PROF.

DR BILJANA ĐORIĆ FRANCUSKI

The English Department

Faculty of Philology
University of Belgrade

Third-year course

BRITISH CULTURAL STUDIES 1

- Course Material -

October 2020

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IMPORTANT NOTICE:
This material is a compilation of excerpts and it is not to be cited as an
original source.

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 CONTENTS

 WHAT IS CULTURE? CORE CONCEPTS

 TYPOLOGY AND CLASSIFICATION OF CULTURE
 THE ICEBERG METAPHOR AND THE ONION MODEL OF
CULTURE
 CULTURAL VALUES: STUDIES AND MODELS
(SCHWARTZ, HOFSTEDE, MOLE, HALL, TROMPENAARS,
INGLEHART)
 BRITAIN AFTER WORLD WAR II
 BRITISH LITERATURE AFTER WORLD WAR II
 BRITISH CULTURAL STUDIES
 STEREOTYPES

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 What is Culture? Core Concepts
Culture has been defined in many ways. It is always a collective phenomenon, but it can be
connected to different collectives, and within each collective there is a variety of individuals.
Most commonly the term culture is used for tribes or ethnic groups (in anthropology), for nations
(in political science and sociology), and for organisations (in sociology and management). A
relatively unexplored field is the culture of occupations (for instance, of engineers versus
accountants, or of academics from different disciplines), while the term can also be applied to the
genders, to generations, or to social classes. Societal, national and gender cultures, which
children acquire from their earliest youth onwards, are much deeper rooted in the human mind
than occupational cultures acquired at school, or organisational cultures acquired on the job –
which are exchangeable when people take a new job. Societal cultures reside in (often
unconscious) values, in the sense of “broad tendencies to prefer certain states of affairs over
others” (Hofstede 2001: 5). Organisational cultures reside rather in (visible and conscious)
practices: the way people perceive what goes on in their organisational environment.

Meanings of the Term Culture

Culture is a notoriously difficult term to define, or – as Raymond Williams said – “Culture is one
of the two or three most complicated words in the English language” (1983: 87). The reasons for
this are that there exists a variety of ways in which the term culture can be understood, it is
constantly changing, there are many aspects of the word culture, as well as an individual
perception of culture. In 1952, the American anthropologists, Kroeber and Kluckhohn, critically
reviewed concepts and definitions of culture, and compiled a list of 164 different definitions. In
the ten-volume Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, the problem was summarized as
follows: “Despite a century of efforts to define culture adequately, there was in the early 1990s
no agreement among anthropologists regarding its nature.” (1994: 2001) However, culture is
undeniably one of the key concepts in our understanding of how modern societies work, and it
has a central place in the social sciences and the humanities. On the other hand, the true meaning
of the term culture hasn’t been defined yet, because definitions are constantly being developed
and refined.
The word culture has different definitions and references across various academic disciplines. In
archaeology and cultural anthropology reference to culture, or a culture, is overwhelmingly
connected to material production, whereas in history and cultural studies the primary focus
relates to “signifying or symbolic systems” (Williams 1983: 91). In cultural studies “culture is
that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other
capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society” (Tylor 1870: 1). Another
definition of culture is that it is “a dynamic set of socially acquired behaviour patterns and

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meanings common to members of a particular society or human group, including the key
elements of language, artifacts, beliefs and values” (Sojka and Tansuhaj 1995). All of these
definitions point to one conclusion, which is that culture is an indispensable part of lives of all
human beings and that it actually organizes, governs and coordinates them. The importance of
culture is so great that it can be compared with the importance of a human cell. The reason for
that is the mere fact that from the moment we are born we are shaped and modelled by certain
principles, knowledge, experiences, rules, customs, rituals, etc., and all of them are produced by
a certain system which is called culture.
The following extract provides a historical perspective to some of the ways in which the term has
been interpreted:
Much of the difficulty [of understanding the concept of culture] stems from the different
usages of the term as it was increasingly employed in the nineteenth century. Broadly
speaking, it was used in three ways (all of which can be found today as well). First, as
exemplified in Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1867), culture referred to special
intellectual or artistic endeavors or products, what today we might call “high culture” as
opposed to “popular culture” (or “folkways” in an earlier usage). By this definition, only a
portion – typically a small one – of any social group “has” culture. (The rest are potential
sources of anarchy!) This sense of culture is more closely related to aesthetics than to social
science.
Partly in reaction to this usage, the second, as pioneered by Edward Tylor in Primitive Culture
(1870), referred to a quality possessed by all people in all social groups, who nevertheless
could be arrayed on a development (evolutionary) continuum from “savagery” through
“barbarism” to “civilization”. According to Tylor’s definition of culture, in contrast to
Arnold’s view, all folks “have” culture, which they acquire by virtue of membership in some
social group – society. And a whole grab bag of things, from knowledge to habits to
capabilities, makes up culture.
The third and last usage of culture developed in anthropology in the twentieth-century work
of Franz Boas and his students. As Tylor reacted to Arnold to establish a scientific (rather
than aesthetic) basis for culture, so Boas reacted against Tylor and other social evolutionists.
Whereas the evolutionists stressed the universal character of a single culture, with different
societies arrayed from savage to civilized, Boas emphasized the uniqueness of the many and
varied cultures of different peoples or societies. Moreover he dismissed the value judgments
he found inherent in both the Arnoldian and Tylorean views of culture; for Boas, one should
never differentiate high from low culture, and one ought not differentially valorize cultures as
savage or civilized.
Here, then, are three very different understandings of culture. Part of the difficulty in the term
lies in its multiple meanings. But to compound matters, the difficulties are not merely
conceptual or semantic. All of the usages and understandings come attached to, or can be
attached to, different political or ideological agendas that, in one form or another, still
resonate today. (Avruch 1998: 6–7)

