to follow including a strong cognitive orientation and an emphasis on contextualization.

To guide scholars interested in incorporating culture into research on behavior in organizations, this chapter discusses cross-level approaches to the study of culture that go beyond simplistic comparative analyses. We focus on the major issues confronting a cross-cultural management researcher. We consider diverse theoretical, research design, and analytical approaches that allow the researcher to link culture to organizational behavior. A central theme in our discussion is the paramount importance of a model that specifies mechanisms that link culture to lower levels of analyses, such as organizations, teams, and individuals. Our recommendations for empirical research revolve around the informed use of cross-level theoretical models to guide research design and analytical choices. We conclude with general recommendations for future research on culture and behavior in organizations.

To identify what scholars consider to be important and interesting for future research in social entrepreneurship (SE), this chapter analyzes 248 SE papers and generated 327 topics for future research. From these 327 topics, a modified Delphi process generated 27 underlying themes. Subject matter experts were surveyed as to how interesting each research topic is and the extent to which the topics lend themselves to theoretical or empirical development; this assessment was also used to calculate aggregate scores for each theme. In this chapter, we present all research topics that scored at or above 2.5 on a 5-point scale for both questions. We discuss the implications of both the method and the results of the study.

Because of the importance of a global mindset from both a theoretical and a practical point of view, there is need to examine this construct further to understand its contents, how it is developed, when and how it should be applied, and what its consequences are. Thus, we invited a select group of scholars to develop chapters on specific aspects of this topic to help build a volume accomplishing these goals. Our aim here was to invite the foremost thinkers and writers on this topic.

From its earliest incarnations, entrepreneurship has been linked to innovation, and often innovations with a societal or social impact. Although classical economists discussed the role entrepreneurs play in handling risk in an economy (Hébert & Link, 2009), perhaps the greater risks have been the social impacts which entrepreneurship brought to societies (Drucker, 1985). The power of mercantile economies like the Phoenician or two thousand years later the British came as much from the new ideas and processes they introduced to the societies of trading partners as from the goods traded.

The authors of the various chapters in this book have approached the concept of global mindset from diverse perspectives and have defined it differently. Levy et al. in this volume define global mindset as a highly complex cognitive structure distinguished by an openness to and expression of multiple cultural and strategic realities on both global and local levels and the cognitive capacity to moderate and assimilate across this diversity. More specifically, global mindset is typified by three corresponding dimensions: (1) an openness and attentiveness to multiple realms of action and meaning, (2) a complex representation and expression of cultural and strategic dynamics, and (3) a moderation and incorporation of ideals and actions oriented toward both global and local levels (Chapter 1 of this volume). At the core of their definition is the awareness of and openness to multiple realities, meanings, and perspectives.