The lacuna model: A new approach to cross-cultural management research

Abstract

This paper presents the lacuna model—an innovative investigational tool for the study of cross-cultural differences in a broader context. Originally developed and still widely used as a linguistic instrument, the lacuna theory also applies to empirical investigations in the field of cross-cultural management. Using several examples from the business world to illustrate the taxonomy, the authors demonstrate how lacuna analysis can be carried out. By comparing the lacuna model with Hofstede’s framework, the paper presents the strengths and weaknesses of each approach and concludes with a discussion of the potential offered by the lacuna model for cross-cultural management research and suggestions for its further development.

Keywords

Cross-cultural management Geert Hofstede Germany new approaches qualitative research Russia

Introduction

Current research on cross-cultural management is still dominated by dimensional frameworks, with Hofstede’s National Cultural Dimensions being the most cited. These frameworks aim to describe culture based on predefined dimensions. They enable a comparison of different cultures and can be incorporated as an explanatory variable in quantitative studies describing various aspects of cross-cultural management, e.g. internationals mergers, investment behavior, team performance, HR practices, and many others. At the same time, dimensional frameworks have several shortcomings. They are not able to integrate context into the studies, for example, or provide explanations for the behavior of participants in cross-cultural interactions (Brannen and Salk, 2000; Clausen, 2007; Dheer et al., 2014; Dupuis, 2014; Luiz, 2015; Mahadevan, 2017; Primecz et al., 2011; Shenkar, 2001, 2004; Tsui et al., 2007; Tung, 2008; Venaik and Midgley, 2015). With our paper, we contribute to the ongoing discussions on “alternative paradigms, alternative cultural perspectives, and challenges the hegemony of Western management knowledge” (IJCCM “Aims and Scope”) that are taking place in the field (cf. Gelfand et al., 2011; Novak and Liu, 2007; Pauluzzo et al., 2018).

Our paper presents the lacuna model—an innovative investigational tool developed by the psycholinguistic branch of the field of general linguistics for the study of cross-cultural differences in a broader context. Lacuna research deals with the gaps in languages and cultures that can lead to misunderstandings in all areas of cross-cultural communication. By revealing and explaining these gaps, lacuna research has the potential to optimize this communication through lacuna elimination strategies. Originally developed and still widely used as a linguistic instrument, the lacuna theory is also applicable to empirical investigations in the field of cross-cultural management. By comparing the lacuna model with Geert Hofstede’s framework, the paper presents the strengths and weaknesses of each model and concludes with a discussion of the potential offered by the lacuna model for cross-cultural management research and suggestions for its further development.

Hofstede’s national cultural dimensions

Geert Hofstede (1928–2020) was a Dutch social psychologist and practitioner. During his time at one of the European subsidiaries of International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) in the late 1970s, where he was involved in executive education, he struggled with the question of how to bring students from various educational backgrounds together. He illustrated this using a simple experiment: he showed one of his classes an ambiguous picture that could be seen as either a young or an old woman. He then divided his class into those who could see only one or the other, causing both groups to question and doubt one another. It was only after a short discussion that both groups were able to see the entire picture: “If this is so in the simple classroom situation, how much stronger should differences in perception of the same reality be between people who have been conditioned by different education and life experience not for [some] seconds, but for twenty, thirty, or forty years?,” asked Hofstede (Hofstede, 1980b: 43).

To answer this question, Hofstede initiated and conducted a large empirical study among employees within the company by asking about 150 questions about their beliefs and values. The data was collected twice: between 1967 and 1969 and between 1971 and 1973. He reached a high amount and variety of respondents: more than 116,000 people responded to his questions, from unskilled workers to highly qualified engineers to top management. In total, the questionnaire was administrated in 20 languages and distributed in 40 countries. Based on this large data set, Hofstede formulated four main cultural criteria—dimensions—that can be found in every country with different levels of intensity (on scale from 0 to 100, or low, moderate and high): power distance, uncertainty avoidance, individualism vs. collectivism and masculinity (Hofstede, 1980). Later on, inspired by the research of Michael Harris Bond in Hong Kong and Taiwan, Hofstede expanded his model by adding a fifth dimension—long-term orientation versus short-term orientation—and in 2010, in collaboration with Michael Minakov, he renamed this dimension pragmatic vs normative and added the sixth and the last one—indulgence vs. restraint (McSweeney, 2015). The current 6-D model of national culture is summarized as follows:

Power Distance: “the extent to which the less powerful members of organizations and institutions within a country expect and accept that power is distributed unequally” (Hofstede, 2001: 98).

