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The aim of this paper is to survey existing information security culture research to scrutinise the kind of knowledge that has been developed and the way in which this knowledge has been brought about.

Results are based on a literature review of information security culture research published between 2000 and 2013 (December).

This paper can conclude that existing research has focused on a broad set of research topics, but with limited depth. It is striking that the effects of different information security cultures have not been part of that focus. Moreover, existing research has used a small repertoire of research methods, a repertoire that is more limited than in information systems research in general. Furthermore, an extensive part of the research is descriptive, philosophical or theoretical – lacking a structured use of empirical data – which means that it is quite immature.

Findings call for future research that: addresses the effects of different information security cultures; addresses the identified research topics with greater depth; focuses more on generating theories or testing theories to increase the maturity of this subfield of information security research; and uses a broader set of research methods. It would be particularly interesting to see future studies that use intervening or ethnographic approaches because, to date, these have been completely lacking in existing research.

Findings show that existing research is, to a large extent, descriptive, philosophical or theoretical. Hence, it is difficult for practitioners to adopt these research results, such as frameworks for cultivating or assessment tools, which have not been empirically validated.

Few state-of-the-art reviews have sought to assess the maturity of existing research on information security culture. Findings on types of research methods used in information security culture research extend beyond the existing knowledge base, which allows for a critical discussion about existing research in this sub-discipline of information security.

Functionalist models of intercultural interaction have serious limitations relying on static and decontextualized culture views. This paper sets out to outline newer developments in anthropological theory in order to provide inspirations to a more dynamic and contextual approach for understanding intercultural communication research in cross‐cultural management (CCM).

The paper analyzes the established approaches to the cultural underpinnings of intercultural communication in CCM and examines how newer developments in anthropology may contribute to this research.

The standard frameworks for classifying cultures in CCM are based on a view of culture as static, formal mental codes and values abstracted from the context of valuation. However, this view, underwriting the dominating research stream, has been abandoned in the discipline of anthropology from which it originated. This theory gap between intercultural communication research in CCM and anthropology tends to exclude from CCM an understanding of how the context of social, organizational and power relationships shapes the role of culture in communication.

The paper proposes to substitute the view of culture as comprising of abstract values and codes as determinants of communication with concepts of culture as dynamically enfolded in practice and socially situated in specific contexts, in order to give new directions to theories on intercultural communication in CCM.

Scant research has compared intercultural communication research in CCM with new anthropological developments. New insights from anthropology are analyzed in order to open up analytical space in CCM.

This paper aims to unfold the path of how the complexity of culture issues leads to a rising pressure for paradigm changes in the research on culture in international management. In terms of academic debate about culture, the crucial paradigm shift has not yet happened. Research and writing are still dominated by a mechanistic-rational approach which does not quite know to handle cultural phenomena which by nature are mutuable, often transient and invariably context-specific. Rising pressure is observed for paradigm changes through three main trends: integration of West-East dichotomy, coexistence of convergence and divergence; and dynamic vs static perspectives. It is argued that the unresolved debate on the culture construct and its measurement, the epistemological stance by researchers and associated methodological choices in culture studies reinforce these trends pressuring for a paradigm shift.

This paper reviews the knowledge based on culture studies to establish the contributions of culture studies in international business and the foundation of its knowledge base. The conceptual foundation of culture, its multi-level and multi-dimensionality and critical issues in research epistemology and methodology are analyzed to discuss emerging trends in the process of an imminent paradigm change.

By unfolding the nature of abstract and high-order definition of culture, the focus is on deciphering the complex construct and multi-level and multi-dimensionality in measurement, which, in turn, interact with the epistemology of culture researchers and the choice of methodology used to carry out culture studies. Eventually the interaction of the three studied elements drives the proposed three paradigmatic changes in the evolving business environment.

The identified trends in existing culture research keep the importance of culture studies in international business management thriving as we point to their relevance for the envisaged paradigm shift.

The three paradoxes discussed challenge researchers who aim to contribute to the knowledge base of culture in international business. In addition, the debate cannot be ignored by international business managers as culture is a key informal institutional driver that influences international business performance.

The review of the knowledge base on culture studies in management contributes to a better understanding of the envisaged paradigmatic shift of the discipline. The debate on the complexity of culture studies is extended to three tendencies for potential paradigmatic change, with implications discussed to suggest future research.

The purpose of this paper is to conduct a study on the articles published in the four top international business (IB) journals to examine how four cultural models and concepts – Hofstede’s (1980), Hall’s (1976), Trompenaars’s (1993) and Project GLOBE’s (House et al., 2004) – have been used in the extant published IB research. National cultures and cultural differences provide a crucial component of the context of IB research.

This is a bibliometric study on the articles published in four IB journals over the period from 1976 to 2010, examining a sample of 517 articles using citations and co-citation matrices.

