* Academy of Management Journal 1999, Vol. 42, No. 1, 76-86.

CROSS-CULTURAL COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH: TOWARD REFLEXIVITY

MARK EASTERBY-SMITH Lancaster University DANUSIA MALINA University of Teesside
We examine the methodological and philosophical implications of cross-cultural management research, comparing a field study conducted collahoratively in the United Kingdom and China with Teagarden and colleagues' survey-hased international study. Our findings confirm those authors' calls for flexihility in cross-cultural research and for careful management of research team relationships hut also highlight the significant effects that power differences and contrasting views ahout research can have on the conduct of cross-cultural research. Further, we identified refiexivity as a valuahle component of cross-cultural management research, especially when there is a need to comhine insider and outsider perspectives.

The recent interest in cross-cultural management research (Boyacigilier & Adler, 1991; Earley & Singh, 1995; Steers, Bischoff, & Higgins, 1992) is very welcome, but there is still relatively little work addressing cross-cultural management research methods. Moreover, published studies that address these methods have usually relied on the work of Hofstede (1984), who considered only problems involved in conducting nomothetic and largely quantitative cross-cultural work. There has as yet been little consideration of the problems characteristic of qualitative and idiographic studies, at least within the management field. In this research note, we argue that although certain issues, such as how relationships are best
We would like to thank our sponsors, the Economic and Social Research Council, the National Science Funding Council, and the British Council, as well as the companies and staffs who allowed us to enter their lives to conduct this research. Special thanks go to Rachel Heard and Lu Yuan, who provided background material for this research note. We consider ourselves fortunate to have worked within a collaborative research team that included Dr. Lu Yuan and Professor J. Child (Cambridge University), Mr. D. Brown and Ms. Rachel Heard (Lancaster University), Dr. N. Campbell and Mr. A. Neilson (Manchester Business School), Professor Chen Zhicheng, Mr. G. Junshan, and Mr. Liu Zhiwei (University of Science and Technology, Beijing), Professor Zhang Chongqing (Chinese Enterprise Management Association), Professor Sun Qianzhang (Karl Marx University), and Professor Robert Chia (Essex University). We would also like to thank the anonymous referees of AMf, Robin Snell, and Anna Lorbiecki for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this work.
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managed, are common to both nomothetic and idiographic studies, there are some issues that do not feature in nomothetic studies but are highlighted by idiographic studies. Our argument is supported by a review of a collaborative China-United Kingdom research project examining decision-making cases in large organizations in the two countries. We compare our observations with the account of a nomothetic study provided by Teagarden and colleagues (1995), identifying points of similarity and difference.
TWO STUDIES OF CROSS-CULTURAL COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH

Teagarden and her coauthors (1995) provided a rare review of the process of conducting crosscultural collaborative research. The authors used a four-stage model to organize their report of their experiences studying human resource management practices in 10 countries and in collaboration with researchers from 18 countries. These researchers had not anticipated many problems at the outset and had to substantially adjust the research design in order to maintain adequate rigor. Adjustments included having to adapt the wording and content of the main survey instrument to fit local circumstances and needs and shifting from random sampling to theoretical sampling because of the problems posed by corporate access in some countries. Above all, it was recognized that the quality of the relationships between researchers and between researchers and informants was crucial to the successful implementation of the project. The present report describes a contrasting study,

