Cross-cultural competence and management – setting the stage

At start up of our new journal we provide a frame of reference supporting reflections on the domain of cross-cultural competence and management and on future research. Referring to basic epistemological and ontological considerations, the article differentiates between various levels of analysis and gives examples for fruitful research avenues for these levels: 1) 'classical' issues in cross-cultural competence and management research, 2) the epistemology of a system with values, beliefs (stereotypes) and knowledge (memory), the ontology of a system with personality (decision making processes) and the phenomenology of a system with action and observable patterns of behaviour, 3) relations of societal culture to structural, demographic and ecological characteristics of societies and to their historical experience, to national policies or distributions of individual attitudes, values, behaviour, etc. within societies, 4) issues related to the time dimension, 5) methodological issues such as meaningful cultural distance measures or mixed language use.