Definitions of the Term Culture

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Look at the following definitions of culture, and consider the characteristics of culture they each
draw attention to:
• “Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behaviour acquired and
transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievements of human groups,
including their embodiment in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional
(i.e. historically derived and selected) ideas and especially their attached values; culture
systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of action, on the other, as
conditional elements of future action.” (Kroeber & Kluckhohn 1952: 357)
• “Culture consists of the derivatives of experience, more or less organized, learned or
created by the individuals of a population, including those images or encodements and
their interpretations (meanings) transmitted from past generations, from contemporaries,
or formed by individuals themselves.” (Theodore Schwartz 1992; cited by Avruch 1998:
17)
• “[Culture] is the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of
one group or category of people from another.” (Hofstede 1994: 5)
• “... the set of attitudes, values, beliefs, and behaviors shared by a group of people, but
different for each individual, communicated from one generation to the next.”
(Matsumoto 1996: 16)
• “The production and circulation of sense, meaning and consciousness. The sphere of
meaning, which unifies the spheres of production (economics) and social relations
(politics). In other words, culture is the sphere of reproduction not of goods but of life. If
you are planning to use the term ‘culture’ as an analytical concept, or if you encounter its
use, it is unlikely that you will ever be able to fix on just one definition that will do for all
such occasions. However, it will often be possible to use or read the word clearly and
uncontroversially: Welsh culture, youth culture, a cultured person, Victorian culture,
working-class culture, intellectual culture; or even a cultured pearl, bacterial culture,
agriculture, cultivation of the soil. The trouble arises when you notice that even in these
examples the term culture seems to mean half-a-dozen different things. What on earth do
all these things share that can be encompassed by the single term?” (Hartley 2002: 77-78)
• “Culture is a living, changing system that embraces our personal and social life.
Everything we do or say is a manifestation of culture.” (Mole 2003: 8)
• “Culture is a fuzzy set of basic assumptions and values, orientations to life, beliefs,
policies, procedures and behavioural conventions that are shared by a group of people,
and that influence (but do not determine) each member’s behaviour and his/her
interpretations of the ‘meaning’ of other people’s behaviour.” (Spencer-Oatey 2008: 3)
• “Our culture is the way we view things and the way we do things round here.” (Chrysler
Corporation, the US automotive firm)