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based on fieldwork methods, through which many of the insights offered by Teagarden and her colleagues were confirmed and extended. This research project, conceived in the mid-80s, reflected concern in the U.K. business community about the quality of business relationships between the United Kingdom and China. It was felt that these relationships could be improved if more insider information were obtained about actual decision-making processes in equivalent organizations in each country. Accordingly, the first author and several colleagues decided to conduct case studies of two major decisions made in each of four U.K. and four Chinese companies matched as far as possible by size and products. The work was ultimately designed and conducted by a team comprising seven Chinese academics and eight United Kingdom academics from five different universities.^ Thus, in both national settings studied, the research team contained both insiders and outsiders, as Bartunek and Louis (1996) recommended. Substantive results from the project have already been published elsewhere (cf. Chen, 1993; EasterbySmith, Malina, & Lu, 1995; Lu & Heard, 1995); in this report, we consider the methodological issues that arose in conducting the project. Our study differed from that of Teagarden and colleagues (1995) in two important respects; First, the design was idiographic. It involved extensive fieldwork within a small number of companies conducted to investigate major capital investment and human resource decisions. Each decision was written up as a unique case, and analysis took the form of the researchers' attempting to understand the reasons for the similarities and differences observed. This design contrasts directly with the nomothetic design of the Teagarden study, whose researchers relied principally on a single survey instrument to gather data on human resource management practices from a large number of companies in ten different countries, in order to describe general patterns and practices in these countries.
^ The size and membership of the team varied over the course of the project. The second author joined the team after all fieldwork had been completed. All the researchers are identified in the acknowledgment at the beginning of this note. The U.K. institutions were Lancaster and Cambridge Universities and the Manchester Business School; Chinese institutions were the Karl Marx University and the University of Science and Technology, Beijing (USTB). The project was coordinated in the United Kingdom by the first author and in China by Professor Chen of USTB. The participating companies' identities are not reported for reasons of commercial confidentiality.

Second, our project was established in such a way that responsibility for funding, resourcing, design, and execution of the study was shared between the Chinese and U.K. teams from start to finish, whereas the Teagarden study involved central design, coordination, and analysis of data, with the first author passing out responsibility for data collection to her research colleagues in other countries. In our study, the equivalence in the two national groups' contributions to and ownership of the research meant that neither was able to impose methods or objectives on the other, beyond the detailed arrangements for fieldwork in their own countries. The contribution of the present note is in four areas. First, we confirm the importance of managing relationships within cross-cultural research teams and the need to adapt methods for different national and cultural circumstances in ways that cannot be predicted in advance. Second, we extend the observations of Teagarden and her colleagues (1995) on the problems of power and politics w^ithin cross-cultural management research teams. Third, we identify an additional problem for crosscultural teams that arises when conceptions of research differ between countries that do not have a common cultural and academic heritage. Fourth, we explore the potential of refiexivity in crosscultural research. Refiexivity is more than merely reflecting on what has taken place: it involves actively considering the implications of what has been observed for the observer's own practice. We believe that refiexivity can contribute significantly to sense-making in cross-cultural teams conducting collaborative research. Our story is organized around five phases, which modify and extend the four phases described by Teagarden and her colleagues. These were forming a research consortium, generating research questions and constructing a survey, doing the research, and making sense of the findings. Our five phases were as follows: harnessing networks, focusing the project, accessing data, interpretation and writing and dissemination. The penultimate section of this article draws together, and sets within the context of relevant literature, the emergent themes of power differences and differing conceptions of research. In the final section, we consider the insideroutsider dilemma in cross-cultural research and propose that it can be resolved through adopting a reflexive methodology. The account presented here is based on notes made by members of the team while the project was being conducted, documentary sources, our own reflections, and extensive dialogue with our colleagues in China and the

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United Kingdom based on drafts of this report that have been circulated around the team. FIVE PHASES OF CROSS-CULTURAL COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH Phase 1: Harnessing Networks The project had its genesis in a number of informal meetings conducted between 1984 and 1988 among five U.K. and Chinese academics who were collaborating with each other on minor research projects and development activities. The success of these other projects led to mutual respect between the key parties, and gradually the idea emerged that the group might initiate a major research study of decision making in Chinese and U.K. companies. As the five core members' research ideas developed, further staff became involved. Every new member of the team was already well known to at least one of the core researchers, so the project was based on a strong network of personal ties within both national groups. The core team had expected that personal ties would be important in the Chinese group because of the significance of guanxi, the intricate system of overt and covert social networks governed by unwritten laws of reciprocity that require constant maintenance (Wilpert & Scharpf, 1990). The lead Chinese collaborator commented on this issue as follows: A good partner must have interest in the chosen subject, have a friendly attitude toward other members of the group, have a cooperative manner, . . . be competent, influential and can manage to find the necessary funds for the project. (Chen, 1995: 4) Therefore, in dealings with the Chinese team members, the U.K. researchers were conscious of the need to nurture relationships and of expectations of mutual obligation. But it was not until after the research project was completed that U.K. team members realized that this consciousness had not been applied to relations at the U.K. end. This insight leads us to register strong agreement with Teagarden and colleagues (1995) and with others (Filion, 1989; Oyen, 1990), about the key role that trust and good communications between team members play: they are the sine qua non of crosscultural management research. Phase 2: Focusing the Project The second phase concerned the way the research team clarified the focus and aims of the research in order to secure funding. At an early

