Increased international trade and competition has encouraged organizational analysts to look into the role of location, in other words the institutional frameworks, and their underlying cultural base, of competing countries. This article proposes the discipline of hermeneutics for the realization of this task. The hermeneutic tradition of taking into account context and past history in understanding the basis of institutional frameworks is presented as being particularly useful The example of French organizational characteristics serves as an illustration of this method, as these characteristics are related to history, contextual elements and other aspects of French society. Consideration is then given to the evaluation of a hermeneutic interpretation.
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