Irish

Abstract

… [C]ulture is the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one group or society from those of another. Culture consists of the patterns of thinking that parents transfer to their children, teachers to their students, friends to their friends, leaders to their followers, and followers to their leaders. Culture is reflected in the meanings people attach to various aspects of life: their way of looking at the world and their role in it; in their values, that is, in what they consider as “good” and as “evil”; in their collective beliefs, what they consider as “true” and as “false”; in their artistic expression, what they consider as “beautiful” and as “ugly.” Culture although basically resident in people’s minds, becomes crystallized in the institutions and tangible products of a society, which reinforce the mental programmes in their turn. Management within a society is very much constrained by its cultural context, because it is impossible to coordinate the actions of people without a deep understanding of their values, beliefs, and expressions… [T]he collective programming which I call culture should be seen as a collective component shared in the minds of otherwise different individuals and absent in the minds of individuals belonging to a different society. (Hofstede, 1984b, p. 82)