stage, the support of the British Council was obtained to cover travel for the U.K. academics between the United Kingdom and China and the basic needs of the Chinese academics when they were in the United Kingdom. The team then approached the United Kingdom's Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and China's National Science Funding Council (NSFC) for funding to cover the salaries of research staff and internal travel at each end. It is interesting to note here that the two councils used similar decision-making processes, involving anonymous peer reviews and final decision making by committees of academics. Proposals to the funding councils were pursued simultaneously. The United Kingdom proposal. This document took about a year to draft. At meetings held every couple of months, the U.K. researchers discussed aims, conceptual frameworks, and methodologies; the task of updating the draft proposal moved around the group. The U.K. team members agreed quite quickly that the substantive focus should be on decision making in the contrasting areas of strategic investments and human resource management, which provided a meeting ground for the different interests of team members. The final proposal submitted to the ESRC was written by the U.K. team's coordinator, the senior author. To appeal to academic referees, the proposal needed to demonstrate theoretical and methodological quality. But the ESRC was also under political pressure from the Thatcher government to demonstrate the utility of the projects it funded (Rothschild, 1982), and it had recently changed its name from the Social Science Research Council to the Economic and Social Research Council. Hence, the potential economic contribution of improving trade relations between the United Kingdom and China was emphasized in the proposal. The Chinese proposal. This document was based on the U.K. draft and modified to appeal to prevailing research priorities in China; thus, how the study would contribute to the deepening of the economic reform process within enterprises was highlighted. There were several exchanges of letters and drafts between the U.K. and Chinese groups at this stage, but significantly, no detailed debate on methodology took place between the two groups because each was responsible for implementing the study in its own country. One consequence of this independence was that each group started to form assumptions independently about the motivations of the other group. Thus, as Dr. Chen, the coordinator of the Chinese team (and author of the final version of the Chinese proposal) commented later:

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The overseas scholars and experts are quite ready to know China and get necessary [information] about China before they make their way into the Chinese market. Whereas we want to know and learn from our foreign counterparts so as to improve our theoretical level to serve the deepening of our reform. (Chen, 1995: 4) On the U.K. side, it had been expected that the Chinese academics would hope to learn about research methodology from the U.K. academics. It was a surprise in retrospect to see how the Chinese collaborators viewed the U.K. members' motivations: both groups assumed that their own interest was primarily theoretical but that the other group's was more practical. Once funding had been approved at both ends, staff recruitment began. Two Mandarin-speaking researchers (1 Chinese and 1 British) were appointed at the U.K. end, and two junior Chinese faculty members with good English were allocated to the project at the other end. The two national groups also started to organize communications within and between themselves. Arrangements included meetings every tw^o months for all U.K. team members, staff secondments from China to the United Kingdom totaling nearly two person-years, visits from 5 of the U.K. researchers to China for periods of two to ten weeks, and a three-day residential seminar held near Lancaster for all 14 thencurrent members of the project. In summary, external funding introduced a political element into the project, which was not apparent in the (unfunded) Teagarden study, and this meant that both national groups composing our research team had the added pressure of accommodating the demands of national funding agencies with differing objectives. There were also possible differences between the two research groups regarding the nature and purpose of the research and the motives of the other group. In addition, we can note two reflexive insights: through observing how the Chinese team members adapted the focus of the research to their context, the U.K. group realized how much the draft proposal already reflected the U.K. context; we in the United Kingdom also started to appreciate how each group was attributing purely academic motives to itself but attributing slightly less positive, practical and commercial motives to the other national group. Phase 3: Accessing Data Gummesson (1991) commented that access to organizations and individual informants is the prob-

