What we inherit and what we create. Making the case for an interpretive approach to societal cultures

To deal with the omnipresence of otherness in today’s culturally-complex world, Cross-Cultural Management (CCM) investigates the interrelations between culture and management. The most recent research denaturalizes culture to emphasize the construction of otherness as an instrument of power plays. Thus, it refutes the very possibility of vast national cultures, given the cultural diversity found in modern societies. This conceptual article revisits the notion of culture and provides a definition that makes it possible to grasp both what is inherited and what is created in ‘otherness’. It draws upon an interpretive approach to culture which, although still overlooked in English-language research on CCM, has for several decades been developed in France. The socalled Gestion & Société approach posits that the root causes of otherness lie in the diversity of culturally-shared major fears and ideal ways of living together to counteract them. This approach breaks new ground by emphasizing the inherited cultural references underlying the individuals’ sense-making and by acknowledging the individual agency of the stakeholders who use these references to create new intercultural arrangements in cross-cultural encounters at work. A language metaphor is used to show how the inherited part of culture and the part that is created are articulated. Examples of empirical findings illustrate the benefits of this approach to overcome the critical effects of otherness. The value of its contribution to the understanding of otherness is assessed in comparison with other interpretive approaches, and avenues for future research are discussed.