Culture Theory in Global Marketing Research: An Assessment from the Literature

Global marketing research is an expanding body of work on the complex enterprise of marketing goods and services in a range of geographies and political/economic/socio-cultural conditions. From 1976 to 1982, only 112 empirical papers on global marketing were published, whereas from 1983 to 1990 the number more than doubled to 230 (Albaum and Peterson, 1984; Aulakh and Kotabe, 1993). While a rise in the volume of scholarly work is evident, less apparent is whether it is achieving the goal of knowledge advancement. In an often cited review, Albaum and Peterson (1984, pp. 161–162) concluded that the global marketing literature is “fragmentary, generally atheoretic, and not sufficiently programmatic to offer anything than simplistic and incomplete insights….”