scholarly journals Cross-cultural IS research: perspectives from Eastern and Western traditions

2015 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 229-233 ◽  
Author(s):  
Merrill Warkentin ◽  
Brigitte Charles-Pauvers ◽  
Patrick Y K Chau
PsycCRITIQUES ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 55 (50) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence H. Gerstein ◽  
Stefanía Ægisdóttir
Keyword(s):  

Author(s):  
Narendra Singh Chaudhary ◽  
Radha Yadav

The authors discuss in detail the meaning of conflict, cross-cultural conflict, the reasons for the conflicts, and its impact on overall organization performance and productivity. The authors also highlight and discuss the various strategies that can be worked out to reduce and resolve conflicts amicably and how to use conflicts for the betterment of the organization. The authors also focus upon the various issues and concerns that need to be taken care of while handling the conflicts and resolving them effectively. The authors have also drawn attention towards the future research perspectives, which will help organisations and management to address the cross-cultural conflicts and utilizing them for the betterment of the organisation in a constructive manner.


Author(s):  
Detmar Straub ◽  
Karen Loch ◽  
Roberto Evaristo ◽  
Elena Karahanna ◽  
Mark Srite

In reviewing the history of the conceptualization and measurement of “culture,” one quickly realizes that there is wide-ranging and contradictory scholarly opinion about which values, norms, and beliefs should be measured to represent the concept of “culture.” We explore an alternate theory-based view of culture via social identity theory (SIT), which suggests that each individual is influenced by plethora of cultures and sub-cultures–some ethnic, some national, and some organizational. In IS research, the culture of subjects and respondents is problematic because it is typically an overly simplistic categorization. IS research nearly always assumes that an individual living in a particular place and time belongs to a single “culture,” e.g., someone living in Egypt is automatically classified as being a member of the Egyptian culture, or, more broadly, the Arab culture. This dearth of clear concepts and measures for “culture” may explain why cross-cultural research has been so exceedingly difficult to conduct. It may also explain why it has been hard to develop and refine theories. Moreover, it may give insight into why reasonable explained variance in predictive models has not been higher. Finally, it is very possible that much cross-cultural business research could be rightly accused of advancing an “ecological fallacy” by not recognizing the individual makeup of persons with respect to culture. Using SIT (or other theory bases) as grounding for cultural research programs implies the use of certain methodological approaches. Each study would have to establish the salient “cultures” in each individual’s background and include these different “cultures” as independent variables in positivist research. In qualitative research, there would need to be an equally rigorous assessment of the cultural identifiers of each individual.


2008 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 249-268 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Avison ◽  
Peter Banks

The offshoring of information systems (IS) work has seen phenomenal growth in the past 5 or more years. This has resulted in IS professionals, interacting with workers from vastly different cultural backgrounds, in order to deliver IS project and support services. This cultural ‘barrier’ has been highlighted in the IS literature as a key challenge for offshoring; however, the attention given to research in the field has in the main been restricted to surveys or interviews, often reliant on reductionist national culture models. Within the fields of linguistics and anthropology, the ethnographic research technique of conversation analysis (CA) has been successfully applied to cross-cultural communications. However, there have been no concerted research efforts to apply CA to IS research in general and to IS offshoring in particular. Our research aims to address that gap by analysing naturally occurring recordings of telephone conferences between offshore vendor staff in India and UK/US employees of a major pharmaceutical company. The research has identified and analysed two important phenomena observed within these communications. Firstly, evidence of asymmetries of participation across cultural divides has been documented, and analysed for underlying causes, such as different attitudes to hierarchy and a lack of shared understanding of expected responses. Secondly, differences in the rhetorical organisation of conversation by participants have also been observed and clearly documented within transcribed specimens of these conversations. These phenomena led to seven findings that are aimed to stimulate further research. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, this paper demonstrates how the methodological approach of CA can be applied to IS offshoring research, producing key insights into culturally loaded conversations with clear applications for practice. We hope that this evidence of the potential of CA in IS research will inspire IS researchers to use the approach in other domains as well as in further work in offshoring situations.


Author(s):  
Dan M Kotliar ◽  
Rivka Ribak ◽  
Shazeda Ahmed ◽  
Jonathan Roberge ◽  
Marius Senneville

The last years have seen a proliferation of research on the social ramifications of algorithms (Eubanks 2018; Noble 2018) and the power of algorithms was insightfully theorized (Gillespie 2016; Bucher 2018). At the same time, scholars have begun to examine the ties between algorithms and culture (Seaver 2017), describing algorithms as products of complex socio-algorithmic assemblages (Gillespie 2016, 24), with often very local socio-technical histories (Kitchin 2017). However, the spatial trajectories through which algorithms operate, and the specific sociocultural contexts in which they arise have been largely overlooked. Accordingly, research tends to focus on American companies and on the effects their algorithms have on Euro-American users, while, in fact, algorithms are being developed in various geographical locations, and they are being used in diverse socio-cultural contexts. That is, research on algorithms tends to disregard the heterogeneous contexts from which algorithms arise and the effects various cultural settings have on the production of algorithmic systems. This panel aims to fill these gaps by offering four empirical perspectives on algorithmic production in three prominent tech centers: China, Canada, and Israel. We will ask: How do cross-cultural encounters construct notions of privacy? How is algorithmic discrimination understood and acted upon in China? What symbolical and material resources were invested in making Canada’s AI hubs? And how Israeli tech companies use their algorithms to profile their Other? Hence, this panel offers to think beyond the Silicon Valley paradigm, and to aim towards a more diverse, culturally-sensitive approach to the study algorithms.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Willem Mertens ◽  
Jan Recker

The objective of this Research Perspectives article is to promote policy change amongst journals, scholars and students with a vested interest in hypothetico-deductive information systems (IS) research. We are concerned about the design, analysis, reporting and reviewing of quantitative IS studies that draw on null hypothesis significance testing (NHST). We observe that debates about misinterpretations, abuse, and issues with NHST, while having persisted for about half a century, remain largely absent in IS. We find this an untenable position for a discipline with a proud quantitative tradition. We discuss traditional and emergent threats associated with the application of NHST and examine how they manifest in recent IS scholarship. To encourage the development of new standards for NHST in hypothetico-deductive IS research, we develop a balanced account of possible actions that are implementable short-term or long-term and that incentivize or penalize specific practices. To promote an immediate push for change, we also develop two sets of guidelines that IS scholars can adopt right away.


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