Illustrating the pervasiveness and possibly ambiguity of the term "culture," a Google search for "culture" and its derivatives returns 1.5 billion hits, making it one of the most popular words on the Web. First, the word culture has many meanings, from a collective of people who share a common history, language and traditions, to characteristics of such a collective in terms of its artifacts, practices, and value systems. However, the appropriateness of this trend depends on answers to two questions, including: (1) are countries good proxies for cultures, and (2) could other factors be superior for describing boundaries of cultural regions or groups of people who display similar cultural values?Ĭulture is a multi-faceted construct. Equating cultures with countries and using country of origin and individual culture interchangeably became a common practice (Brewer and Venaik 2012). The focus on national cultures has appropriate applications, but its dominance in research has led to a lack of attention to other plausible organizing units of culture. 2004), the unit of analysis in cross-cultural studies has typically been country. 1) to more recent research by Hofstede (1980) and the GLOBE team (House et al. From the earliest studies of cultural differences dating back over two centuries (Darton 1790, see Fig. Traditionally, cultures have been assumed to reside within countries. Keywords Culture * Cultural values * Cultural regions * Cross-cultural management Our results suggest that it may be more appropriate to talk about cultures of professions, socio-economic classes, and free versus oppressed societies, than about cultures of countries. We also evaluate the relative suitability of other demographic and environmental characteristics, such as occupation, socio-economic status, wealth, freedom, globalization, and instability. The results reveal that approximately 80% of variation in cultural values resides within countries, confirming that country is often a poor proxy for culture. Sage Publications, Beverly Hills, 1980) cultural values framework. To help resolve the country-culture conundrum, we evaluate the extent to which political boundaries are suitable for clustering cultures based on a meta-analysis of 558 studies that used Hofstede's (Culture's consequences: international differences in work-related values. As evidence mounts for substantial within-country cultural variation, and often between-country similarities, the problem with equating country and culture becomes more apparent. Indeed, the terms "country" and "culture" are often used interchangeably. Abstract Traditionally, cultures have been treated as though they reside exclusively within, or perfectly overlap with countries.
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