Purpose of cross-cultural research in business and marketing
Cross-cultural research of all types, not specifically business related, can be criticised as unconsciously enacting the agenda of the dominant culture and new ways of thinking about culture and cross-cultural issues are emerging (Baerveldt and Verheggen , 1999; Bowlin and Stromberg, 1997; van den Bouwhuijsen, Claes and Derde, 1995) .  The dominant culture has the power to frame understanding of the world on their terms, and to enact issues and investigations flowing from that world view to serve those agendas. (This is often simply summed up in the expression that much cross-cultural research is ethnocentric (Boyacigiller and Adler, 1991)). 

At a simple level the issues for multi-cultural and cross-cultural research in business, and marketing specifically, are apparently quite removed from such concerns.  The issues for business and marketing management may be defined as enabling trade, enabling the firm to operate successfully in more than a local geographic market or to operate more successfully in a local geographic market where many cultures live together. Other issues relate to successfully targeting offerings at more than a single cultural group, increasing efficiency and effectiveness by illuminating areas of similarity and difference across cultures that may enhance the success of business and marketing management and transactions.  This may not be an exhaustive list of issues but captures the essence of a fairly deterministic approach to the multi-cultural and cross-cultural research agenda in today’s global business environment. The aims are, broadly, increased transparency and formal, rather than tacit, knowledge to increase business success. 

Even if increased transparency through formal knowledge was an appropriate goal, some reframing of the research agenda might lead to the following types of questions. What is the relationship between modernity and traditional values within a culture? What is the relationship between the dominant culture and the minority culture and an individual’s identification with each? What are the processes by which change is managed within this culture?  Are processes of homogenisation, differentiation or stratification more accurate description of processes of adaptation and change?  Is cooperation or competition the more successful mode of behaviour? Specific examples are those as noted by a tradition of blessing tools of the trade or occupation in India by having a priest enter the place of work or the implication for business to business marketing of the importance of the network relationships in Korean society, and the influence of God “Inshallah” (“God willing”) in the goal directedness of Saudi Arabians. An ethnocentric research agenda might have led to an exporter of beef emphasising the quality, hygienic preparation, taste and adaptation to traditional recipes rather than even being aware of the impact of the network relationships on business- to- business relationships.  A concrete practical example concerns the issue of a restaurant meal.  By what criteria do we define a “good” meal?  The Japanese are primarily concerned with the freshness of the ingredients.  They will consider and debate the merits of different farm regions and the speed with which fish has been caught and presented to table.  The French are more concerned with the process of meal preparation – the recipe and the time and trouble spent in preparation and presentation.  Latin diners, from Spain or Mexico for example, will praise the “gift” of the chef for her special ability with a particular dish.  The North Americans are more concerned with the efficiency with which the meal progressed and apparently cannot enjoy a meal unless it is served quickly .  These are generalisations of course.  Most of us take some account of each of these points, but one issue is of greatest moment for each cultural group and some are probably not even in the consciousness of other cultures.

Setting the research agenda, or more simply, forming the questions for investigation, are not necessarily simple or obvious issues.  Should the investigation begin with an already well-established issue in the consumer behaviour literature?  This apparently innocuous and accepted approach to research is highly likely to be culture bound in that "the literature" originates most often from North America or from North American trained researchers and reflects concerns and issues relevant to the practice of business in that country.   Should the research begin with a well-established practical issue, such as the need to understand the possibilities and limitations of standardisation across markets, and then seek to extend its application to other cultures?  Should the research begin with some cultural framing questions and then seek to understand the impact of these in different cultures?  Are there universal questions that are of central interest that should be established and researched first? 

Comparative or cross-cultural research?
The starting point for much of what is termed cross-cultural research is summed up by this statement at the beginning of a well-respected paper that the task concerns “assessing the applicability of frameworks developed in one country to other countries [as] an important step in establishing the generalizability of  …theory.. and the measurement of the constructs of interest have to exhibit adequate cross national equivalence” (Steenkamp and Baumgartner, 1998). If cross-cultural research can be equated to comparative research, then a number of recent papers (Cavusgil and Das, 1997; Saimee and Jeong, 1994; Steenkamp and Baumgartner, 1998; Yu, Keown and Jacobs, 1993) have very adequately addressed method issues and given a good lead in developing more methodologically sound research. 

Central to the improvement in method are concerns with equivalence of all types: functional, conceptual, instrument (measurement and vocabulary) equivalence, sample selection and data collection methods and data analysis (Yu, Keown and Jacobs, 1993).   Among the approaches identified has been the use of confirmatory factor analysis to address configural, metric and scalar equivalence or invariance issues in measurement and to develop practical guidelines relating to the goals of the research given the frequent occurrence of only partial measurement invariance (Steenkamp and Baumgartner, 1998).  This approach is a measurement led procedure that does not consider broader cultural issues.