Examining this sample revealed interesting patterns of the connections across the studies. Hofstede’s (1980) and House et al.’s (2004) research on the cultural dimensions are the most cited and hold ties to a large variety of IB research. These findings point to a number of research avenues to deepen the understanding on how firms may handle different national cultures in the geographies they operate.

Two main limitations are faced, one associated to the bibliometric method, citations and co-citations analyses and other to the delimitation of our sample to only four IB journals, albeit top-ranked.

The paper focuses on the main cultural models used in IB research permitting to better understand how culture has been used in IB research, over an extended period.

Through a number of comprehensive reviews, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) has recommended that healthcare organizations develop safety cultures to align delivery system processes with the workforce requirements to improve patient outcomes. Until health systems can provide safer care environments, patients remain at risk for suboptimal care and adverse outcomes. Health science researchers have begun to explore how safety cultures might act as an essential system feature to improve organizational outcomes. Since safety cultures are established through modification in employee safety perspective and work behavior, human resource (HR) professionals need to contribute to this developing organizational domain. The IOM indicates individual employee behaviors cumulatively provide the primary antecedent for organizational safety and quality outcomes. Yet, many safety culture scholars indicate the concept is neither theoretically defined nor consistently applied and researched as the terms safety culture, safety climate, and safety attitude are interchangeably used to represent the same concept. As such, this paper examines the intersection of organizational culture and healthcare safety by analyzing the theoretical underpinnings of safety culture, exploring the constructs for measurement, and assessing the current state of safety culture research. Safety culture draws from the theoretical perspectives of sociology (represented by normal accident theory), organizational psychology (represented by high reliability theory), and human factors (represented by the aviation framework). By understanding not only the origins but also the empirical safety culture research and the associated intervention initiatives, healthcare professionals can design appropriate HR strategies to address the system characteristics that adversely affect patient outcomes. Increased emphasis on human resource management research is particularly important to the development of safety cultures. This paper contributes to the existing healthcare literature by providing the first comprehensive critical analysis of the theory, research, and practice that comprise contemporary safety culture science.

Different forms of inter-organisational encounters, including joint ventures, alliances, mergers and acquisitions, have over the last decades become fashionable and much-sought means of globalisation. A continuous concern shared by managers involved in these different forms of inter-organisational encounters is the challenge of making them work in practice – their successful implementation and management. The cultural dimensions of these different kinds of inter-organisational encounters, particularly in cross-border contexts, have been deplored as being particularly difficult. This paper builds on prior research and aims to understand how the cultural dimensions of inter-organisational encounters have been approached by researchers on mergers and acquisitions on the one hand and researchers on alliances and joint ventures on the other hand. Based on a comparative literature review, the findings suggest that the two fields, despite their valuable contributions and the similarities in the phenomena they study, have remained surprisingly isolated from one another and would offer opportunities for cross-fertilisation. Through its theoretical contribution, the paper intends to offer insights to researchers in both streams of research.

The purpose of this study is to capture the variation in entrepreneurs' understandings and experiences through which they contextualise cultural factors within a national setting to articulate how they use their knowledge and social capabilities to advance their activity.

This study adopts an interpretivist approach through which culture is investigated at the individual level. Phenomenography is used as a methodology to capture the variation in the entrepreneurs own understanding and experiences of the cultural factors.

The findings introduce four different understandings and eight experiences to explore how entrepreneurs contextualise culture in their environment. The findings present a change in the role of culture in influencing entrepreneurial social capabilities and confidence; and a change in the local culture from collectivism to individualism. Furthermore, the findings show how entrepreneurs use their knowledge, experience and understanding to achieve socially driven acts to pursue economic value, integration and acceptance.

We encourage further research in the Middle-East region to examine the model and identify other factors that affect entrepreneurial behaviour, including the important developments with regard to women entrepreneurs. While Jordan has embarked on introducing policy level changes to support entrepreneurship, the findings report that the culture of collectivism is changing. This requires a longitudinal research to capture the change and its implication on entrepreneurial activity in Jordan and its impact on unemployment and economic value.

In terms of practical contribution, the study introduces a policy level contribution by answering the question presented by the GEM report (2014) pointing out the high entrepreneurial opportunity identification in Jordan, yet the country has the lowest entrepreneurial activity in the region. Although the report pointed out issues in policy and institutional support the role of culture was not addressed. The study recommendation is to celebrate and entrepreneurial activity and introduce entrepreneurial studies at schools to influence a positive change.

We addressed some of the several calls to further investigate and understand the role of culture, how entrepreneurs contextualise it (Foss and Klein, 2012; Garud et al., 2016; Zahra et al., 2014; Welter et al., 2019). Our research provides a fertile ground for further enquiries that pose questions such as “What other factors do entrepreneurs contextualise in their environment?” and “how these factors are contextualised?” The use of phenomenography as an interpretive methodology might therefore assist in revealing further shared understandings of the variation in entrepreneurs' behaviours. Further research on capturing “understanding” presents the complex forms of interactions and mechanism in the cognitive world of the entrepreneurs (Barandiaran et al., 2009; Brannback and Carsrud, 2016).

