Dimensions of Culture

Running Head: DIMENSIONS OF CULTURE
Dimensions of Culture
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DIMENSIONS OF CULTURE1
Culture is a knowledge and collective behavior of a group of individual (Von Scheve,
2017). Culture encompasses religion, language, social habits, norms, music, arts and most
importantly language. According to me, culture is the form of behavior and interaction that is
shared by a group of people. These people can belong to a similar geographical area and hence
they share their behavioral pattern and their ideas, they could also belong to a similar religion
and therefore they share the same characteristics. Culture for me is both learned and inherited
(Kramsch, 2013). Some forms of behavior are inherited through the primary socialization that is
received by a person from birth, such as the native language of a person, the way they behave in
the family and the hierarchy they chose to follow in general, these behaviors is usually acquired
by a person from birth. Certain types of behavior such as the political ideologies that an
individual chose to support or the kind of profession they want to pursue or their education is
learned gradually throughout the years. In this essay, I will talk about the meaning of culture
according to me and will talk about the Hofstede cultural dimension.
Some identities are shared by the group and some are not but they also form a part of the
culture as those behaviors build up the society. However, the behaviors that are shared by the
collective differ from one group to the other. Every group has their own behavioral pattern.
There are certain norms, rules that are unique to every group. These behavior patterns that are
followed in a group are dependent on the social patterns that are followed by every group. The
social patterns of every group are dependent on factors such as religion, way of dressing, the
food that they eat, the language that they speak, their notions of moral and immoral, these are the
entire social patterns that vary from one group to the other and they form the social patterns of
each group (Coccia, 2014). The term culture is derived from the French word, which was in turn
derived from the Latin word “colere”, this words means to look after the earth and cultivate

DIMENSIONS OF CULTURE2
something and provide for them so that they could grow. The etymology of the word is shared by
a lot of other words which have the same meaning of fostering growth. I believe culture has
many layers and it operates on multiple levels. Often country or the ethnic region a person
belongs to is referred to as a culture of the person, and his individual character traits are also
attributed to the region that they belong to but these two components, the collective behavior of
the group is one phenomenon and the individuals behavior are always not because of the region
that they belong to. Culture is to unique to every social group, all the members of this social
group share this unique traits hence it can labeled as the culture of the group. No culture is wrong
or right, they are unique to every group and the other groups may not be able to understand it but
they those behaviors cannot be labeled as wrong or right, they are the ways by which a society
operates in a particular.
Dutch social psychologist Geert Hofstede did a pioneering research on cross-cultural
communication (Beugelsdijk, Kostova & Roth, 2017). He is a professor Emeritus of
Organizational Anthropology and International Management at Maastricht University (Minkov,
Blagoev & Hofstede, 2017). The Hofstede’s cultural dimension theory is a framework that is
used in understanding the differences that exists in cultures across the world (Favaretto, et al.,
2017). This framework is used in distinguishing between national cultures and the various
dimensions of culture and the impact that they have on a business setting. This theory was
created in the year 1980.