Literature shows that there have been difficulties in defining culture. The concept is hard to define and harder to analyse and measure.
Most people have a connotative sense of what culture is but have difficulty defining it abstractly.
However, it can equally be argued that many sociologists share similar views when defining culture.
Many researchers define culture in approximately the same way – in terms of cultural manifestations that are shared by most cultural members.
In an interview carried out by Psychology Today, John Kotter of Harvard University defined culture as: Shared values and behaviour norms.
Shared values are basic preferences about good and bad that most people in a group share in common.
Authors agree that culture is a trait possessed by the human species and a majority of writers view that people from different cultural backgrounds have differing perspectives, manifested in their values, attitudes, beliefs and behaviours.
In order to further narrow the definition of culture, it is important to discuss how culture comes into being.
Culture emerges from history, is rooted in practice, sustained by structures and becomes habitual – and therefore unconscious and unthinking – as the result of routines of repeated behaviour.
Additionally, it is defined as “that which the human species has and other social species lack… That, in short, is what we learn from other men and women, from our elders or the past, plus what may add to it”.
Culture consists in patterned ways of thinking, feeling and reacting which are acquired and transmitted by symbols; the essential core of culture consists of traditional (i e historically derived and selected) ideas and especially their attached values.
It becomes a product of one’s mental programming which in turn begs the assumption that human behaviour is predictable.
Human beings share certain aspects of their mental programming which they tend to derive from their established social systems.
Hofstede distinguishes three levels of mental programming: The universal level of mental programming (found at the base of the triangle) refers to a common type of programming that almost all of us share.
The second level (namely the level that is most pertinent to my research), refers to mental programming that is shared by some but not all people.
Specifically Hofstede defines it as being “common to people belonging to a certain group or category, but different from people belonging to other groups or categories”, and it is within this realm that subjective human culture belongs.
The final level is the individual level, which refers to the fact that none of us are programmed in the exact same manner and it is here that we are able to account for a wide range of behaviours within the same collective culture.
As mentioned previously, the collective level is the most effective definition of culture. The word culture is usually reserved for societies (operationalised as nations or as ethnic or regional groups within or across nations).
Basically, the word can be applied to any human collectivity or category: an organisation, a profession, an age group, an entire gender, or a family.
Or, as in the case of this research, it can be applied to certain sections of workers within an organisation who can be differentiated by their nationality.
Ali (1995) states, “Arabic is a vehicle for the continuing transmission of information” in Arab countries. Language not only ensures the continuity of national thoughts but also maintains and reinforces cultural identity.
What is often referred to as a language barrier can be more deeply understood as a cultural difference.
If we have sufficient knowledge of another language, we may be able to communicate with people of a different culture but this does not imply that we truly understand their culture.
The author is a management and technology expert
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