In this study, phenomenography has enabled new insights into the multiplicity and idiosyncratic role of culture within a national setting and introduces a model of social capability and integration which capture the contextualisation of cultural factors. The study contributes to entrepreneurship literature as follows: first, the implicit assumption in this research is that culture is an active construct that entrepreneurs understand, experience and also influence; second, the variation in entrepreneurs' outcomes is based on their subjective and personal understandings which form the ways of contextualisation. Third, the variation in understanding and experiences captures the different ways entrepreneurs use their social capabilities to achieve integration and economic value.

Culture has been identified as one of the main drivers of the “competitive productivity” (CP) of nations. However, research studies examining the relationships between culture, competition and productivity are highly fragmented across different streams of literature, leaving researchers with a lack of a holistic view of the topic. This study reviews research studies that examined the relationships between culture and productivity and between culture and competitiveness, as well as the joint relationships between culture, productivity and competitiveness in leading economic, business and management journals in the period 2009–2018 in order to identify research gaps and opportunities for future research.

The authors used a combination of bibliometric analysis using VOSviewer, text analysis using Leximancer and systematic review by expert reviewers to analyze 293 articles that consider culture, productivity and competitiveness published in leading business, management and economics journals in the period 2009–2018.

The findings indicate that, although productivity and competitiveness are often discussed jointly in some policy circles, research studies on the roles of culture on productivity and on competitiveness take place in quite different streams of academic literature, drawing on different sets of concepts and theoretical frameworks. The concept of innovation appears prominently in both sets of the literature as an antecedent of both productivity improvement and international competitiveness.

The findings highlight the need for more research studies which jointly examine culture, productivity and competitiveness and the relationships between them.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is among the first attempts to systematically analyze the literature on the relationship between culture and CP.

This paper aims to report the efforts to reverse a dire research output trend at a Ghanaian Business School, following a similar effort at a business school in New Zealand in the 1990s. African universities are often challenged by resource constraints, ageing faculty and low compensation regimes. The consequences of these challenges are particularly felt in the area of the research output of faculty members in the business and management area. The problem of low research output has been written about by management scholars who lament the weak showing of African management faculty in reputable journals and top-notch conference presentations.

This is a qualitative and phenomenological study of an applied intervention. Using a combination of open-ended questionnaires as well as open forums attended by faculty members of the business school, views, perceptions and opinions on factors mitigating research and issues on research culture were collected and analysed. Descriptive analyses were used to collate the dominant views and frequency of mention of such views.

Using the descriptive accounts of faculty of the Business School, the research finds that a research-oriented culture expressed through factors such as leadership, institutional support, articulation or otherwise of relevant values have significant impacts on research output.

Based on the impacts reported here, this paper advances an intervention model to assist efforts towards improving the research culture and scholarly outputs in business schools in Africa. The paper also proposes a conceptual and research framework for examining and influencing the organisational and research culture of universities in Africa.

This paper is perhaps the only attempt to examine research culture in an African business school. It suggests that the research culture in a business school or faculty can be developed, reinvented or influenced and that research in African universities will not “just happen”, it has to be carefully planned for, nurtured and built into the fabric of university culture. This has significant implications for the growing effort to bring African scholarship in the management areas up to the point where it can more directly impact management thinking.

With the worldwide growth of the Chinese tourism market, a number of studies have emerged, that attempt to understand the phenomenon, including the influence of Chinese culture on Chinese tourist behavior. This research aims to answer four questions: How has Chinese culture been adopted in tourism literature? What is the current state of tourism research on Chinese culture? What are the similarities, differences and research gaps between international and Chinese studies in this area of investigation? What are the directions that future tourism research will take?

The articles for this systematic review were published in major international hospitality and tourism journals and Chinese journals over a period of 20 years (1993-2012). A meta-review was carried out on 80 Chinese and English tourism literature dating from 1993 to 2012.

This review showed that Chinese culture has been fragmentally operationalized due to underdeveloped Chinese cultural theories in tourism, independent and unrelated extant cultural systems and perspectives and lack of empirical testing for theory development. Two major theoretical systems of Chinese culture in tourist research were revealed in this review: cross-cultural theory and traditional Chinese cultural framework. The current state of tourism research on Chinese culture was also analyzed. The similarities, differences and research gaps were identified between international and Chinese studies on this inquiry. Implications for future tourism research in this area were suggested.

Unveiling the evolving research progress of a single culture helps to provide a deeper insight into how culture was used to analyze the behavior of individual tourist markets, and hence to better understand a particular tourist market.

This research has synthesized a wide range of literature to unveil the extant understanding of Chinese culture as reflected in Chinese tourists and outline the ways forward in this area of investigation.