The Role of Culture-Specific Relationships in International Businesses: A Systematic Review and Future Directions

Abstract

This paper presents a systematic review of 44 prevailing articles about cultural-specific relationships in the international business (IB) context, manifested in five emerging markets: Chinese Guanxi, Arabic Wasta, Latin America Compadrazgo, Brazilian Jeitinho, and the Russian Sviazi. For each of the cultural-specific relationships, this review highlights the state of construct development, theory application, and partnership types in the context of international business relationships in empirical IB studies. Based on these findings, future directions are proposed for advancing the conceptualization and operationalization of culture-specific relationships followed by the study limitations.

Keywords:

• Culture-specific relationships
• emerging markets
• international business relationships
• review study

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).