Differences in Culture

I. Introduction
International business is different from domestic business because countries are different.
The first theme is that business success in a variety of countries requires cross-cultural literacy. By cross-cultural literacy, we mean an understanding of how cultural differences across and within nations can affect the way in which business is practiced.
Another theme developed in this chapter is that a relationship may exist between culture and the cost of doing business in a country or region. Different cultures are more or less supportive of the capitalist mode of production and may increase or lower the cost of doing business.
Culture is not static. It can and does evolve, although the rate at which culture can change is the subject of some dispute.

II. What Is Culture?
In the 1870s, the anthropologist Edward Tylor defined culture as “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and other capabilities acquired by man as a member of society”. Since then hundreds of other definitions have been offered. Geert Hofstede, an expert on cross-cultural differences and management, defined culture as “the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one human group from another….Culture, in this sense, includes systems of values; and values are among the building blocks of culture”. Another definition of culture comes from sociologist Zvi Namenwirth and Robert Weber who see culture as a system of ideas and argue that these ideas constitute a design for living.
Here we follow both Hofstede and Namenwirth and Weber by viewing culture as a system of values and norms that are shared among a group of people and that when taken together constitute a design for living. By values we mean abstract ideas about what a group believes to be good, right, and desirable. Put differently, values are shared assumptions about how things ought to be. By norms we mean the social rules and guidelines that prescribe appropriate behavior in particular situations. We shall use the term society to refer to a group of people who share a common set of values and norms. While a society may be equivalent to a country, some countries harbor several societies (i.e., they support multiple cultures), and some societies embrace more than one country.

III. Values and Norms
Values from the bedrock of a culture. They provide the context within which a society’s norms are established and justified. They may include a society’s attitudes toward such concept as individual freedom, democracy, truth, justice, honesty, loyalty, social obligations, collective responsibility, the role of women, love, sex, marriage, and so on. Values are not just abstract concept; they are invested with considerable emotional significance. People argue, fight, and even die over values such as freedom. Values also often are reflected in the political and economic systems of a society.
Norms are the social rules that govern people’s action toward to another. Norms can be subdivided further into two major categories: folkways and mores. Folkways are the routine conventions of everyday life. Generally, folkways are actions of little moral significance. Rather, folkways are social conventions concerning things such as the appropriate dress code in a particular situation, good social manners, eating with the correct utensils, neighborly behavior, and the like. While folkways define the way people are expected to behave, violation of folkways is not normally serious matter. People who violate folkways may be thought of as eccentric or ill-mannered, but they are not usually considered to be evil or bad. In many countries, foreigners may initially be excused for violating folkways.
Folkways include rituals and symbolic behavior. Rituals and symbols are the most visible manifestations of a culture and constitute the outward expression of deeper values.
Mores are norms that are seen as central to the functioning of a society and to its social life. They have much greater significance than folkways. Accordingly, violating mores can bring serious retribution. Mores include such factors as indictments against theft, adultery, incest, and cannibalism. In many societies, certain mores have been enacted into law. Thus, all advanced societies have laws against theft, incest, and cannibalism. However, there are also many differences between cultures. In America, for example, drinking alcohol is widely accepted, whereas in Saudi Arabia the consumption of alcohol is viewed as violating important social mores and is punishable by imprisonment (as some Western citizens working in Saudi Arabia have discovered).
IV. Culture, Society, and the Nation State
We have defined a society as a group of people that share a common set of values and norms; that is, people who are bound together by a common culture. There is not a strict one-to-one correspondence between a society and a nation-state. Nation-state are political creations. They may contain a single culture or several cultures. While the French nation can be thought of as the political embodiment of French culture, the nation of Canada has at least three cultures---an Anglo culture, a French-speaking “Quebecois” culture, and a Native American culture.

At the other end of the scale are cultures that embrace several nations. Several scholars argue that we can speak of an Islamic society or culture that is shared by the citizens of many different nations in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa.

V. The Determinants of Culture
The values and norms of a culture do not emerge fully formed. They are the evolutionary product of a number of factors, the prevailing political and economic philosophies, the social structure of a society, and the dominant religion, language, and education. Below we will discuss the influence of social structure, religion, language, and education.


A society’s social structure refers to its basic social organization. Although social structure consist of many different aspects, two dimensions are particularly important when explaining differences between cultures. The first is the degree to which the basic units of social organization is the individual, as opposed to the group. The second dimension is the degree to which a society is stratified into classes or castes. Some societies are characterized by a relatively high degree of social stratification and relatively low mobility between strata (e.g., Indian), while other societies are characterized by a low degree of social stratification and high mobility between strata (e.g., American).

VI. Individuals and Groups
A group is an association of two or more individuals who have a shared sense of identity and who interact with each other in structured ways on the basis of a common set of expectations about each other’s behavior. Human social life is group life. Individuals are involved in families, work groups, social groups, recreational groups, and so on. However, while groups are found in all societies, societies differ according to the degree to which the group is viewed as the primary means of social organization. In some societies, individual attributes and achievements are viewed as being more important than group membership, while in others the reverse is true (in Saudi Arabia, for example, the family group one belongs to is arguably more important than individual attributes and achievements in explaining success).

The Individual:
In many Western societies, the individual is the basic building block of social organization. This is reflected not just in the political and economic organization of society, but also in the way people perceive themselves and relate to each other in social and business settings. The value systems of many Western societies, for example, emphasize individual achievement. The social standing of individuals is not so much a function of whom they work for, as of their individual performance in whatever work setting they choose.

The Group:
In contrast no the Western emphasis on the individual, the group is the primary unit of social organization in many other societies. For example, in Japan, the social status of an individual is determined as much by the standing of the group to which he or she belongs as by his or her individual performance. In traditional Japanese society, the group has frequently come to be associated with the work team or business organization to which an individual belongs.