Uncertainty Avoidance: “The extent to which the members of a culture feel threatened by uncertain or unknown situations” (Hofstede, 2001: 161).

Individualism versus Collectivism: Individualism “stands for a society in which the ties between individuals are loose: Everyone is expected to look after him/herself and her/his immediate family only. Collectivism stands for a society in which people from birth onward are integrated into strong, cohesive in-groups, which throughout people’s lifetime continue to protect them in exchange for unquestioning loyalty” (Hofstede, 2001: 225).

Masculinity versus Femininity: Masculinity “stands for a society in which social gender roles are clearly distinct: Men are supposed to be assertive, tough, and focused on material success. Femininity stands for a society in which social roles overlap: Both men and women are supposed be modest, tender, and concerned with the quality of life” (Hofstede, 2001: 297).

Long-Term versus Short-Term Orientation: “Long-term orientation stands for the fostering of virtues oriented toward future rewards, in particular, perseverance and thrift. In opposite pole, short-term orientation, stands for the fostering of virtues related to the past and present, in particular respect for tradition, preservation of “face” and fulfilling social obligations” (Hofstede, 2001: 359).

Indulgence versus Restraint: “Indulgence stands for a society that allows relatively free gratification of basic and natural human drives related to enjoying life and having fun. Restraint stands for a society that suppresses gratification of needs and regulates it by means of strict social norms” (Hofstede, 2020).

Originally developed for human resource management, this model has helped to manage and lead employees in multinational corporations (MNCs). If an American manager were to lead a Chinese team, for example, he or she may be surprised that his/her subordinates are not fully independent in their tasks and instead expect to be told exactly what to do. Moreover, an American expat may become annoyed at the degree to which people attempt to obtain preferential treatment or talk to him/her as if he/her were the savior they have always waited for. On the other hand, the Chinese subordinates of an American manager might start to doubt his/her commitment to the firm if he/she seems to be spending too much time and effort on his/her family or friends who have nothing to do with work. This is, however, nothing more than a different understanding of the two roles—leader and employee—in American and Chinese society, which can be assessed and explained using Hofstede’s dimensions.

Current research applying this theory is broad, and still occupies a significant place in human resource management (s. recent examples in Afshari, 2020; Arseneault, 2020; Jungst and Janssens, 2020; Karjalainen, 2020), but also encompasses almost all of the disciplines related to management, such as business ethics (MacNab et al., 2007), organizational studies (Luthar and Luthar, 2008), global branding (de Mooij and Hofstede, 2010), entrepreneurship (Alon et al., 2016), leadership (Lofquist and Matthiesen, 2018) and beyond (Beugelsdijk and Welzel, 2018; Chapman, 1997; Kirkman et al., 2006), including, for example, higher education (cf. Dennehy, 2015) or corruption (DiRienzo, 2019). The legacy of Geert Hofstede for the field is highly significant; he “was a fresh voice in the 1980s. There are very few fresh voices within our discipline today” (Jackson, 2020: 4). His approach is simple for anyone to grasp and work with: in interdisciplinary research, in teaching at all levels, in consulting and coaching, in work for practitioners and society at large. Ironically, this very simplicity has been widely criticized: for creating a model based on a data set that was collected in one company with a very strong corporate culture; for comparing cultures using a small number of dimensions; for being descriptive rather than evaluative (Jackson, 2020). Nevertheless, Hofstede is and will remain “the father of cross-cultural research” (Carraher, 2003) who pioneered the field.

Lacuna theory

Yuri Sorokin (1936–2009) was a Russian psycholinguist and practitioner. During his time at the Soviet worldwide radio broadcasting service in the late 1970s, he struggled with the question of how to translate Russian texts into a foreign language in a way that would reach the international audience. He worked for the Chinese department, and some of those radio programs were particularly successful among Chinese listeners: people either liked them and endorsed what they said or they were disappointed and threatened the authors, including Yuri Sorokin, saying: “When we get to Red Square, we will hang you all from the lamp posts”. Those radio shows were based on allegorical storytelling about political events, a tool that was not common in Russian but was apparently widely used in Chinese literature. This instrument immediately activated Chinese listeners, even with texts that were originally misunderstood, underestimated and almost rejected by the Soviet radio management due to their artificiality (Sorokin, 2006: 308). This marked the birth of the lacuna theory.