lem in qualitative research. Expecting at the outset that access to Chinese organizations would prove very difficult, the U.K. researchers were most surprised to discover that this was not the case. A key factor in gaining access was that the senior Chinese researchers worked in prestigious universities and had therefore developed excellent networks that included former students who were by now senior managers in the target companies. Because of these personal links, the project was not reliant on the official gatekeepers who normally allow access for foreign researchers only to showcase organizations (Shenkar & von Glinow, 1994; Snell & EasterbySmith, 1991), and this advantage enabled the team to reach areas that would not normally be accessible. Access to U.K. companies proved much more difficult, and three of the four companies named in the original research proposal were unable to confirm their provisional commitments. These were eventually replaced by three other companies with characteristics slightly different from those originally planned, and the Chinese team members then had to find new companies at their end that would provide good matches. There were two separate stages in the negotiations with U.K. companies: first, general approval of the project had to be given at a senior level; then, meetings with individual managers had to be negotiated on an ad hoc basis. Success at both stages was influenced by a number of factors, including the academic status, gender, and age of the researcher involved. In some instances, a junior, female researcher was able to establish contact and eventual access more easily than a more senior, male counterpart, particularly when male gatekeepers were involved. Sometimes a racial dimension was evident, as when a U.K. company appeared reluctant to discuss interview dates with a Chinese member of the team; but in another case the same individual was able to obtain access to a key U.K. company through contacts established when he worked for them as a student. Fieldwork spanned almost two years and included visits to China by U.K. team members and visits to the United Kingdom by Chinese team members. Given the riumber of researchers involved, it was often necessary for the principal researchers to exclude some people from visits because the composition of fieldwork teams needed to take account not only of actual research experience, language skills, and status, but also of the way that status and expertise would be perceived by companies. Moreover, perceptions of status were based on different considerations in the two countries. A young female researcher who was often ignored by interviewees when working with an

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older male in the United Kingdom described her contrasting experience in China thus; The very fact that I was a foreigner granted me an exaggerated importance. In China, foreignness seems to override age and experience in the ranks of status and brings with it a different kind of treatment. . . . I really began to feel like royalty. (Heard, 1992) Easterday, Papademas, Schorr, and Valentine (1982) noted how, when researchers conduct fieldwork, external perceptions of status may conflict with the internal pecking order of a research team, which is likely to be based on seniority and technical expertise. In the case of cross-cultural research, there is the additional problem that the same attributes (for instance, being male or foreign) may have different implications for status in different national contexts, and hence research teams will not be able to predict the effect of these factors in each country. In the present project, it was also hard for both national groups to explain to members of the other group how local attributions of status had affected specific fieldwork decisions. This led to suspicions of unwarranted exclusion, which generated tensions both within and between the two groups. Fieldwork relied on interviews with key decision makers at the participating companies, supported by examination of documents and informal discussions with additional personnel. At least two researchers, including one from each of the national groups, were involved in each interview. The interviews in China were conducted in Mandarin, without the use of interpreters. Despite the whole team's having discussed and agreed on the methods to be used in the project, all the researchers were surprised at differences that emerged in the way fieldwork interviews had to be conducted in the two countries. The Chinese team members were surprised at the informality and short duration of the interviews in the U.K. companies (normally, 1-2 hours). The U.K. researchers were surprised that interviews in China were more like lectures, with managers reading from prepared reports in day-long meetings attended by at least three other members of the company. Questions were not usually allowed until after each speech was finished. During informal discussions with these managers later on, they explained that a spontaneous exchange of ideas would have led to ill-prepared answers. As one of the Chinese academics explained further, "How can they answer questions if they have not prepared the answers?" This was one of the first indications that the two national groups might have different ontological orientations: it