Origin of the Word Culture

Initially, the term was derived from the Latin word cultura that had a range of meanings
including ‘inhabit, cultivate, and protect, honour with worship’. The word culture originally
meant the tending or cultivation of something, in particular animals or crops – hence the noun
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‘agriculture’. By the early fifteenth century the French word culture had passed into the English
language and the primary meaning was then in husbandry, associated with the tending of natural
growth in either crops or animals. From the early sixteenth century the concept of tending to
natural growth was extended to human beings. Culture as a noun was not common before the late
eighteenth century. In eighteenth-century England, the term was often associated with civility
that acquired social class associations connected to breeding and advantage. From the eighteenth
century onwards, this sense of culture as cultivation was particularly associated with the spiritual
and moral progress of humanity. Involved in this meaning of culture was the idea of a process,
unlike some meanings of the term, which suggest an end product. For example, the term culture
is often used to mean actual products, such as opera, concerts, literature, drama and paintings;
mass culture is often applied to television, Hollywood, magazines, ‘pulp’ fiction and
newspapers; and the term ‘Victorian culture’ implies a body of material already available for
study. However, from the nineteenth century onwards, with the growth of nation states and the
Romantic interest in ‘folk art’, it became necessary “to speak of cultures in the plural” in order to
distinguish between the particular cultures of different nations, but also between “the specific
and variable cultures of social and economic groups within a nation” (Williams 1983: 89). In
cultural studies, one of the most comprehensive definitions of culture was supplied by Sir
Edward Burnett Tylor, a nineteenth-century British anthropologist, who wrote in his book
Primitive Culture that culture “is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art,
morals, law, customs and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of
society” (Tylor 1870: 1).
The nineteenth century was also marked by the so-called ‘culture and civilization debate’, in
which one of the key figures was Matthew Arnold (1822–1888), a Professor of Poetry at the
University of Oxford, whose canonical work is Culture and Anarchy (1869). In this book,
Arnold claims that “culture […] is a study of perfection, and of harmonious perfection, general
perfection, and perfection which consists in becoming something rather than in having
something, in an inward condition of the mind and spirit, not in an outward set of circumstances,
– it is clear that culture [...] has a very important function to fulfill for mankind. And this
function is particularly important in our modern world, of which the whole civilisation is [...]
mechanical and external, and tends constantly to become more so”. Arnold believes that culture
has its origins in love of perfection, and not in curiosity; it is a result not only of scientific
passion for knowledge, but also of the moral and social passion for doing good. According to
Arnold, there are several primary purposes and functions of culture. One function is becoming
something rather than having something. Another function is an inward condition of mind and
spirit, not an outward set of circumstances, opposite of mechanical and external in the modern
civilization.
the pursuit of perfection = the pursuit of sweetness and light = working for the reason
vs.
working for machinery = working for hatred and confusion
Another purpose of culture is to make everything that has been discovered in the world current
anywhere, such as familiarity with the bodies of knowledge: philosophy, literature, paintings,
music. Arnold considers that culture should make men live in the atmosphere of sweetness and
light where they may use ideas freely and not be bound by them. “The pursuit of perfection”, for
him, is a moral, intellectual and spiritual journey. Opportunities to achieve “perfection” in this

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sense cannot be restricted to a privileged minority, but must be available to “the raw and
unkindled1 masses of humanity”. Culture, in the sense of the “best that has been thought and
known”, is a way for “real thought and real beauty to be given to the masses”. In modern
industrial society, Arnold believes, it is the duty of those “already possessing the culture” to pass
that culture to the masses in danger of being offered inferior intellectual food such as for
example ordinary popular literature.
In the early years of the twentieth century, anthropology was finally established as an academic
discipline, with its sub-branch of cultural anthropology generally understood to be “the
comparative study of preliterate people”, in which culture is defined as the whole way of life of a
particular society. There were three definitions of culture in the 20 th century:
- A general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development
- A particular way of life, whether of a people, a period, a group or humanity in general
- The works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity
One of the most influential people in the field of culture is Raymond Williams (1921-1988).
Even to him, to the man who was ahead of his time and to the man who was doing cultural
studies even before the term was invented, it was extremely difficult to define the word culture.
“There is now a good deal of hesitancy over the value of the word culture. I don’t know how
many times,” Raymond Williams once said, “I’ve wished that I’ve never heard the damned
word”. Williams had a very successful life and accomplished a lot. He wrote more than 650
publications over his 40-year career. His contribution to cultural thinking was that of a
Cambridge professor who never forgot the Welsh village where he was born and where he grew
up. His research was extremely important for the development of the Centre for Contemporary
Cultural Studies at Birmingham (BCCCS). His most significant books are Culture and Society
(1958), The Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976), and The Long Revolution
(1961). It is very complicated to make one firm and closed definition of culture so we will look
at Raymond Williams’s three broad categories of the definition. 1) It is a general process of
intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development. 2) It is a particular way of life, whether of the
people, of the period, a group or humanity in general. 3) It is the works and practices of
intellectual especially artistic activity. After these definitions of culture Williams came up with
his famous social definition of culture which says that “culture is a description of a particular
way of life which expresses certain values and meanings not only in art and learning but also in
institutions and ordinary behaviour” (from his famous book The Long Revolution, 1961). If we
compare Williams’s definition with Arnold’s, it is obvious that for Williams culture is a more
inclusive and wider ranging phenomenon. He attempts to link three ways of defining culture: the
way in which the intellectual and imaginative works are analysed in relation to particular
tradition and societies as well as in a relation to elements of the parts of life such as organisation
of production, structure of the family, structures of institutions important for social relationships,
and form of communications in a society. The Long Revolution was one of Williams's three most
important and most enduring works. This publication made a substantial contribution to the
production of modern cultural studies in general, and advanced his politics, joining culture and
democracy. The Long Revolution looks forward to the next decade and suggests that we are
living through a long revolution that is simultaneously economic, political, and cultural.

