Understanding the dynamics of national business culture: a stationarity analysis for the case of South Korea

Understanding national business culture - and its subsequent influence on organizational practice - continues to draw scholarly attention. However, being drawn primarily from static, comparative taxonomies, existing research cannot adequately explain and predict the process of cultural evolution (e.g. towards convergence, divergence, or crossvergence). In addressing this caveat, this paper proposes a novel way of understanding changing national business culture using stationarity analysis based on shifting frequency, sentiment, and meanings of representative key terms. Using the big data keywords collected from the Maekyung Daily published over three decades (1991-2021) in Korea, our findings show that cultural changes can be measured based on the four dimensions of 'conscious vs. unconscious' on the one hand and 'political vs. economic' on the other. Further, we show how the economic and the unconscious dimensions have changed more rapidly than the political and the conscious, reflecting an informal model of cultural changes. We then discuss the practical implications of these findings for MNEs in the cross-border design and implementation of strategy, policy, and process, providing valuable insights for their operations in diverse cultural contexts.