seemed that the Chinese people were looking for accurate data and factual information, whereas the U.K. people were more interested in perceptions and interpretations. Turning to our ongoing comparison with the Teagarden study, we can note here our strong agreement with those authors on the crucial importance of personal contacts in gaining access, even though the significance of those contacts might vary by country. But experiences conducting the present study have three further implications for cross-cultural management research: The first is rather obvious, that one should not expect the fieldwork procedures of one's own country, such as arrangements for access or interview settings, to be replicated in the other country. The second point is that the variable impact of the gender and nationality of field-workers may be compounded by international differences, and external attributions of status may conflict with internal assumptions about research competence. The third implication, a reflexive insight, is that observing the approach of the Chinese colleagues to data collection revealed how much the U.K. team members' expectations about fieldwork were conditioned by their own experiences in the United Kingdom. Phase 4: Interpretation Published studies generally describe research sites and data collection techniques but give less space to discussing the process of analysis (Eisenhardt, 1989). This traditional neglect was mirrored in the initial stages of this project since, being in need of consensus, the team forebore from confronting in depth the different methodological preferences of team members. Two factors provided an impetus for this emergent norm of consensus: First, when writing the research proposals, the team put itself under time pressure to obtain funding from both countries at the same time. This meant that the other team members suppressed their views to allow the final authors of the proposals (the respective coordinators in each country) a free hand. Second, the U.K. researchers did not want to jeopardize good relations by engaging in sharp debate with the Chinese researchers at this stage. In this section, we describe some of the main points that arose once both groups started to work together on the interpretation of data. Although the team agreed quickly on the need to write up separate cases for each company, it took a long time to reach consensus on how to make sense of the data. Long debates took place between fieldworkers after a day's interviewing about the data obtained. It became evident that the U.K. team

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members were most interested in differences, whether these were between accounts of the same decision in one company or between accounts of similar decisions in different companies, whereas the Chinese team members were more interested in the similarities between the practices of companies and were therefore most concerned to ensure that observations were accurate and that the "facts" were right. These interests may have been conditioned by circumstances, such as the degree of corporate homogeneity or diversity, in the researchers' home countries. For example, when asked about the criteria used to assess the promotability of a manager, the four Chinese companies offered identical four-point lists, even though they were located in different industries and in different parts of China, whereas the four U.K. companies all had distinct and unique criteria (Easterby-Smith et al., 1995). The U.K. researchers also expected accounts to vary for different informants in the same company, whereas the Chinese researchers expected an agreed-upon answer to each question to be supplied by the most appropriate person. These assumptions were tacitly reinforced by the ways, noted in the previous section, that data collection arrangements varied in the two countries. This difference again suggests that the two teams held different ontological positions regarding the object of inquiry and different epistemological positions about methods of inquiry. At this point in time, the emphasis of the Chinese researchers on obtaining accurate facts suggested a realist position (Bhaskar, 1989), whereas the U.K. researchers' interest in exploring different interpretations of events suggested a constructionist position (Shotter, 1993).^ Teagarden and colleagues (1995) suggested that shared vision and objectives can help researchers deal with the problems of different levels of skill, knowledge, and resources within their teams. But a common vision is difficult to achieve when team members hold different views about knowledge and the best ways of interpreting data, as we have noted here. Furthermore, as the project progressed, the U.K. and Chinese national groups not only became more aware of these differences in their ori^ Here we are using Bhaskar's notion of realism as "the theory that the ultimate objects of scientific enquiry exist and act (for the most part) quite independently of scientists and their activity" (1989:12). This is contrasted with the social constructionist perspective, according to which phenomena are understood and, in a sense, created through conversation between the actors involved, thus blending the roles of observer and observed (Shotter, 1993).

