Comparative studies of culture focus on individual competence (what cultural software, based on which collective raw "prefabs" facilitates cooperation), will focus on organizational identity (what cultural identity, based on which collective traditions legitimizes competitive advantage) and may focus on social translation (which norms, within which cultural domain, best secure survival and maintenance of core cultural values). The metaphors of "competence", "identity" and "translation" mark off the domain of cross-cultural research in - respectively - managerial studies, behavioral and social sciences and the humanities. One of the most fascinating aspects of these three metaphorical worlds - the world of individual competence, of organizational identity and socio-cultural translations/interpretations is that they are connected by complex underground networks of tunnels, mazes of cables and nodal switchboards of ongoing communications, translations, deals, smuggling routes and lobbyist networks. Preliminary analysis of some of these links, bonds, flows, networks and relations allows us to predict the forthcoming developments in cross-cultural research. Having established the initial model of dimensions, which allows tracing culture's consequences, research communities tend to cluster around paradigms of competence (Jackson, Holden, Magala). The next generation of research programs will probably lean either towards problems of identity and "identizing", especially within the framework of professional speciation (social psychologists, researchers of intergroup relations; e.g. Miguel Moya, Maria Jarymowicz, Jean-Claude Deschamps, Susan Schneider), or towards the "humanist" branch of organizational research community, which tends to focus on "translations" (narrative, discursive, constructionist schools; David Boje, Mats Alvesson, Stuart Clegg, Barbara Czarniawska). Recent radical interpretivist turn in previously fiercely quantitative and neopositivist subparadigms of organizational sciences, for instance, in the population ecology of organizations (Carroll, Hannan) announces a new wave of interparadigmatic mergers and acquisitions in comparative and cross-cultural studies, which will not leave academic (and broader professional) context unchanged. Will they change metaphors we live by?(original abstract)