Cross- cultural Communication This page intentionally left blank

Definitions of culture
ART? MUSIC?
LITERATURE? HUMOUR?
FOOD? LANGUAGE?
VALUES? ATTITUDES?
CUSTOMS? ETIQUETTE?
Figure 1.1 Culture – what is it?
As we might expect, there are many definitions of culture. Some of these 
include the following:
‘Culture is man- made, confirmed by others, conventionalized … It provides 
people with a meaningful context in which to meet, to think about 
themselves and face the other world’ (Trompenaars, 2000: 3).
‘A shared system of meanings. It dictates what we pay attention to, how 
we act and what we value’ (Trompenaars, 1993: 13).
‘Each cultural world operates according to its own internal dynamics, 
its own principles and its own laws – written and unwritten. Even time 
and space are unique to each culture. There are, however, some common 
threads that run through all cultures’ (Hall and Hall, 1990: 3).
It would seem that a comprehensive workable definition of culture is based 
on the belief that its value systems lie at its core. These are what defines a 
particular culture. It includes its norms of behaviour, beliefs, aesthetic stand-
ards, patterns of thinking and styles of communication which a particular 
group of people have developed over time to ensure their survival.
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What is Cross- Cultural Communication? 5
Culture is therefore socially, and not biologically, constructed. Individuals 
are socialized into a particular culture and their individuality is developed 
within the overall context of that culture. All people carry within them 
patterns of thinking, feeling and behavioural responses which have been 
learned throughout their lifetime. Much of this is acquired during early 
childhood, when a person is most susceptible to learning and assimilating.
We can summarize these definitions to say that culture is a system of 
shared beliefs and values which are learned rather than inherited. It is com-
posed of those values and beliefs, norms, symbols and ideologies that make 
up the total way of life of a people. Culture has also been defined as a form 
of ‘map’ which each of us has implanted in us by the society into which we 
are born. This ‘map’ defines reality, sets the guidelines for behaviour, thus 
developing our value system, and establishes the rules for problem solving 
or explaining events that are not normally encountered.
In most Western languages, ‘culture’ is taken to mean ‘civilization’, 
‘education’, ‘art’. This is culture in a narrow sense. However, culture is also 
a form of mental programming. As soon as certain patterns of thinking, 
feeling and behaviour have been established, for the individual to learn 
something different, the old patterns need to be unlearned. These patterns 
of thinking, feeling and behaviour can indeed be described as a form of 
mental programming, using a computer analogy, and have been called 
‘mental software’, extending the analogy. Indeed, Hofstede describes cul-
ture as: ‘The collective programming of the mind, which distinguishes the 
members of one group or category of people from another’ (1994: 5). What 
we ‘learn’ is, in fact, modified by the influence of ‘collective program-
ming’ (that is, culture) as well as by our own unique personal experiences 
throughout life.
A useful method is to divide culture into implicit culture – basic assumptions 
which produce norms and values which show in the explicit culture – 
observable reality which includes language, food, music, dress, literature, 
architecture, public emotion, work ethic, noise, physical contact and so on.