In addition, it is becoming more apparent that cross-cultural research and comparative research cannot be used interchangeably. While some (Steenkamp and Baumgartner, 1998) have been careful to restrict method techniques to issues of comparative research, others (Cavusgil and Das, 1997) use comparative and cross-cultural research interchangeably, still others (Yu, Keown and Jacobs, 1993) have focused on issues of method whilst only acknowledging the broader “non-methodological” issues. 

The “non-methodological issues” have been identified as relating centrally to the issue of culture itself and also to the issues of functional and conceptual equivalence (Yu, Keown and Jacobs, 1993).  Functional and conceptual equivalence go to the central issue of meaning, and are thus not simply amenable to method solutions.  To be functionally equivalent an object or construct must perform the same function in different cultures.  A computer has meaning as an information-processing tool in Western economies but this is also subject to different functional interpretations.  For example, the use that computers, donated by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, have been put to in African countries have been quite diverse including the use of the “grey box” as a chicken coop. To be conceptually equivalent a concept or construct must apply in the same way in different cultures.  A concept as central as love can be understood quite differently across cultures.  The search for love, as shown in the prime time U.S. television show “Sex and the City”, has a very different meaning to the search by the young Indian middle class person using the classifieds in major Indian newspapers.  Thus culture itself needs to be addressed. 

A meaning based approach to culture
A very general, often used definition of culture is that it is “the man-made part of the human environment” (Herskovits, 1948).  This definition immediately cues us to think of the material objects and artefacts created by humankind (VCRs, art, home furnishings). Of equal importance is the subjective culture, the subjective psychosocial responses of people to experience often expressed as values, roles and norms (Triandis, 1972). The subjective culture refers to the corporate cognitive system with which a society interprets experience and imputes meaning to the world, and to objects, including man made objects. Culture is "the totality of equivalent and complementary learned meanings maintained by a human population … and transmitted from one generation to the next" (Rohner, 1984). 

The nature of cultural influence has been identified (McCort and Malhotra, 1993) as a circular process from which meaning is created, maintained and transmitted within a society.  Individuals interpret experience through a shared cognitive structure. Cultural meaning is transmitted through communication and behaviour, through rituals, through adherence to norms and by the use of artefacts to form individual meaning systems (McCracken, 1986). Culture is both determined by its members and determinant of the characteristics of its members.  So “the different structure of words and concepts as between two different societies is a measure of different realities as lived and understood in the fullest sense by different peoples” (Tayeb, 1994, p.431). 

Meaning, reality, ontology and cross-cultural research 
It has been established that culture relates to the construction of meaning and the different realities experienced by people in different cultures.  Thus to undertake cross-cultural research, researchers must develop ways to tap into meanings and realities.  A first step in this process necessitates making ontology explicit.  Ontology is the branch of philosophy that deals with assumptions about the nature of reality.  Considerations of ontology have recently been found to be a powerful tool in the area of knowledge engineering and information science (Vickery, 1997; Wand, 1996) and it is suggested offer similar possibilities in cross-cultural research. 

Much of the existing research in the cross cultural research area objectifies reality, sees it as real, out there, and unchanging.  Given this understanding of the world, the types of knowing, or epistemology, tend toward the objective measurement of phenomena, through the use of questionnaires and surveys and the use of mathematical tools of analysis. However, ontology most often remains implicit. While people often question method, and sometimes question epistemology, ontology is rarely questioned. However, ontology is important for a number of reasons.  Ontology addresses fundamental issues of meaning.  It is the point where we identify and define the objects and processes that are worthy of consideration in our research.  It is central to agenda setting: What’s important, what are the relationships between the issues?  What is the research question?

Such reflections on how the world is ordered and organised are not the exclusive domain of cross-cultural research and insight into the issue of ontology can be gained through consideration of other research approaches.  These concerns intersect with what is broadly termed the interpretive or social constructionist perspective (Berger and Luckman, 1966) and explicitly the postmodernist school influenced by Foucault (1970) and Fleck (1979).  For example, in his influential analysis of the development of order and organisation in the modern world Foucault (1970) starts with an amused and perplexed reflection on the writer Jorge Luis Borge's description of 'a certain Chinese encyclopedia' in which it is written that: "..animals are divided into (a) belonging to the Emperor (b) embalmed (c) tame (d) sucking pigs (e) sirens (f) fabulous (g) stray dogs [..]…etc”. The shock of confronting such a different world order reveals the limitations of a particular thought style.  Fleck (1979) points out that individuals are necessarily members of a thought collective with a particular thought style, which, often unbeknown to the individual, or indeed the entire collective, exerts a compulsive force upon their thinking. This explains the harsh reaction to Columbus' assertion that the earth was round.  This tendency has been identified as a process of selectively abstracting ideas, concretizing them as aspects of reality, and then taking them as the appropriate unit of analysis whilst ignoring and forgetting the process by which this occurred (Chia, 1995). 

Concluding Remarks
Recognising the issues raised above and moving from some of the present approaches  of ordering the world to a more interpretivist approach is suggested as a part of the way forward for cross- cultural research in business and marketing.

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