1. What is culture?
There are different definitions and opinions about culture because “culture as a concept derives from the fields of social anthropology and sociology” (Cheyne & Loan-Clarke 2004, p.229). Also, there are two ways of viewing culture, the first one views culture as an implicit feature of our social life and the second is culture as an explicit social construction (Wunthow & Witten 1988). According to Hofstede (1984), he defined culture as “the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one human group from another”. However, this definition is not classified further different aspects of culture such as values, attitudes and meanings through different stage of socialization (Tayeb 2003).
As a result, we have cultural differences because of different region, religion, gender, generation, class and especially individuals are unique. There are some main frameworks have been developed to analyse and understand cultural differences in general and national cultural differences specially. For example, they include Hodstede research on IBM, Laurent’s study, Hall research etc. These researches have followed defining culture in term of behaviours. On the other hand, culture can be “a system of publicly and collectively accepted meanings operating for a given group at a given time” (Trice & Beyer 1984). There is no right or wrong answer about culture and cultural differences.
Developing cultural difference strategy can enable a superior strategy formation, especially in globalisation. In this, we ask the question how can we develop and manage the cultural differences in order to build an international team; and analyse the external environment of our business and intellectual assets both in operating and ...