1
unkindled /ʌnˈkɪndld/ = not set alight or made to burn or shine; not aroused, made lively, or excited (Collins
English Dictionary).

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The point of Williams’s definition of culture is that it is ORDINARY. “Culture is ordinary in
every society and every mind”. It is something we perceive as common and usual in everyone
and everything that surrounds us. “Every human society has its own shape, its own purposes, its
own meanings. It expresses these in institutions, and in arts and learning. The making of a
society is the finding of common meanings and directions, and its growth in an active debate and
amendment under the pressures of experience, contact and discovery. To grow up in a certain
culture, to see the shape of that culture, and its models of change is to belong to a specific
culture. There are two significant senses of the word culture. The first one refers to the whole
way of life – that is the common meaning. The other one refers to the arts and learning along
with the special processes of discovery and creative effort”. According to Williams, there is a
complex relationship between religion, the arts, economics, and consumerism in contemporary
society. Williams insists on both senses equally and on the significance of their conjunction. This
is how Williams explains and understands culture in his essay “Culture is Ordinary”. He
mentions a village, a valley, a railway station, the cathedral, the cinema, a bus, etc. – which are
all the components of everyday behaviour, customs, practices and something that at the same
time constitutes and is an indispensable part of human culture. Take a cathedral for example. To
many Europeans the cathedral may be a place of worship. It may also be a place of historical
significance, a work of art, or a tourist attraction. This example clearly shows the complex
relation between religion, the arts, economics and consumerism in contemporary society.
Williams was interested in the discovery of absolute and universal laws and trends in social and
cultural development of a particular way of life or community. We draw conclusions not by
comparing and evaluating, but by studying particular meanings and values to better understand
social and cultural development of a particular way of life. According to Williams certain values
and attitudes, certain common understandings of the world are shared by different groups of
society. This structure of feelings enables communication by both verbal and nonverbal
mеssages (body language, music, …). A more recent theory suggests that culture is the
production and circulation of meaning. It is our responsibility to examine the centrality and
relative autonomy of the culture, and to analyze the spheres of its social life. The use of language
can help produce meaning. All social practices are organized through meanings, and must be
analyzed while taking cultural dimension into consideration. Raymond Williams wants to
establish the cultural grounding of ideas and their representations. He is interested in the whole
of the cultural experience and for him culture is a whole way of life: “material, spiritual,
intellectual”. Williams argued that in the modern world culture would be so complex that no
individual could ever grasp it in its entirety. Culture would therefore always be fragmented,
partly unknown and partly unrealized. The purpose of his cultural analysis is the discovery of
absolute and universal laws/trends in social and cultural development of a particular way of
life/community, not by comparing and evaluating, but by studying particular meanings and
values and their models of change, with the aim of better understanding that social and cultural
development of a particular way of life.

Cultural Values and Principles

In order to look in more detail into what culture is comprised of, we can consider cultural
categories and cultural principles. Cultural categories define and organize time, space, nature,
the sacred and society. For example, occupation, social class, caste, gender, ethnicity, and age
are examples of cultural categories. Others include social categories such as families, temporal

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categories, for example the distinction between work and leisure, and natural and sacred
categories that delineate between what is considered cleanliness and filth in different cultures.
Cultural principles allow things to be grouped into cultural categories, ranked and interrelated.
Values, ideals, norms and beliefs come into this category.
Cultural values are also an essential point for the understanding of culture and the functioning
and progress of a certain society and its members. Clyde Kluckhohn defines a value in the
following way: “A value is a conception explicit or implicit, distinctive of an individual or
characteristic of a group, of the desirable which influences the selection from available modes,
means and ends of action.” (1951: 395) His point is that values in themselves do not differ, only
the way members of different cultures prioritize among them. Drawing upon the findings of
Kluckhohn, Rokeach developed two sets of values. Values can be instrumental values that are
shared beliefs about how people should behave; they are the idealized modes of behaviour used
to attain end-states such as ambitious, capable, independent, intellectual, obedient, logical,
loving, etc. Or alternatively, they can be terminal values, for example desirable life goals or the
so-called idealized end-states such as a comfortable life, family security, a sense of
accomplishment, a world at peace, etc. Some expressed concern that this classification may not
sample all the values because the research is based on the findings from the western world.

Some Key Characteristics of Culture

1. Culture is manifested at different layers of depth
In analyzing the culture of a particular group or organization it is desirable to distinguish three
fundamental levels at which culture manifests itself:
(a) observable artifacts, (b) values, and (c) basic underlying assumptions.

