HRD scholarship now has to confront the challenges of cross-cultural analysis experienced earlier by other scholars from various social science and management disciplines. We face an important choice: do we take well-established theories, developed and tested mainly in the USA, and then apply them to the analysis of empirical evidence gathered in other countries? Or, do we sometimes need to start afresh, grounding our process of theorization in specific cultural context or even drawing upon theories and concepts developed in other management and social science disciplines?