entations, but also started to understand and appreciate each other's initial perspectives. With hindsight, we suggest that one way of testing for this possibility at an early stage might be to design a joint pilot study in which both sets of researchers can get a feel for the way their colleagues operate. Again, the implications are that in cross-cultural settings, management researchers should not assume that their overseas colleagues share the same research perspectives as themselves, especially if they have been trained in different educational traditions. Also, since researchers from different nations may not share a common methodological language, they are unlikely to become aware of differences before they engage in joint fieldwork. Phase 5: Writing and Dissemination The project's overall policy was that responsibility for writing and dissemination should rest with each individual team member. In order to facilitate individual contributions, the overall team affirmed that all data collected on the project should be considered equally the property of every member, that pairs and subgroups would be encouraged to write together wherever there were likely to be common interests, and that all members would inform the national coordinators of their writing plans so that an overall list of work in progress could be maintained. The members of each national group occasionally met to update each other on writing plans and to see whether there were other themes that could be tackled to advantage. Over ten major publications have been produced from the project so far, two by Chinese and U.K. coauthors. Some of the key papers were published by two contract researchers, Lu Yuan and Rachel Heard, with minimal involvement from the national coordinators. The principals encouraged these publications because it was clear that the contractors needed to be able to demonstrate an independent output for career purposes; it was also a reflection of the fact that by the end of the project they, as full-time researchers, had acquired a much deeper understanding of the complex qualitative data than the principals held. Indeed, it is unlikely that the latter could have exercised central control had they wished to, because of the great scope for writing provided by qualitative data and the enormous time commitment required for its analysis. Thus, the contract researchers were in a powerful position. With regard to outputs, research team members began to realize through the experience of working alongside foreign colleagues that in each country different assumptions were being made about the

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requirements of the audiences for this research. U.K. team members were under pressure to publish theoretical work in refereed journals, and any practical implications were seen as secondary. In contrast, the Chinese team members were expected to demonstrate how theoretical observations could be implemented in Chinese enterprises. The assumption of a close link between theory and practical application turned out to be an important feature of our Chinese colleagues' approach, and after some discussion of this point one Chinese professor summarized their position neatly in the following words; "A theory is the summary of the reality, and the reality is the practice of the theory." In summary, we can see a likely difference between our project and Teagarden and colleagues' (1995) work, even though those authors did not explicitly consider the writing-up phase in their proposed model. Our project illustrated the difficulties of exercising central control in qualitative projects, and this is likely to be another area of contrast with survey-based studies that require centralization so that statistical analysis of data can be conducted. We also gain a reflexive insight when looking back at this phase; We had expected our Chinese colleagues to be strongly influenced by the requirements of their funding council since China is still highly dependent on networks of personal and institutional relationships (Boisot & Child, 1996), but it was through observing tbe Cbinese team that we again realized just how much we in the United Kingdom had also internalized the expectations of our national academic peers and funding council.
DISCUSSION

This note has outlined some of the issues we encountered while working within a cross-national collaborative research team, which we have contrasted with those identified by Teagarden and colleagues (1995). We agree about the value of conceptualizing international research projects in terms of discrete, albeit overlapping, phases, because the problems encountered at each phase are distinct. We also agree about the importance of flexibility: researchers must prepare strategies for dealing with the unexpected, and these critically depend on the quality of the relationships among the actors involved. But the extensive fieldwork required for our idiographic study has enabled us to obtain further insights into cross-national research, and in this section we consider two aspects: the power relations inherent in the research process, and the effects of different research conceptualizations. We would stress that although we have discussed these

points with our Chinese colleagues, the final interpretation presented here is still shaped by our own (U.K.) background and philosophy. Power relations in research are most often regarded as a problem arising between the researcher and the research subject because asymmetrical power relations have ethical implications and may also affect the quality and quantity of the insights offered. Researchers have been particularly concerned with this in the cases of race and gender studies, where inequality is one of the substantive features of investigation (Anderson, 1993; Gergen & Cergen, 1993). Problems with power relations are also encountered within research teams of one single nationality, because there are power differences between principal researchers and associates and between tenured and fixed-contract staff (Barwise, Marsh, Thomas, & Wensley, 1989; Hyder & Sims, 1979). In our project, power relations were also evident between teams and in relation to external stakeholders. They were particularly evident when decisions had to be made about methodology and who would do what fieldwork. We can extend this point using French and Raven's (1968) classic categorization distinguishing five types of power in groups; reward, coercive, legitimate, referent, and expert power. In this case, the principal researchers maintained reward power (for instance, the ability to make decisions about who would go on foreign visits) and legitimate power as holders of the contracts from the funding councils. The contract researchers increasingly developed expert power through their control over data, which finally, for example, put them in a position to publish independently of the principal researchers. The companies in our study also made assumptions about the status of researchers when dealing with requests for research access, which sometimes conflicted with internal views of individual status based on technical expertise, and this was made even more complicated in cross-national work because factors such as age, race, and gender were interpreted in different ways by companies in the two countries. Although the contributions of the two national groups in terms of finance and local arrangements were fully balanced, differences between the teams in terms of assumed technical expertise provided a perception of considerable expert power for the U.K. members of the project. Cross-national dynamics are sensitive, and it is perhaps not surprising that they are rarely discussed in the literature. For example, Adler, Campbell, and Lavu:ent, in an admirable critique of their own method for conducting research in China, commented in passing that their team consisted of "the researchers, all of

