Minkov indb

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◆ 9
T
his treatise on the study of cross-cultural differences between mod-
ern societies starts with an examination of the various ways in 
which culture has been conceptualized. Approaches to the concept and 
study of culture have varied between academic disciplines, and some-
times even within them. The goal of this analysis is not to provide one 
right perspective. Culture can be whatever a scholar decides it should be. 
What we need is not a single best theoretical definition of culture but 
clear empirical operationalizations of each approach: Researchers need 
to explain exactly how they propose to measure culture in accordance 
with their conceptualizations, diverse as they may be. 
1
THE CONCEPT OF CULTURE

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10
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Understanding “Culture”
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1.1. The “Unpackaging” 
of Culture 
Psychologists who compare individu-
als from different nationalities or ethnic 
groups often observe differences between 
them on the dependent variables that they 
study. In such cases, they may show that 
various psychological variables, as well as 
age, gender, educational level, and more, 
produce a statistical effect that seems to 
account for the differences. But what if 
some of the variance remains unexplained? 
In that case, it was common practice until 
recently to refer to an obscure residual 
called “culture.” Originally, the concept 
of culture seemed even more opaque to 
researchers who compared organizations 
in different countries.   In the words of Child 
(1981), “In effect, national differences 
found in characteristics of organizations 
or their members have been ascribed to . . . 
national differences, period” (p. 304). 
To a cultural anthropologist, culture is 
neither obscure, nor a residual. It is a social 
phenomenon that manifests itself quite 
clearly, even if the manifestations are not 
always easy to explain. Anthropologists 
consider culture an important phenom-
enon that warrants its own field of study. 
They do not view it as a single variable; 
being an extremely complex system, it is 
to be analyzed in terms of its components 
and their relationships. Although cross-
cultural psychologists and organizational 
behavior experts accepted this logic rela-
tively late, by now they too have grasped 
the need to unpackage culture rather than 
approach it as a monolithic block. 
1
This 
chapter and the next prepare the reader 
for the third one, which represents an 
unpackaging exercise. We must start with 
a philosophical warning at the very outset 
of our journey. We will not try to find 
out what is in the package because that 
would be futile. Culture is not a specific 
material object that has its own objec-
tive existence. It is underpinned by real 
phenomena that, however, we perceive 
and analyze
subjectively. Therefore, the 
best that we can do in a discussion of the 
nature of culture is to explore the subjec-
tive conceptualizations of various schol-
ars. Then, we can discuss the contents of 
the package labeled “culture” as they have 
been seen by cross-cultural experts. 
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