This article examines culture, an ambiguous yet prevalent concept in comparisons of crime and justice. It investigates the extent to which culture’s application and meaning across research reflects Western-centric bias in criminological knowledge-production despite it being a concept meant to advance understanding on different groups and places beyond the “Western” worldview. The article extends the discussion on Western-centric bias but also on culture in criminology by tracing the use of this concept on East Asian populations and by identifying patterns of application and meaning in international and comparative research through a scoping review of 230 journal publications. The findings address patterns of culture’s appearance in criminology journals in the past two decades and its meaning. Similar to previous scholarship on Western-centrism in criminology, the article finds that this bias does, too, exist in uses of culture but also shows how culture’s conceptual ambiguity is conducive to this bias, in that some groups and places are given one meaning of culture while others receive another.

This article examines the ways in which Brazil's African foreign policy during the Ernesto Geisel administration (1974–9) utilised notions of ‘racial democracy’ and the nation's Africanity in framing itself as an intrinsic partner to the continent across the Atlantic. It does this through an analysis of Brazil's involvement at the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC’77, 15 January–12 February 1977), hosted in Lagos, Nigeria. The international event celebrated past and present contributions of Black and African cultures to global civilisation. An assessment of the Brazilian government's delegation to FESTAC’77 shows how the Geisel administration attempted to depict Brazil as a harmoniously integrated society, where, through a historic process of mixing, the nation's racial identity was united into an equitable whole. In contrast, the propagation of these ideas at FESTAC’77 left the regime's racial ideology vulnerable to attack from international and domestic audiences.

In the 1950s, the Sociedad de Escritores de Chile experienced bitter disputes caused by the efforts of the Chilean Committee for Cultural Freedom, the local branch of a major institution in the US cultural Cold War, to gain control of the association. These disputes reveal the role played by the cultural Cold War in the breakdown of older political and intellectual alliances in Chile. They also highlight the transnational networks that connected Chilean writers during the Cold War, and the complex articulation of local and international contexts and agendas that influenced Chilean cultural and political groups.

This study provides an overview, categorization, and integration of what has been achieved in the niche of cross-culture experimental economics (CCEE) so far, aiming to inspire indigenous management researchers to extend their methodological toolbox by including experimental methods. As a result of the review, I find that most of the early studies lack depth and contextualization as well as detailed explanation about why human behavior differs. Hence, a better understanding about the influence of culture on economic decision-making is rather limited if it cannot be explained in more detail. In contrast, deep contextualization is a principle in indigenous management research (IMR). Both have so far not benefited from each other in the study of how culture affects human behavior, as both currently develop in parallel. Following the call for high-quality IMR (Tsui, 2004), this paper argues that an experimental methodology can make a contribution to IMR in the future by drawing on the strengths of both IMR (i.e., contextualization) and CCEE (i.e., methodology).