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whom were western, as well as . . . the Chinese research assistants" (1989: 70). But they make no further comment on the implied link between status and race within their team. We contend that status differences will always be likely in research teams with members from countries that are perceived to be more and less advanced scientifically. It is also evident that both national groups in our research team were affected by the expectations of their own academic peers and funding agencies. Behind the funding agencies sat the anonymous academics who reviewed research proposals and outcomes against the criteria for respectable research, and behind them sat the governmental or political groups who funded the agencies themselves. Both national groups had to make judgments about what would or would not prove to be acceptable; team members could not afford to do exactly as they wished owing to the reward/coercive power of the external stakeholders. As Punch (1996) explained, politics are inevitable in organizational research, and in a cross-national project there is the additional problem of exposure to the demands and constraints of more than one political system. It is through highlighting the w^ays that institutional power and the attributed status of individual researchers can vary in a cross-national study that we have been able to extend the analysis of Teagarden and her colleagues in this respect. A second issue concerns the conceptualization of the research act. Teagarden and colleagues (1995) considered the problems of conducting survey research across different cultures, focusing primarily on the problems of survey administration and the equivalence of questionnaire translations but not addressing the possibility that researchers themselves may have different views about what constitutes valid research. However, some authors have argued that there are fundamental differences in the thinking patterns of Western and Eastern people. Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995), for example, characterized Western empiricism as involving a Cartesian dualism, a distinction between subject and object, which they contrasted with Japanese holism, a belief in the oneness of self, others, and environment. Researchers have also demonstrated that there are many differences in the values held in individual countries globally (Hofstede, 1984; Trompenaars, 1993), among Eastern countries (Kumar, 1997; Nakamura, 1964), and among Western countries (Caltung, 1981). The question therefore arose as to whether we should have expected to encounter differences in research methods among academics that derived not from their training and ideology, but from culturally determined thinking patterns.

As the project progressed, ontological differences between ourselves and our Chinese colleagues seemed to emerge. When collecting data, the Chinese managers and academics were concerned about providing accurate representations of the "facts," whereas the U.K. academics were more interested in exploring interpretations of any event. Above, we noted that this contrast indicated respective commitments to ontological realism and constructionism. We also noted how the Chinese academics were keen to identify consistent patterns and similarities across companies, but the U.K. academics were more interested in identifying and explaining the differences that they observed. These concerns can be linked to the epistemological distinction made by Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) between holism and dualism. Table 1 summarizes some of tbe main differences; however, it should be noted both that this categorization involves an element of stereotyping and also that it is a product of our own Western concern with identifying differences. These differences in the orientations of the two teams became even more pronounced when it came to publishing, but we suspect for several reasons that here the differences were not merely a product of culture. First, as one of our Chinese colleagues commented after reading an early draft of this report, Chinese academics follow many different traditions, depending on when and where they were trained. The Chinese team included social scientists trained in the old scholarly analytic tradition and others with technical and more pragmatic backgrounds. Second, we realized that what we had observed in China was by no means unique to China. For example, the method of looking for similarities in different circumstances underlies the "emergent universality" of the methods of Hofstede (1984). Third, we realized that the positions of the Chinese and U.K. academics began to converge as our experience working together grew. It is this possibility of convergence between previously distinct perspectives that leads to the last section of this note, where we develop the idea of refiexivity TABLE 1 Conceptualizations of Research in Our Chinese and United Kingdom Research Groups
Philosophical Domain Ontology Epistemology Chinese Team Members Realism Facts Holism Similarities U.K. Team Members Constructionism Interpretations Dualism Differences

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as an aid to joint sense-making within collaborative cross-cultural management research teams.

