A Linguistic and Philosophical Analysis of Emic and Etic and their Use in International Business Research

Peter J. Buckley, Malcolm Chapman, Jeremy Clegg and Hanna Gajewska- De Mattos ()
Additional contact information
Peter J. Buckley: Leeds University Business School, University of Leeds
Malcolm Chapman: Leeds University Business School, University of Leeds
Jeremy Clegg: Leeds University Business School, University of Leeds
Hanna Gajewska- De Mattos: Leeds University Business School, University of Leeds

Management International Review, 2014, vol. 54, issue 3, No 2, 307-324

Abstract: Abstract The purpose of this paper is to examine ways in which cross-cultural research in international business can use emic–etic approaches more effectively. The majority of research conducted in the field has been etic, while the cross-cultural data used by the researchers have been emic in nature. This resulted in producing ethnocentric results which are biased towards Western perspectives. We call for a re-evaluation of the importance of in-depth qualitative analysis in international business research. We go back to the origins of emic and etic in linguistics and conduct a linguistic and philosophical analysis of these terms to demonstrate that the emic–etic distinction is not helpful for adequately studying cross-cultural data. We provide examples from linguistics, kinship, and from international business research on German-Polish acquisitions. We demonstrate that what conventional etic cross-cultural research perceives to be a problem is often an opportunity to gain deep insight. We find that emic matters in some cases more that etic, and that the emic can often add value beyond the etic. We conclude that a research strategy employing emic and etic approaches is a vital step to enable cross-cultural researchers to obtain more adequate and meaningful results. While most of researchers have treated emic and etic as dichotomous, we demonstrate the benefits of treating them as complementary approaches.

Keywords: Cultural differences; Emic and etic; Poland and Germany; Qualitative methodology (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11575-013-0193-0 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:manint:v:54:y:2014:i:3:d:10.1007_s11575-013-0193-0

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/11575

DOI: 10.1007/s11575-013-0193-0

Access Statistics for this article

Management International Review is currently edited by Michael-Jörg Oesterle and Joachim Wolf

More articles in Management International Review from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().