Does there exist only one, universally valid, research ethic? Are informed consent and ethical committees the best means to ensure the moral correctness of research? Again, what consequences ensue from the introduction of these instruments for the freedom of research and the quality of its results? This article addresses these issues by first recounting an ethnography conducted by its author in...

The area of cross-cultural management and organization studies has been dominated by Hofstede’s (1980a) seminal work on cultural values dimensions. Despite much recent criticism, and perhaps because of it, he remains the most cited author in this area. It is difficult to start any account in this field without reference to his work, and this is certainly the starting point here. This chapter fi...

CULTURAL SAMPLE The Standard Cross-Cultural Sample, or SCCS (Murdock and White 1969), is a cumulative and collaborative database of coded variables on maximally diverse and ethnographically best-described societies used by scholars in the social sciences. The champion of modern cross-cultural and statistical methods, George P. Murdock, in preparation for a standard sample, had classified the 1,...

In the enormous collection of cross-cultural data that have been published during the last few decades it is difficult to perceive patterns. There is a clear need for systematizing the vast amount of cross-cultural studies and for developing models that explain cross-cultural differences in psychology. Two methods of crosscultural meta-analysis can be distinguished. First, the instrument-based ...

The Standard Cross-Cultural Sample contains the best-described society in each of 186 cultural provinces of the world, chosen so that cultural independence of each unit in terms of historical origin and cultural diffusion could be considered maximal with respect to the others societies in the sample. Often the time period chosen is that of the earliest high quality ethnographic description. Hen...

The aim of the study was a cross-cultural comparison of personality traits between individuals from two very different cultures and refugees who resettled several years before from one to the other. Four hundred forty four Swedish individuals of the normal population; and 100 Iranian refugees in Sweden, and a group of 335 individuals from Tehran, capital of Iran, were investigated by means of t...

Sentimentality and nostalgia are two similar psychological constructs, which play an important role in the emotional lives of elderly people who are usually focused on the past. There are two objectives of this study - making cross-cultural comparison of sentimentality and nostalgia among Bulgarian and Greek elderly people using a questionnaire, and establishing the psychometric properties of t...

Computer game development is a rapidly growing global business. However, research in the understanding of the global user is lacking. This paper presents a survey of recent research on cross cultural game development. The paper proposes a cross cultural hybrid model to carry out user modeling to assist developers in understanding the cultural nuances of end users.

/ have given the term pragmatic failure' to the inability to understand 'what is meant by what is said'. In this paper I argue that pragmatic failure is an area of cross-cultural communication breakdown which has received very little attention from language teachers. I suggest that there is one area of pragmatic failure ('pragmalinguistic failure') which is fairly easy to overcome. It is simply...