Figure 1: The Levels of Culture & their Interaction (Schein 1984: 4)

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When one enters an organization one observes and feels its artifacts. This category includes
everything from the physical layout, the dress code, the manner in which people address each
other, the smell and feel of the place, its emotional intensity, and other phenomena, to the more
permanent archival manifestations such as company records, products, statements of philosophy,
and annual reports (Schein 1990: 111). This level [visible artifacts] of analysis is tricky because
the data are easy to obtain but hard to interpret. We can describe “how” a group constructs its
environment and “what” behaviour patterns are discernible among the members, but we often
cannot understand the underlying logic – “why” a group behaves the way it does.
To analyse why members behave the way they do, we often look for the values that govern
behaviour, which is the second level in Figure 1. But as values are hard to observe directly, it is
often necessary to infer them by interviewing key members of the organization or to content
analyze artifacts such as documents and charters. However, in identifying such values, we
usually note that they represent accurately only the manifest or espoused 2 values of a culture.
That is, they focus on what people say is the reason for their behaviour, what they ideally would
like those reasons to be, and what are often their rationalizations for their behaviour. Yet, the
underlying reasons for their behaviour remain concealed or unconscious.
To really understand a culture and to ascertain more completely the group’s values and overt
behaviour, it is imperative to delve into the underlying assumptions, which are typically
unconscious but which actually determine how group members perceive, think and feel. Such
assumptions are themselves learned responses that originated as espoused values. But, as a value
leads to a behaviour, and as that behaviour begins to solve the problem which prompted it in the
first place, the value is gradually transformed into an underlying assumption about how things
really are. As the assumption is increasingly taken for granted, it drops out of awareness. Taken-
for-granted assumptions are so powerful because they are less debatable and confrontable than
espoused values. For example, the notion that businesses should be profitable, that schools
should educate, or that medicine should prolong life are assumptions (Schein 1984: 3–4).

2. Culture affects behaviour and interpretations of behaviour

Hofstede (1991:8) makes the important point that although certain aspects of culture are
physically visible, their meaning is invisible, so that their cultural meaning lies precisely and
only in the way these practices are interpreted by the insiders. For example, in body language the
‘ring gesture’ (thumb and forefinger touching) may be interpreted as conveying agreement,
approval or acceptance in the USA, the UK and Canada, but as an insult or obscene gesture in
several Mediterranean countries. Similarly, choice of clothing can be interpreted differently by
different groups of people, in terms of indications of wealth, ostentation, appropriateness, and so
on (e.g. black clothes are appropriate for a funeral in Serbia, while in India mourners wear white
clothes, and in certain West African cultures the green colour is associated with death).

2
to espouse /ɪˈspaʊz, ɛˈspaʊz/ = adopt or support (a cause, belief, or way of life); approve of, take to one's heart,
receive enthusiastically/wholeheartedly, accept, welcome.

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 3. Culture can be differentiated from both universal human nature and unique individual
personality
Culture is learned, not inherited. It derives from one’s social environment, not from one’s genes.
Culture should be distinguished from human nature on one side, and from an individual’s
personality on the other (see Figure 2), although exactly where the borders lie between human
nature and culture, and between culture and personality, is a matter of discussion among social
scientists.

Figure 2: Three levels of uniqueness in human mental programming (Hofstede 1994: 6)

Human nature is what all human beings have in common: it represents the universal level in
one’s mental software. It is inherited with one’s genes; within the computer analogy it is the
‘operating system’ which determines one’s physical and basic psychological functioning. The
human ability to feel fear, anger, love, joy, sadness, the need to associate with others, to play and
exercise oneself, the facility to observe the environment and talk about it with other humans all
belong to this level of mental programming. However, what one does with these feelings, how
one expresses fear, joy, observations, and so on, is modified by culture. Human nature is not as
‘human’ as the term suggests, because certain aspects of it are shared with parts of the animal
world.
The personality of an individual, on the other hand, is her/his unique personal set of mental
programs which (s)he does not share with any other human being. It is based upon traits which
are partly inherited with the individual’s unique set of genes and partly learned. ‘Learned’
means: modified by the influence of collective programming (culture) as well as unique personal
experiences.
Cultural traits have often been attributed to heredity, because philosophers and other scholars in
the past did not know how to explain otherwise the remarkable stability of differences in culture
patterns among human groups. They underestimated the impact of learning from previous
generations and of teaching to a future generation what one has learned oneself. The role of
heredity is exaggerated in the pseudo-theories of race, which were responsible, among other
things, for the Holocaust organized by the Nazis during the Second World War. Racial and
ethnic strife is often justified by unfounded arguments of cultural superiority and inferiority
(Hofstede 1994: 5–6).

