A Social Capital Approach to Inter-Cultural Differences

This work examines to what extent cultural differences at a level both of intra-organizational multinational network and inter-organizational multinational network are associated with liability of foreignness. The authors propose a conceptual framework where the different dimensions of social capital improve the exchange and combination of resources and knowledge in different subsidiaries localized in dissimilar cultural contexts, by mitigating the inter and intra organizational cultural differences. This in turn reduces the liability of foreignness. The chapter empirically applies this conceptual framework to one of the world's largest tour operators. It focuses on different moments of foreign growth of selected tour operator, performing an exploratory longitudinal case study. The findings presented have important implications for research in multinational literature because the chapter proposes to originally study the liability of foreignness and cultural differences topics according to a social network perspective of analysis.