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The Collective Programming Of The Mind

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Introduction:
Culture can be defined as “the collective programming of the mind” (Hofstede, 1983 )or “a system of attitudes, values, and knowledge that is widely shared within a society” (Inglehart, 1997). Definitions of culture change depending of the focus, units of measurement and disciplines of study. Within the same context, studies about culture adopt different constructs based on distinctive criteria, which are always subject to debate. Nevertheless, cross-cultural research brought a great deal of improvements into business and managerial studies. “Nationality and culture tend to coincide” (Hofstede, 1983), despite the fact that nations envelop a wide range of subcultures, beliefs, religions and code of conducts, in order to illustrate a country’s cultural mapping, numerous studies focused on making national generalizations in order to define and measure culture researches in the field of cross-cultural studies with the aim of constructing frameworks that would determine culture as closely as possible to its reality in a given nation. In the same context of understanding cultures, ever since the publication of Geert Hofstede about national cultural dimensions (1983) there has been a growing interest among scholars of cross-cultural studies in terms of defining, understanding and analysing national cultures and their impact in international business.
Question 1: literature review and critical analysis of concepts
Hofstede, Trompenaars and Hampden-turner, Schwartz and

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