A lacuna (Latin: lacūna; a hole, pit) is a gap in cross-cultural communication. Lacunas are the verbal and non-verbal elements of another culture that might be misinterpreted, (partly) overlooked and/or confused, and that have the potential to cause misunderstandings or even failures in cross-cultural communication. Lacunas might provoke undesirable effects, awaken unexpected reactions and/or remain invisible. At the opening of the first McDonald’s in Russia in 1990, for example, the local staff was trained to smile, but smiling was not common in the consumer sector in the shortage economy of the USSR, and had a different connotation in society at large. Laughter without any reason is still considered a sign of foolishness in Russia. The first McDonald’s employees were really concerned that their customers would consider them to be total fools (Denisova-Schmidt, 2010).

Later on, Yuri Sorokin, together with Irina Markovina, developed the classification of lacunas into the lacuna model (Markovina and Sorokin, 1989). The researchers differentiated between lacunas of language and of culture, and highlighted subject lacunas, lacunas of activity and lacunas of culture space. This taxonomy is based on a three-dimensional understanding of culture (cf. the cultural-historical psychology of Lev Vygotsky, the activity theory of Alexei Leontiev, the theory of language consciousness and other accomplishments of Soviet (Russian) psycholinguistics—s. recent discussions in Leonard et al., 2019 and Lénárt et al., 2019). Later on, the classification was further developed by Astrid Ertelt-Vieth (2005), who added new subgroups and introduced the category of object lacunas (see Table 1 for a summary). This original classification can be reorganized into three broad categories of mental lacunas, lacunas of activity, and object lacunas:

“Mental lacunas are differences in cognitive and affective states: feelings, attitudes and taboos, as well as term-oriented, role-oriented, status-oriented, room-oriented and person-oriented knowledge.

Lacunas of activity depict different ways of processing information, talking, moving and other activities.

Object lacunas refer to differences in human appearance, such as body shape, coloring and other physical attributes, but also variations in the environment and in objects, including written and oral texts (Denisova-Schmidt, 2015: 97)”.

Table 1.

Types of lacunas and examples.

