Empiricism Theory: National Culture And Corporate Culture

The paper begins with explaining the theoretical foundations by introducing the main concepts; national culture and corporate culture, or culture at organizational level. The study conducted by Engelen et al. concentrates on the individualism versus collectivism dimension of national culture and on the strength of the corporate culture. After familiarizing the concepts, the paper presents the hypotheses and clarifies how the hypotheses are derived. Next, the research conducted to test the hypotheses is described. Data was collected from 619 firms in six countries with national cultural differences. A hierarchical regression analysis was used and an etic measurement strategy was applied, which means that the same measurement instrument are used
One of those historical perspectives to research is empiricism, founded by John Locke. “Empiricism holds that the only knowledge we have can come from our observations, and that humans have no innate ideas which are not from experience” (Lee and Lings, 2008, p. 28). Logical positivism can be regarded as an evolution of empiricism. Logical positivism states that ideas are only meaningful when they can be empirically tested. Also, knowledge that could not directly observed was considered untrue. In the 1960s logical positivism died out and realism came up. Realism claims that many phenomena scientist are interested in cannot be directly observed, but can be measured. This idea returns in the scientific theory or approach to research. (Lee and Lings,
The objects and the reality are not generalizable as they are in the scientific approach, but are time- and context-specific. Since the reality depends on socio-historical context, it is unstable, constantly changing, and never final. The reality is a subjective social construction; it is collaboratively constructed by the people within it and should be viewed as a whole. Individual phenomena should accordingly be viewed in relation to that whole. (Lee and Lings, 2008). Knowledge is therefore more descriptive than abstract from the particular context and is not agreed upon by scientist nor reduced to laws and facts. Hence, the epistemology, or the “knowledge which they aim to generate” (Lee and Lings, 2008, p. 59), of the two approaches to research differ significantly. Moreover, the interpretive approach is concentrated on understanding the reality rather than explaining it. It is thus focused on generating local understanding of a phenomenon or experience. This concerns the axiology of the approach, or the goal of the approach. (Lee and Lings,