National Culture: when does it matters?

In order to understand why is culture important or unimportant, we must try to elucidate the  meaning of the word culture. Despite many experts have tried to give a single concept for culture according to the document "International Management: Cross-Cultural Dimensions" by Richard Mead (see further readings), the most accurate concept is that of Hofstede which considers culture as being:

"The collective programing 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." (Mead, Richard, 2004)

Thus the concept of culture includes the concept of values, and it implies that every human group has its own culture, which means that every group may react differently to the same situations.

One must remember that in culture, beside the values, are the beliefs of a person but Mead states in its book that they're not as important as values because people do not act according to their beliefs all the time.

Instead values are much more deeply rooted in a persons psyche and are, therefore, more useful in determining someones behavior towards unknown circumstances.

Now in order to answer the question proposed in the title of this post I would like to refer not only to the document quoted above but also to two other documents: the first is the document from Kwok Leung titled "Culture and international business: recent advances and their implications for future Research." The second is the document from Martin Gannon titled "“Understanding cultural metaphors”. So lets get to the point: when does culture matters?

Its seems like the three authors quoted before in the document all agree that culture is important most of the time but that there are specific circumstances in which it doesn't matter at all.

According to Mr. Mead the culture is relevant when trying to understand big groups of people, because it is hard to create a psychological profile of each of the group-member. Meaning that this author recognizes that beyond the culture there are other influences that mold the individual's personality (he mentions things such as genetic transmission, family, age and gender). Thus facing the impossibility of analyzing each individual's set of conditions, the cultural analysis gains importance in order to have a general idea of the attitudes of a particular group.

Mr. Gannon proposes that the importance of culture is related to specific case situations: he states that culture is important in specific situations such as to trigger unconscious values leading to action (small changes generate positive responses), in cross-cultural negotiations (to facilitate the exchange) and when distorting stereotypes are present (how accurate are they?). This means that the culture is relevant in a myriad of situation but its impact may be greater or lesser according to the specific circumstance.

Kandinsky - Composition VIII,
Taken from: http://blog.artsclub.com
"when uncertainty is present
cultural responses  tend to be amplified"

For Mr. Kwok there are instances in which individuals tend to think and act according to cultural, this instances are the degree of identification of a person to its particular culture, self-steem, degree of group development (early amplifies cultural responses) and uncertainty (the more the uncertain the situation is, the more cultural behaviors should be expected.)

These three concepts of when culture matters are complementary to each other. The conclusion taken is that culture matters almost all the the time but its effect can be more or less significant according to the circumstance, therefore making culture an important element to understand the behavior of a group of people. But, in the end the individual's response is difficult to determine when referring only to culture because it is a generalization.

So when culture does not matters?

34th Street - Richard Estes, Taken from:
www.flikr.com
"occupational similarities can reduce
cultural responses"
this painting by Richard Estes will never raise
controversy on its clear subject and technique. 

At this point I find that despite Kwok and Mead explain situations where culture does not matters, they stay quite specific (the economist example in Mead and the opposite side of the previous conditions stated by Kwok). The generalized situations provided by Gannon are the ones that I find more illustrative. This author states that usually the culture does not matter or matters the least when there are occupational similarities (for example mathematicians may not experience any cultural problem because they share one "language" that of maths, and the results of their works have to be the same, meaning culture has no impact when they are working to solve a problem), similarity of social class (diminishes the importance), Nature of the problem (when a single goal is being pursued by all the parties of a group (the cultural differences tend to be neutralized), when trust is present and the technological change.

So as to conclude this post I must say that those who are interested in studying the cultural differences and the impact of culture in a particular situation must be aware that there are circumstances when culture matters a lot and when its effects on behavior are diminished or even neutralized.

Further readings:
Mead, Richard. 2004. International Management: Cross-Cultural Dimensions London: Blackwell Publishing. Chapter 1.
Leung, Kwok. 2005. Culture and international business: recent advances and their implications for future Research. Journal of International Business Studies. Pg 36, 357–378.
Gannon, Martin. 2004. Understanding global cultures. Sage Publications. “Understanding cultural metaphors” p. 3 – 18