Types of Lacunas	Examples
Mental lacunas are differences in cognitive and affective states:
Cultural-emotive lacunas: feelings and attitudes (= object-related) and their intensities, e.g. shame, pride, interest, and disgust.	German employees tend to discuss professional mistakes openly in order to learn and avoid these kinds of mistakes in the future. In contrast, Russian employees feel ashamed to admit their mistakes and are uncomfortable about discussing them openly.
Attention lacunas: continuity and intensity of any activity (lacuna of concentration; Grodzki, 2003).	For example, during meetings, German employees tend to focus their attention on the topic under discussion, whereas Russian employees tend to switch between different topics more fluidly. Russian employees might even answer their phone calls and check their e-mail during meetings with important clients or even during job interviews.
Context lacunas: term-oriented, role-oriented, status-oriented, room-oriented, person-oriented knowledge (among other things, auto-/heterostereotypes), simple/complex (scientific and subject theories, common sense, etc.).	German employees easily accept the presence of several supervisors in matrix organizations, whereas Russian employees often feel perplexed by matrix structures and the presence of several supervisors. They prefer hierarchical organizational structures with clear assignments of supervisors. While German top management tends to involve middle management in their strategic discussions in order to obtain their opinion and to get broader acceptance of the resulting strategic decisions by lower-level management, Russian middle management expects the top management to make decisions without their involvement.
Mnestic lacunas: memory; forgotten, (unconsciously) displaced, (purposefully) taboo knowledge.	For example, German managers often motivate their employees to expand their competencies by telling them that covering these areas might become necessary if someone from the team were absent due to illness or any other undesirable circumstances. In Russia, it is not common to talk about potential illness or accidents, because it might bring bad luck.
Language system lacunas: lexical, phonetic, grammar, syntactic.	For example, the German terms Termin and Jour Fixe do not have direct translations into Russian, which might lead to many unpleasant consequences for Western businesspeople when they attempt to make arrangements with Russians.
Lacunas of activity depict different ways of processing information, talking, moving, and other activities:
Language usage lacunas: opening the conversation, conversation topics, conversation strategies, etc.	For example, the well-being of one’s family might be a typical topic of small talk between business partners in the Russian business environment. Moreover, a good Russian leader is expected to ask his/her subordinates such questions, whereas such a topic might seem rather unusual in the German business environment. For example, in the German business environment, the discussion of a meeting agenda and clarification of organizational issues is typically handled at the opening of a meeting, whereas in Russia, meeting participants tend to start the content discussion more quickly.
Paralinguistic lacunas: prosody, pauses, etc.; body language lacunas: mimic, kinetic, position in a room, body distance, etc.	For example, during discussions Russians tend to gesticulate more with their hands, whereas Germans tend to keep their hands still. In the German business environment, body language is rarely used to emphasize oral speech.
Lacunas in (unconscious/semiconscious) daily routine: in private, semipublic, and public areas.	For example, colleagues and business partners in Germany greet each other with a handshake, regardless of gender; in Russia, only men greet each other with a handshake, while women are greeted only with “hello.”
Lacunas in behavior: interpersonal, somewhat reflected, in private, semipublic, and public spaces, etc.	For example, female Russian employees tend to check their appearance and makeup during the day and often finish putting on their makeup in the morning at the office. Such behavior is rather uncommon for female German employees.
Lacunas in etiquette: unwritten rules (also unspoken) and consequences if these rules are broken.	For example, German colleagues do not discuss their salaries. This is often prohibited by their contracts and might lead to administrative sanctions. In contrast, Russian co-workers tend to discuss their salaries openly, even if it is prohibited in their contracts.
Thought-style lacunas: abstract-logical versus concrete-empirical; linear versus circular, etc.	For example, German employees tend to use fact-based arguments in discussions or negotiations, whereas Russian employees might appeal to feelings or experiences in other domains.
Lacunas in the means of identity acquisition and description: verbal, mimic, gesticular, kinetic, areal self-presentation; with attributes (see object lacunas below).	For example, Russian managers put numerous certificates and diplomas from all their schools, training sessions, and other courses on the wall of their office, whereas German managers tend to concentrate on the most important or valuable ones. The representation of an individual’s skills and abilities is similar: Russian employees tend to list all of them in their CV, whereas German employees tend to concentrate on the important and relevant qualifications.
Lacunas in oral communication: informal texts and social conventions (telling, small talk, gossip, rumors, etc.); strong codified texts and social convention in institutions (job interviews, oral exams, seminar discussions); relative codified texts in different contexts (reports, stories, explanations, discussions, hierarchical communications connected with role-related knowledge); parents/children; students/teachers; students/professors; officials/civil servants/the public; different formats in media (news, talk shows, commercials, etc.).	For example, Russian employees prefer to exchange news and solve business issues in spontaneous informal communication in the office, whereas German employees tend to use meetings.
Lacunas in virtual texts and pictures (with changeover to written texts, thus object lacunas): chats, newsgroups, emails, SMS, homepages, media portals, etc.	Pictures on CVs in Germany must be taken by professionals; otherwise, it is considered to be a lack of professionalism and interest in the position. In Russia, pictures are often something between “mug shots” and pictures that are more suitable for dating platforms.
Object lacunas refer to differences in human appearance, such as body shape, coloring, and other physical attributes as well as to variations in the environment, and in objects, including written and oral texts:
Lacunas in fixed texts and illustrations: letters, business cards, books, magazines, packages, instructions, advertisements, street sings, tombstones, etc. (attention should be paid to: author, receiver, distribution, content, material, format, weight, colors, fonts, picture quality, design tools, etc.)	For example, the consistency of figures and sources is very important in German business presentations, whereas Russian presentations might rely on a variety of sources or different figures depending on the context.
Lacunas in subtexts: titles, reference blocks, indexes, tables of contents, breaks, illustrations, footnotes, etc.	For example, in the German business environment, more attention tends to be paid to the source of information, i.e. the reliability of the source and its indication in the presentation, whereas the Russian business environment tend to drop this information. In general, academic titles are rarely used in Russian culture. Most Russians might be overwhelmed by titles such as Dipl. Ing or MA, which are often indicated on the business cards of German employees.
Lacunas in space: geographical space (country/village/town; cultivated/uncultivated; used/unused areas; working forest/virgin forest, etc.); public rooms; residential/industrial area, inside/outside district (buildings, design and layout of a road, places, parks, bridges, etc.); public/private buildings, interior, working/living areas, etc.	For example, in Russian managers’ offices, the table for meetings is placed perpendicular to the manager’s own working desk to form a T, whereas many German managers usually have a separate round table for meetings in their offices.
Body lacunas: form and color (figure, skin, hair, face, lips, eyebrows, beard, etc.); attributes (haircut, makeup, clothes, bags, etc.)	For example, female Russian employees tend to dress in a more feminine style (with décolletage or shirt skirts) as a part of their professional identity. Many German employees wear glasses, whereas Russian employees, particularly female employees, prefer contact lenses.
Food lacunas: different types of meat and fish, fruits and vegetables; dishes, drinks, spices, etc.	For example, meals at Russian dining halls are usually greasy and might be served without knives. German canteens usually have a larger variety of salads and vegetarian food, and German employees typically eat with both a fork and a knife.

