Exploring Diverse Perspectives on Cultural Definitions

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B. Literature Review
1. Conflicting Perspectives on Culture
Hofstede (1980b) offered the definition of culture as the collective programming of mind that differentiates humans from one another in terms of values (Maznevski and DiStephano, 2000) and/or communication styles (Hall and Hall, 1990). Cultural values are prevalent themes in cross-cultural literature because of their universal applicability across cultural frontiers (Brem and Wolfram, 2013). Therefore, there have been various researchers studying about this concept. As cited in Knutson, Hwang & Deng (2000), Herkovits (1955) considered culture “the artificial part of the environment” while Triandis and Albert (1987) saw culture as a way to share meanings, norms and values. Other researchers …show more content…

Firstly, culture is what we learnt via interaction with others but not we were born with it. Moreover, culture is the basis of establishing values, beliefs and norms for acceptable and desirable behaviours. It also helps with the structure and categorisation of the environment. As a means to perceive the world, culture has been produced and passed on to the later generations to make one’s existence meaningful and traditions consistent to the group. Therefore, because of cultural practice in the form of rituals, education, myths and so on for centuries, its changes are rather …show more content…

As people with indirect mode of communication have a tendency to be conscious of their surroundings and to predict or interpret others’ behaviour based mainly on contextual information, their conversations are more implicit and full of silence and telepathy to conceal their real motives, desires, and wishes (Gudykunst & Toomey, 1988) and preserve the value of harmony and interdependency (Okabe, 1983). Although ambiguous forms of communication can enable both parties to manipulate and prevent arguments from arising in order to save face and to be in harmony (Ting-Toomey, 1985), unarticulated messages and subjective interpretations on contextual information are not so easy to be comprehended correctly, and thus leading to conflicts (Gudykunst & Nishida, 1986). As a consequence, Chua & Gudykunst (1987) revealed that evasive and non-confrontational conflict resolution would be likely to be observed from people with high-context culture. By contrast, low-context or direct mode of communication means expressing explicitly the targeted message and the speaker’s desires using verbal languages (Gudykunst & Toomey, 1988). Therefore, these people will usually have open and direct communication without the necessity of relying on contextual information and knowledge (Chua & Gudykunst, 1987;

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