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 4. Culture influences biological processes
If we stop to consider it, the great majority of our conscious behaviour is acquired through
learning and interacting with other members of our culture. Even those responses to our purely
biological needs (e.g. eating, or coughing) are frequently influenced by our cultures. For
example, all people share a biological need for food. Unless a minimum number of calories is
consumed, starvation will occur. Therefore, all people eat. But what we eat, how often we eat,
how much we eat, with whom we eat, and according to what set of rules are regulated, at least in
part, by our culture (in the West people use cutlery, in the East some nations – like the Chinese
and the Japanese – eat with chopsticks, and some with fingers – like the Indians).
The effects of culturally produced ideas on our bodies and their natural process take many
different forms. For example, instances of voluntary control of pain reflexes are found in a
number of cultures throughout the world. The ethnographic examples are too numerous to cite,
but whether we are looking at Cheyenne men engaged in the Sun Dance ceremony, Fiji
firewalkers, or U.S. women practicing the Lamaze (psychoprophylactic) method of childbirth,
the principle is the same: people learn ideas from their cultures that when the experience of pain
is internalised it can actually be minimized. In other words, a component of culture (that is,
ideas) can channel or influence biologically based pain reflexes. (Ferraro 1998: 19–20)

5. Culture is associated with social groups (shared)

Culture is shared by at least two or more people, and of course real, live societies are always
larger than that. There is, in other words, no such thing as the culture of a hermit. If a solitary
individual thinks and behaves in a certain way, that thought or action is idiosyncratic, not
cultural. For an idea, a thing, or a behaviour to be considered cultural, it must be shared by some
type of social group or society (Ferraro 1998: 16). As almost everyone belongs to a number of
different groups and categories of people at the same time, people unavoidably carry several
layers of mental programming within themselves, corresponding to different levels of culture.
For example (Hofstede 1991: 10):
- a national level according to one’s country (or countries for people who migrated during
their lifetime);
- a regional and/or ethnic and/or religious and/or linguistic affiliation, as most nations are
composed of culturally different regions and/or ethnic and/or religious and/or language groups;
- a gender level, according to whether a person was born as a girl or as a boy;
- a generation level, which separates grandparents from parents from children;
- a role category, e.g. parent – son/daughter, teacher – student;
- a social class level, associated with educational opportunities and with a person’s occupation
or profession;
- for those who are employed, an organizational or corporate level according to the way
employees have been socialized by their work organization (organizational/corporate/team
culture).
So in this sense, everyone is simultaneously a member of several different cultural groups and
thus could be said to have multicultural membership.

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 6. Culture is both an individual construct and a social construct
Culture is as much an individual, psychological construct as it is a social construct. To some
extent, culture exists in each and every one of us individually as much as it exists as a global,
social construct. Individual differences in culture can be observed among people in the degree to
which they adopt and engage in the attitudes, values, beliefs, and behaviours that, by consensus,
constitute their culture. If you act in accordance with those values or behaviours, then that
culture resides in you; if you do not share those values or behaviours, then you do not share that
culture. While the norms of any culture should be relevant to all the people within that culture, it
is also true that those norms will be relevant in different degrees for different people. It is this
interesting blend of culture in anthropology and sociology as a macroconcept and in psychology
as an individual construct that makes understanding culture difficult but fascinating. Our failure
in the past to recognize the existence of individual differences in constructs and concepts of
culture has undoubtedly aided in the formation and maintenance of stereotypes (Matsumoto
1996: 18).

7. Culture is always both socially and psychologically distributed in a group, and so the
delineation of a culture’s features will always be fuzzy 3
Culture is a ‘fuzzy’ concept, in that group members are unlikely to share identical sets of
attitudes, beliefs and so on, but rather show ‘family resemblances’, with the result that there is no
absolute set of features that can distinguish definitively one cultural group from another.
The assumption that culture is uniformly distributed is unwarranted for two reasons: one
sociogenic (having to do with social groups and institutions), and the other psychogenic (having
to do with cognitive and affective processes characteristic of individuals). The first reason is a
corollary of the social complexity issue noted above: insofar as two individuals do not share the
same sociological location in a given population (the same class, religious, regional, or ethnic
backgrounds, for example), and insofar as these locations entail (sub)cultural differences, then
the two individuals cannot share all cultural content perfectly. This is the sociogenic reason for
the non-uniform distribution of culture. Culture is socially distributed within a population.
The second, psychogenic, reason culture is never perfectly shared by individuals in a population
(no matter how, sociologically, the population is defined) has to do with the ways in which
culture is to be found “in there”, inside the individual. Here we are, broadly speaking, in the
realm of psychodynamics, at least with respect to the ways and circumstances under which an
individual receives or learns cultural images or encodements. Because of disciplinary boundaries
and the epistemological blinders they often enforce, these sorts of generally psychological
concerns are considered off-limits for many social scientists. For this reason, even many culture
theorists have preferred to think of culture only as “out there”, in public and social constructions,
including symbols, that are wholly independent of mind – of cognition and affect. Other
scholars, especially from economics or international relations, prefer to ignore mind completely,
treating it as essentially a “black box” phenomenon. But by ignoring mind they do not in fact
escape broadly psychological issues; they merely end up relying on an unacknowledged, and
fairly primitive, psychology (Avruch 1998: 18–20).