Note: The examples are based on one of the authors’ empirical studies conducted in 2012–13 on Russian-German business interactions at the subsidiaries of several large German industrial enterprises operating in Russia and serve only as an illustration. The dataset consists of 30 expert interviews with German expatriates as well as their Russian employees, conducted in person in Moscow between November 2012 and April 2013.

The lacuna model was originally a tool to help oral and written translators and other practitioners predict, reveal and explain or eliminate these gaps—lacunas—in order to optimize communication. The way of unlocking the gaps might vary and include different types of fillings and compensations:

Filling: Whistleblowing

Filling in lacunas means providing a more or less detailed explanation (context permitting) of the phenomenon. In the example of whistleblowing, it is difficult to translate the English term into Russian. Several equivalents that exist in Russian are strongly associated with the political repression under the Stalin administration. It is with this in mind that the Russian branch of Transparency International addresses this issue in its Anti-Corruption ABC as follows: “A whistleblower should not be viewed as a fink or a snitch. Reporting a crime is a worthy deed, which deserves respect and has nothing to do with snitching […] In English, a person who informs about corruption is called a whistleblower, ‘the one who blows a whistle’” (Anti-Corruption ABC, 2015).

Compensation: LADA vs Zhiguli

Compensation involves choosing the most similar phenomenon or the analog in another culture to make it easier to understand and/or to evoke similar associations or emotional reactions. The original name of the Russian car LADA is actually Zhiguli. Under this name, the car was offered on the domestic market until 2014. The name comes from the Zhiguli Mountains located on the Volga River close to the headquarters of the Russian car manufacturer AvtoVAZ, but was changed for the international market in order to avoid possible associations with the word gigolo.

All of these should be seen in their historical and cultural contexts, which are sometimes called axiological lacunas (Ertelt-Vieth, 2005), representing the culturally based meanings of these lacunas. Sorokin and Markovina looked for these meanings in associative experiments (Kiss et al., 1972; Ufimtseva, 2014) in which test participants were asked to give their spontaneous, associative reactions to certain words or stimuli. The subjects’ reactions were then structured and analyzed. Thus, for example, the word “friend” (Russian: drug) is broadly associated by Russian speakers with words such as “devoted,” “real,” “reliable,” “old,” “staunch,” “beloved,” “bosom,” “the best,” “the only” and “warm-hearted.” The Russian meaning of the word is closely connected with “childhood,” “protection,” “help,” “warmth,” “happiness,” “brother” and “faithfulness.” Among English speakers, on the other hand, the word “friend” has a rather narrow meaning and can be associated with more socially distant people, such as “acquaintance,” “companion,” “colleague,” “neighbor” or “ally”; the only reaction close to the Russian responses is “buddy” (Markovina, 2007). Russian decision makers during the Boris Yeltsin administration (1991−1999) often referred to their counterparts from Western countries as “friends,” which confused many ordinary Russians. Since 2000, Western decision makers are more neutrally called “partners.”

