Michael Minkov, Boris Sokolov, Eduard Ponarin, Anna Almakaeva and Ekaterina Nastina
There is an increasing interest in the international management literature in cultural differences between in-country regions. Yet, the regions of any country may be merely…
Abstract
Purpose
There is an increasing interest in the international management literature in cultural differences between in-country regions. Yet, the regions of any country may be merely political products and not necessarily cultural units. The goal of this article is to propose clear empirical criteria for deciding if a set of entities, such as a country's administrative regions, can be legitimate units of cross-cultural analysis and to test these criteria in an empirical study.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors review the literature on what constitutes a unit of cross-cultural analysis and propose empirical criteria. For instance, the regions of a given country are meaningful units of cross-cultural analysis if one can replicate (an) established dimension(s) of culture at the regional level, including some of the dimension(s)' antecedents and predictive properties. The authors apply this test in the context of the Russian Federation (RF), using an RF database (18,768 respondents from 60 administrative regions) with items borrowed from the World Values Survey.
Findings
The RF regions pass the authors’ test. At the regional level, the selected items yield an individualism-collectivism (IDV-COLL) dimension that is similar to its nation-level counterpart in the revised Minkov-Hofstede model in terms of concept and antecedents (wealth differences and geographic latitude) and outcomes that are relevant in business (innovation rates and quality of governance). The authors also find other patterns that confirm the properties of RF regions as meaningful units of cultural analysis.
Research limitations/implications
The authors’ criteria and the test based on them are suitable for large countries, with significant geo-climatic variety and ethnic diversity, but may be inapplicable in small countries with less diversity. It is questionable if the latter countries contain enough cultural variation to justify a cross-cultural analysis of their sub-national regions.
Practical implications
The authors’ criteria can be used in future research in any large country to decide if its regions justify a cross-cultural analysis in the field of management and business or any other field.
Social implications
Cultural differences within a country are important as they may inform political and management decisions. Yet, to demonstrate that those differences are real, and not imaginary, one needs a methodology like the authors’.
Originality/value
The study contributes to the discussion of the meaningfulness of in-country regions as cultural units for cross-cultural analysis in international business by focusing on the RF.
Details
Keywords
Olessia Koltsova, Sergei Koltcov and Sergey Nikolenko
The paper addresses the problem of what drives the formation of latent discussion communities, if any, in the blogosphere: topical composition of posts or their authorship? The…
Abstract
Purpose
The paper addresses the problem of what drives the formation of latent discussion communities, if any, in the blogosphere: topical composition of posts or their authorship? The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the knowledge about structure of co-commenting.
Design/methodology/approach
The research is based on a dataset of 17,386 full text posts written by top 2,000 LiveJournal bloggers and over 520,000 comments that result in about 4.5 million edges in the network of co-commenting, where posts are vertices. The Louvain algorithm is used to detect communities of co-commenting. Cosine similarity and topic modeling based on latent Dirichlet allocation are applied to study topical coherence within these communities.
Findings
Bloggers unite into moderately manifest communities by commenting roughly the same sets of posts. The graph of co-commenting is sparse and connected by a minority of active non-top commenters. Communities are centered mainly around blog authors as opinion leaders and, to a lesser extent, around a shared topic or topics.
Research limitations/implications
The research has to be replicated on other datasets with more thorough hand coding to ensure the reliability of results and to reveal average proportions of topic-centered communities.
Practical implications
Knowledge about factors around which co-commenting communities emerge, in particular clustered opinion leaders that often attract such communities, can be used by policy makers in marketing and/or political campaigning when individual leadership is not enough or not applicable.
Originality/value
The research contributes to the social studies of online communities. It is the first study of communities based on co-commenting that combines examination of the content of commented posts and their topics.