3
fuzzy /ˈfʌzi/ = indistinct, vague, hazy, imprecise, inexact.

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 8. Culture has both universal (etic) and distinctive (emic) elements
Humans have largely overlapping biologies and live in fairly similar social structures and
physical environments, which create major similarities in the way they form cultures. But within
the framework of similarities there are differences. The same happens with language. Phonetics
deals with sounds that occur in all languages. Phonemics are sounds that occur in only one
language. The linguist Pike (1967) took the last two syllables of these terms and coined the
words “etics” for universal cultural elements and “emics” for the culture-specific, unique
elements.
Although some students of culture assume that every culture is unique and in some sense every
person in the world is unique, science deals with generalizations. The glory of science is seen in
such achievements as showing that the laws that govern the movements of planets and falling
apples are the same. Thus the issue is whether or not the emic elements of culture are of interest.
When the emic elements are local adaptations of etic elements, they are of great interest. For
example, all humans experience social distance from out-groups (an etic factor). That is, they
feel closer to their family and kin and to those whom they see as similar to them, than to those
whom they see as different. But the basis of social distance is often an emic attribute: in some
cultures, it is based only on tribe or race; in others it is based on combinations of religion, social
class, and nationality; in India, caste and ideas about ritual pollution are important. In sum, social
distance is etic; ritual pollution as a basis of social distance is emic. To summarize about emics
and etics, when we study cultures for their own sake, we may well focus on emic elements, and
when we compare cultures, we have to work with the etic cultural elements (Triandis 1994: 20).

9. Culture is learned
Culture is learned from the people you interact with as you are socialized. Watching how adults
react and talk to new babies is an excellent way to see the actual symbolic transmission of
culture among people. Two babies born at exactly the same time in two parts of the globe may be
taught to respond to physical and social stimuli in very different ways. For example, some babies
are taught to smile at strangers, whereas others are taught to smile only in very specific
circumstances. In the United States, most children are asked from a very early age to make
decisions about what they want to do and what they prefer; in many other cultures, a parent
would never ask a child what she or he wants to do but would simply tell the child what to do.
Culture is also taught by the explanations people receive for the natural and human events
around them. Parents tell children that a certain person is a good boy because ____________.
People from different cultures would complete the blank in contrasting ways. The people with
whom the children interact will praise and encourage particular kinds of behaviour (such as
crying or not crying, being quiet or being talkative). Certainly there are variations in what a child
is taught from family to family in any given culture. However, our interest is not in these
variations but in the similarities across most or all families that form the basis of a culture.
Because our specific interest is in the relationship between culture and interpersonal
communication, we focus on how cultures provide their members with a set of interpretations
that they then use as filters to make sense of messages and experiences (Lustig and Koester
1999: 31–2).