The lacuna model is a classical tool widely used in the academic community and among practitioners in Russian-speaking countries (Markovina and Sorokin, 2010). The instrument is typically used in philology and related disciplines such as translation studies, literature studies, foreign language pedagogy, or journalism (Panasiuk, 2005, 2010, 2016), but has been transferred into other fields. It was used in social research by Astrid Ertelt-Vieth for analyzing daily lives of Russian and German students in Moscow (Ertelt-Vieth, 1990), and was further developed in marketing research (Grodzki, 2003) and student exchange (Ertelt-Vieth, 2005), just to name a few contexts (see more in Ertelt-Vieth and Denisova-Schmidt, 2009; Denisova-Schmidt, 2007, 2019; Denisova-Schmidt and Dashidorzhieva, 2013; Kryzhko, 2015; Markovina and Lénárt, 2016; Lénárt, 2017; Panasiuk and Schröder, 2006). The lacuna model has the potential to optimize all areas of cross-cultural communication, including cross-cultural management. Online Appendix 1 presents one example and shows how the lacuna model can be used in praxis.

The lacuna model vs. Hofstede’s national cultural dimensions

The lacuna model offers many advantages for cross-cultural research across many disciplines: It focuses on the complexity and multiplicity of perspectives of cross-cultural communication; it encourages researchers to use various data-gathering techniques and to draw upon different disciplines during the data analysis and interpretation process; and it aims to understand and explain individual behaviors through a constant change in perspective. The main strength of the lacuna model for the business community is its ability to go beyond the mere description of cross-cultural interactions. The lacuna model goes even further by aiming to explain the cultural differences to all the parties involved in the communication process so that they can close the gap in understanding. At the same time, the lacuna model does not “prescribe” that the participants in cross-cultural communication adapt to the culture of their counterparts; it “only” explains the differences and reflects on them, letting the participants find their own way to close the gap in understanding without “abandoning” their own culture. At the same time, the application of the lacuna model and the chances to benefit from its numerous advantages depend on the purpose of the study and the research design selected.

Comparing the lacuna model with Hofstede’s framework illustrates the main differences between these two approaches as well as their deployment in the field of cross-cultural management. The main difference between the two frameworks arises from the underlying definition and concept of culture. The lacuna model represents a micro-analytical approach that enables the study of cross-cultural interactions at an individual—i.e., micro—level. Micro-analytical approaches define culture as a product of individual knowledge and experiences, thus emphasizing the dynamic character of culture as well as the individual perceptions and contextual variables. In contrast, Hofstede’s framework is a macro-analytical approach that aims to describe culture by means of selected characteristics—i.e., dimensions. Macro-analytical approaches study culture mainly at a social level and are based on a static definition of culture.

The differences in the concept and definition of culture lead to differences in the deployment of the lacuna model and Hofstede’s framework. As the most commonly applied framework in cross-cultural management (Taras and Steel, 2010), Hofstede’s framework can stand in for any dimensional framework, allowing the comparison in this section to be applied at large to other dimensional frameworks, such as those of Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner (1998), House et al. (2004), and Schwartz (1992). The lacuna model is a powerful tool for understanding real-life interactions and capturing contextual variables. It considers the historical background and socioeconomic environment to explain cross-cultural interactions. At the same time, the model is limited to the investigation of only two (sub-)cultures in one study and lacks the ability to generalize. In addition, a broad empirical validation of findings seems to be difficult, as it is impossible to reconstruct identical contexts in real-life interactions. In contrast, Hofstede’s framework uses fixed dimensions to describe culture. The major focus is on the description of cultural characteristics, whereas an explanatory function and an ability to capture context are missing. Because of its ability to describe culture based on fixed dimensions, Hofstede’s framework can be applied in studies that involve multiple cultures at the same time, enabling a comparison of these cultures along their respective dimensions. Moreover, the generalization and empirical validation of findings are much easier as the studies are conducted at the macrolevel, without taking contextual factors into account, and are based on a very large data sample.

