Etic or Emic? Measuring Culture in International Business Research

How to measure culture has been a fundamental challenge for scholars in the field of international business. Approaches, as well as contexts relating to culture, national culture, and dimensional culture, are their major concerns. It is suggested that etic categories may be useful for comparative analysis, but need corroboration from fieldwork and must be open to new elements collected by an emic approach. Moreover, international business research with cultural issues would benefit from combining the etic and emic approaches.