Understanding National Culture And How Relevant Is Important

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Index
1.- Introduction 3
2.- Approaches to National Culture 4
2.1.- Hall’s Context Culture Model (180) 4
2.2.- Hofstede 's Cultural Dimensions Theory 5
2.3.- Trompenaars ' Model of National Culture Differences 6
3.- Conclusion 7
4.- Bibliography 8

1.- Introduction
According to Hofstede definition, it is possible to develop the idea of national culture as a culture for a particular group of humans that includes systems of values and is passed down between generations by learning. (Hofstede G. H., 1980, p. 21)
Given this, the main target of this essay is to analyse the main approaches to understanding national culture and how relevant is such an understanding to an internationalising firm.
In order to achieve this target, it will…show more content…
2.1.- Hall’s Context Culture Model
In the first approach, Hall explains that context and meaning are highly correlated, same expressions, words or sentences could change his meaning drastically in different context, thus being really important to understand it correctly. (Hall, 1976, pp. 85-104)
Furthermore, Hall says that each culture has a particular way to understand the background, so American people usually tends to have fast relationships and do not feel an important implication with friends, but for example in the Middle East people take more time to establish a relation but it hopes that friends will not let you down. (Hall, 1960).
Following this argument, Hall builds the differentiation between High Context and Low Context cultures using some characteristics which could be divided in:
Source: (Andrews & Mead, 2009).
Moreover, Hall also introduces the concept of polychronic and monochronic in order to describe how cultures perceive, structure and manage time.
2.2.- Hofstede 's Cultural Dimensions Theory
The second approach is constituted by Hofstede, who makes various researches to compare work-related values across employees working for a multinational corporation IBM in a total of 65 countries. Using the information obtained with these researches Hofstede produced a comparison between national cultures on five dimensions:
Source: (The Hosfede Center, n.d.)
One of the most accurate examples of this framework is McDonalds, the
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