Cross-cultural studies in entrepreneurship: a note on culture and language

This chapter, therefore, provides an overview of cross-cultural, language-related issues that are pertinent to entrepreneurship research. Cross-cultural studies are not just translation-back-translation exercises based on lexical and mechanical translations but rather involve semantic and semiotic considerations to capture cultural differences. Some differences are subtle, while others are more obvious. Important issues include whether culture is defined properly with respect to developing research questions, the establishment of equivalence in sample selection and instrument equivalence, operationalization of constructs across different cultural groups, validation of scales, and assessing measurement invariance. If these issues are ignored, the results may be meaningless, inconclusive, or misleading.