|

7

Definitions of Culture

Although not fully accurate one may say that the study of culture started some 200 years ago with the efforts of Europeans to ‘civilise the world’. The key vehicle for doing so was religion and hence, missionaries were sent abroad. They often lived for years with their assigned tribe and started to write down the behaviour, the myths and so on of that tribe; its culture. This had its impact on an emerging science, cultural anthropology. Hence, the first definitions came from this research (see stack on the left). A major conclusion was and is that the expression of culture may differ considerably but that the process shows many similarities (e.g. trying to find an answer to why man is on earth and where s/he goes to after death).

Around the Fist World War sociology got interested because it studied the behavior of groups of people and if culture is about the behavior of people … The same happened around the Second World War and psychology because culture is patterns of thinking …

In the sixties of the previous century international business recognized a need for knowing more about culture. Staff in a daughter company abroad clearly needed to be instructed in other way than ‚at home’. The question was how to deal with cultural differences through a comparison of two or more cultures. This opened a new window in the research on culture. The idea was (and is) to describe different national cultures with the same tools and in such a way that the outcome of this comparison would give you handles on how to deal with these differences. The first effort was the one by Hofstede. He described each national culture on the basis of four dimensions (later six) and gave a value for the position of a given country on each of these dimensions. By a careful description of each dimension and its implication one could anticipate differences in accordance with the positions on each dimension, including the ways and means of dealing with these difference.