Not All Differences Are the Same: Dual Roles of Status and Cultural Distance in Sociocultural Integration in Cross-border M&As

H. Emre Yildiz

Journal of International Management, 2014, vol. 20, issue 1, 25-37

Abstract: Despite, or perhaps due to, its central role in international business research, cultural distance is a widely debated and criticized construct. In this paper, I will examine the conditions under which two specific assumptions regarding the cultural distance construct (viz., symmetry and discordance) can get illusionary and misleading. Understanding the reasons behind the (in)admissibility of these assumptions is especially important to guide future cross-cultural research to take necessary steps towards conceptual and methodological adjustments and remedies. Towards that end, I introduce the idea of status heterogeneities between social actors who interact in a multicultural context, and how these heterogeneities can mold the mutual perceptions and attitudes between individuals. As the primary means with which firms internationalize, cross-border mergers and acquisitions are used as the context within which dual roles and implications of status and cultural distance are theorized. Auxiliary insights provided by status theories can explain why and when assumptions of symmetry and discordance could be wrong and misleading. Furthermore, incorporating status into the extant literature can reconcile inconsistent empirical results and help future research avoid under-specified models that do not account for systematic biases in their sample sets.

Keywords: Cultural distance; Status; Cross-border M&As (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (23)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S107542531300046X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:intman:v:20:y:2014:i:1:p:25-37

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/601266/bibliographic
http://www.elsevier. ... 601266/bibliographic

DOI: 10.1016/j.intman.2013.03.014

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of International Management is currently edited by M. Kotabe

More articles in Journal of International Management from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().