The choice of the lacuna model or Hofstede’s framework also depends on the research design. Hofstede’s framework is used mainly in management and international business to investigate the impact of culture on different aspects of doing business, such as negotiation and investment behavior, leadership style, and employee motivation tools. Furthermore, the ability to “measure” culture using a cultural distance construct makes it possible to apply Hofstede’s framework in a variety of quantitative studies. Hofstede’s framework is also applied to compare (sub-)cultures according to predefined dimensions. The use of questionnaires and large samples ensures the comparability of the findings, even among different studies. At the same time, when the study aims to investigate a large variety of cultural aspects or explain particular culture-specific phenomena, Hofstede’s framework has its limitations (cf. Baskerville-Morley, 2005; McSweeney, 2002). For such studies, the lacuna model seems to be a much better choice, as it aims to explain each individual phenomenon in cross-cultural interactions without referring to predefined categories. While attempting to explain the behavior of parties involved in cross-cultural interactions, the lacuna model relies on a variety of research tools, such as questionnaires, observations, experiments, interviews, and critical incidents. It welcomes participants and experts in cultural studies as well as other relevant disciplines to comment on the behavior and their own experiences. Additionally, it encourages researchers to use other related literature and historical background material to create a systematic “thick description” (Geertz, 1973) and provide further explanations for observed cross-cultural interactions. Finally, the lacuna model offers much more leeway for considering subcultural and individual differences as well as to allow contexts, sectors, age groups, educational backgrounds, and subcultural groups to be taken into account.

Hofstede’s framework is a useful instrument for comparing and analyzing major cultural differences and similarities, whereas the lacuna model helps to analyze and explain real-life cross-cultural interactions at an individual level. Depending on the purpose of the respective study and research design, each framework has its advantages and disadvantages. The combination of both methods may also contribute to a better understanding of a culture, provided the study considers both the individual and societal levels of analysis.

Conclusion and outlook

This paper contributes to the ongoing discussion on the lack of studies based on non-Western ideas (Jackson, 2012, 2014) of cross-cultural management by introducing the lacuna model—an innovative instrument from Russia for the study of cross-cultural differences. The lacuna model enables researchers to reveal and explain gaps in understanding that arise in the course of cross-cultural interactions. In contrast to dimensional approaches, the lacuna model analyzes cross-cultural interactions at the microlevel. It can incorporate subcultural peculiarities and explain specific cultural phenomena. The lacuna model’s rigorous classification system offers researchers a powerful tool for performing qualitative research in a structured manner. At the same time, it encourages researchers to reach out to other disciplines—while conducting the empirical study and interpreting the results—thus promoting cross-disciplinary studies.

The lacuna model has its limitations, however: First, precise techniques for switching between lacuna analysis and context interpretation, as Panasiuk (2005) created for translation studies, need to be developed for other disciplines. Second, the subgroups in the lacuna model must be limited to enable researchers to work with the method more efficiently. Third, the context, variety of perspectives, and dynamics always need to be stressed to prevent the model from reinforcing stereotypes. The more cross-cultural constellations that are dedicated to lacuna research, the easier it will be for knowledge about the culture-specific or culture-unspecific causes of cross-cultural misunderstandings to be identified and corrected (cf. Ertelt-Vieth and Denisova-Schmidt, 2011).

With regard to its characteristics, the lacuna model is suitable for performing cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary qualitative studies at the microlevel, where the main focus is on understanding individual interactions. Because of its lack of generalization power and its inability to achieve a broad empirical validation of the results, the tool is less suitable for quantitative studies or an aggregated level of analysis. At the same time, a combination of the lacuna model with Western approaches might be advantageous for cross-cultural studies with different levels of analysis.

In addition to the numerous possibilities for applying the lacuna model in the research community, the tool may be beneficial for business practitioners. First, studies based on the lacuna model provide strong empirical evidence that can be applied in cross-cultural training courses. Second, the lacuna model aims not only to describe cross-cultural interactions and potential misunderstandings but to explain and reflect on cross-cultural interactions. Finally, the model allows the participants in cross-cultural interactions to find a way to close the understanding gap without giving them any advice on adapting or “abandoning” their own culture.

Supplemental material

Supplemental Material, appendix_new - The lacuna model: A new approach to cross-cultural management research

Supplemental Material, appendix_new for The lacuna model: A new approach to cross-cultural management research by Elena Denisova-Schmidt, Irina Markovina and Lena Nicolas-Kryzhko in International Journal of Cross Cultural Management

Footnotes

Authors’ note

The views expressed in this article are Nicolas-Kryzhko’s own and do not represent those of her employer.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Elena Denisova-Schmidt

Supplemental material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

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