Book review: Ethnography in International Business: Learning from the Field, by Mary Yoko Brannen, Cambridge University Press (2025)

What does it mean to “study culture” in real-world international business (IB) contexts when the reality of workplaces, markets, and communities is increasingly hybrid, mobile, and fragmented? Research settings in IB are rife with multilevel cultural interactions due to diverging cultural assumptions brought together in real time by the merging of individuals across distance and differentiated contexts. Professor Mary Yoko Brannen argues that national culture as a taken-for-granted concept blurs the concept of culture, which is contextually situated, dynamic, complex, and sensitive to change.