Intercultural Research: The Current State of Knowledge

This paper gives a short overview of the main concepts and theories in intercultural and cross-cultural communication, thus providing a brief introduction into the field of empirical research into culture-based value variations and providing a short outline of the major works in this area (e.g. the works of Hall, Hofstede, Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner, and Schwartz). Comparative and so called ‘intercultural’ studies are becoming increasingly more important in the global business environment. However, despite its rising importance few researchers and educators rely on empirical cross cultural and intercultural research to interpret their observations. This paper aims to give a short overview of the major concepts and theories which are useful to interpret cultural variances at a more profound level than the merely behavioural one. The word ‘culture’ is often used loosely in everyday language to describe a number of quite distinct concepts; for example, the word is often used to describe concepts such as ‘organisational culture’ as well as ‘arts and culture’. What all of these concepts have in common is the implication that culture is an abstract entity which involves a number of usually man-made, collective and shared artefacts, behavioural patterns, values or other concepts which taken together form the culture as a whole. For example, people in an organisation are said to “share the organisational culture” – yet, at the same time, they define the organisational culture. Historically, the word derives from the Latin word ‘colere’, which could be translated as ‘to build’, ‘to care for’, ‘to plant’ or ‘to cultivate’. Thus ‘culture’ usually referred to something that is derived from, or created by the intervention of humans – ‘culture’ is cultivated. With this definition in mind, the word ‘culture’ is often used to describe something refined, especially ‘high culture’, or describing the concept of selected, valuable and cultivated artefacts of a society. (Dahl, 1998, 2000)