National Culture as a Conditioning Context for Dynamic Capabilities: A Multi-Level Filtering Framework

Dynamic capabilities are central to strategic management, yet the theory remains hampered by a "universalist" bias that treats organizational adaptation as a culturally neutral, technical process. This paper challenges this assumption by developing a contextualized framework that identifies national culture as a critical conditioning context for the enactment of dynamic capabilities. By integrating the GLOBE framework with the microfoundations of strategy, we theorize how cultural logics, specifically power distance, uncertainty avoidance, and institutional collectivism, filter managerial cognition and the organizational routines necessary for sensing, seizing, and reconfiguring resources. We move beyond "culture-as-variable" models to explain how cultural logic provides the social legitimacy required for capability deployment. This research contributes to the microfoundations movement and the Attention-Based View (ABV) by explaining why identical strategic routines yield heterogeneous results across different social contexts, offering a more robust, context-sensitive theory of firm adaptation. Keywords: Dynamic capabilities; National culture; Contextualization; Power distance; Uncertainty avoidance; Institutional collectivism