What Is Culture?

This brings us to the question, What does culture mean? In this book it has nothing to do with art, theater, music, or literature. One useful definition comes from Riding the Waves of Culture by Fons Trompenaars, in which he calls culture the way in which a group of people solves problems. Karin Sharma in Alla dessa Kulturer calls it A dynamic system giving rise to a shared means of interpretation.

This book focuses primarily on national culture. However, to answer the questions that people have asked, I have had to take into account other influences including regional, corporate, and industry cultures. It is obvious to any U.S. citizen, for example, that the culture of New York City is different from that of San Francisco, just as IBM s corporate culture is not the same as Microsoft s. And even when two people are both from the same city, if one works in the restaurant business and the other in a bank, they are going to be part of very different industry cultures.

Because it is so complicated, this whole area of culture can easily become a morass of sloppy thinking and soggy subjective opinion. But to be honest, that is why it is so interesting! Everyone who has had the slightest international experience has his or her own opinions on what successful intercultural contact means, and these opinions are often perceptive and shrewd. Despite attempts to turn intercultural studies into a science, with a plethora of theories based on surveys and painstaking investigations, and books full of tables and graphs, most businesspeople I know are less interested in theory than in working successfully on a personal level in intercultural situations. And that is still essentially an art, based on squishy and unquantifiable concepts, like intuition and empathy, as well as on knowledge and facts.