TOWARD REFLEXIVITY

The problem for researchers from one culture or context wishing to conduct research on another culture is that the outsiders' past experiences will not have equipped them to make sense of events in the same way that insiders would. Furthermore, as Teagarden and colleagues commented, "No one researcher can be an insider in multiple cultures" (1995: 1283). Various ways of resolving this dilemma have been proposed, including the use of teams combining insiders and outsiders (Bartunek & Louis, 1996; Boyacigilier & Adler, 1991; Morey & Luthans, 1985). In the present report, we are discussing this dilemma not in relation to the object of study, but in relation to the research process itself. The key observations have been reciprocal: we have watched our colleagues in action, and at the same time they have watched us in action. The dialogue about these mutual perceptions has led to deeper insights into both the cross-cultural research process and our own assumptions. Above, we have referred to this process as reflexive, and in this final section we elaborate on the concept of refiexivity, before applying it back to our own analysis. There are numerous threads in writing on refiexivity. The starting point is the idea that it is not possible for a social researcber to be detached from what he or she is observing. This idea has found expression in critiques of the objectivity of natural scientists (Kuhn, 1970; Latour & Woolgar, 1979) and in the social constructionists' view that people make sense of their environment through an active process of engagement (Berger & Luckman, 1966; Shotter, 1993). The case has been taken up by postmodernists, who have stressed the need for researchers to be critical of their ow^n intellectual assumptions (Hassard, 1993) and to avoid making excessive claims to authority (Burrell, 1993). Such ideas have found expression within sociology and anthropology, where it has been argued that researchers will gain greater insights if they take an active part in what they are observing (Filmer, 1975; Garfinkel, 1967; Coffman, 1969); in feminism and racial studies, in which the right of researchers to impose frameworks generated by dominant groups on less powerful groups has been challenged (Anderson, 1993; Gergen & Gergen, 1993); and in literary theory, where the rights of authors to describe the experience of others has been questioned (Hatch, 1996; Siegle, 1986). Critics of the use of refiexivity as a research tactic

point to its recursive nature and question whether it can generate valid knowledge about the world. Siegle (1986) provided a partial answer, pointing out that in terms of the word's roots, something that is reflexive "must turn back on itself, and then turn back on its turning" (1986: 2). In the present report, we started by reflecting back on our own experiences in conducting cross-cultural research, using Teagarden and colleagues' (1995) publication as a basis for constant comparison, and then incorporated, through dialogue, the viewpoints of our Chinese colleagues. This dialogue started with exchanges about how members of each national group saw and experienced the research process, which led to our attempts to make sense by sharing some of our own assumptions, motivations, and external expectations. Refiexivity involves using information from another to gain insights into oneself, and in the present case we used two processes that we can label: mirroring and contrasting. In mirroring, observation of another leads to the realization that the features observed can also be attributed to the observer. For example, the U.K. team assumed a commercial motivation for its Chinese colleagues and a pure, academic motivation for themselvesbut our colleagues assumed the same thing from their point of view. The U.K. team also expected that there would be political influences on the funding of Chinese management research but then realized that the same thing applied to research funding in the United Kingdom. And it was realized that the significance given to the management of relationships in China could also be applied to the management of cross-cultural research, where relationships are very likely to become strained by the differing expectations of, and constraints on, the parties involved. The process of attaining these three realizations is akin to achieving "self-reflexivity" (Cunliffe, 1997). The second method, contrasting, involves an observer's focusing on another in order to understand how the observer is different. By looking at how Chinese interviews were carried out, the U.K. researchers were more able to see the peculiarities of their own cultural approach to gathering data; by noticing how the Chinese team members sought factual data and looked for single patterns when interpreting it, the U.K. researchers became much more aware of a relativist and pluralistic stance; and by considering the differences in the way Chinese and U.K. companies reacted to individual researchers, they became more aware of how status is ascribed within research teams and how these attributions affect power relations. Thus, the application of reflexive analysis has enabled insights to be obtained both about the oth-

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