15
 10. Culture is subject to gradual change
Any anthropological account of the culture of any society is a type of snapshot view of one
particular time. Should the ethnographer return several years after completing a cultural study, he
or she would not find exactly the same situation, for there are no cultures that remain completely
static year after year. Early twentieth-century anthropologists – particularly those of the
structural/functional orientation – tended to deemphasize cultural dynamics by suggesting that
some societies were in a state of equilibrium in which the forces of change were negated by
those of cultural conservatism. Although small-scale, technologically simple, preliterate societies
tend to be more conservative (and, thus, change less rapidly) than modern, industrialized, highly
complex societies, it is now generally accepted that, to some degree, change is a constant feature
of all cultures.
Researchers of culture change recognize that cultural innovation (that is, the introduction of new
thoughts, norms, or material items) occurs as a result of both internal and external forces.
Mechanisms of change that operate within a given culture are called discovery and invention.
Despite the importance of discovery and invention, most innovations introduced into a culture
are the result of borrowing from other cultures. This process is known as cultural diffusion, the
spreading of cultural items from one culture to another. The importance of cultural borrowing
can be better understood if viewed in terms of economy of effort. That is, it is much easier to
borrow someone else’s invention or discovery than it is to discover or invent it all over again. In
fact, anthropologists generally agree that as much as 90 percent of all things, ideas, and
behavioural patterns found in any culture had their origins elsewhere. Individuals in every
culture, limited by background and time, get new ideas with far less effort if they borrow them.
Since so much cultural change is the result of diffusion, it deserves a closer examination.
Keeping in mind that cultural diffusion varies considerably from situation to situation, we can
identify certain regularities that will enable us to make some general statements that hold true for
all cultures.
First, cultural diffusion is a selective process. Whenever two cultures come into contact, each
does not accept everything indiscriminately from the other. If they did, the vast cultural
differences that exist today would have long since disappeared. Rather, items will be borrowed
from another culture only if they prove to be useful and/or compatible. Put another way, an
innovation is most likely to be diffused into a recipient culture if: (1) it is seen to be superior to
what already exists; (2) it is consistent with existing cultural patterns; (3) it is easily understood;
(4) it is able to be tested on an experimental basis; and (5) its benefits are clearly visible to a
relatively large number of people.
Second, cultural borrowing is a two-way process. Early researchers of change believed that
contact between “primitive” societies and “civilized” societies caused the former to accept traits
from the latter. This position was based on the assumption that the “inferior” primitive societies
had nothing to offer the “superior” civilized societies. Today, however, anthropologists would
reject such a position, for it has been found time and again that cultural traits are diffused in both
directions.
European contact with the American Indians is a case in point. Native Americans, to be certain,
have accepted a great deal from Europeans, but diffusion in the other direction has been
significant. For example, it has been estimated (Driver 1961: 584) that those crops that make up

16
nearly half of the world’s food supply were originally domesticated by American Indians. These
include corn, beans, and sweet potatoes.
Third, very infrequently are borrowed items ever transferred into the recipient culture in exactly
their original form. Rather, new ideas, objects, or techniques are usually reinterpreted and
reworked so that they can be integrated more effectively into the total configuration of the
recipient culture. Lowell Holmes has offered an illuminating example of how the form of a
particular innovation from Italy (pizza) has been modified after its incorporation into U.S.
culture. “Originally, this Italian pie was made with mozzarella or scamorza cheese, tomatoes,
highly spiced sausage, oregano spice, and a crust made of flour, water, olive oil and yeast.
Although this type of pizza is still found in most eastern cities, and in midwestern ones as well,
in many cases the dish has been reinterpreted to meet midwestern taste preferences for bland
food. Authentic Italian pizza in such states as Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, or the Dakotas
is often considered too spicy; therefore, it is possible to purchase in restaurants or in
supermarkets pizzas that are topped with American process cheese, have no oregano at all, and in
place of spiced sausage, hamburger or even tuna fish rounds out the Americanized version. In
many home recipes, the crust is made of biscuit mix. Although the Italians would hardly
recognize it, it still carries the name pizza and has become extremely popular.” (1971: 361–2).
Fourth, some cultural traits are more easily diffused than others. By and large, technological
innovations are more likely to be borrowed than are social patterns or belief systems, largely
because the usefulness of a particular technological trait can be recognized quickly. For example,
a man who walks five miles each day to work does not need much convincing to realize that an
automobile can get him to work much more quickly and with far less effort. It has proven to be
much more difficult, however, to convince a Muslim to become a Hindu or an American middle-
class businessperson to become a socialist.
It is important to understand that to some degree all cultures are constantly experiencing change.
The three basic components of culture (things, ideas, and behaviour patterns) can undergo
additions, deletions, or modifications. Some components die out, new ones are accepted, and
existing ones can be changed in some observable way. Although the pace of culture change
varies from society to society, when viewing cultures over time, there is nothing as constant as
change. The two most important results of this are that (1) any cultural environment today is not
exactly the same as it was last year or will be one year hence; (2) the very fact that culture can
and do change provides some measure of optimism that the cultural gap can eventually be
closed.

11. The various parts of a culture are all, to some degree, interrelated
Cultures should be thought of as integrated wholes – that is, cultures are coherent and logical
systems, the parts of which are interrelated to a certain degree. When we say that a culture is
integrated we are saying that its components are more than a random assortment of customs. It is,
rather, an organized system in which particular components may be related to other components.
If we can view cultures as integrated systems, we can begin to see how particular culture traits fit
into the integrated whole, and consequently how they tend to make sense within that context.
If, in fact, cultures are coherent systems, with their constituent parts interrelated with one
another, it follows logically that a change in one part of the system is likely to produce

17
concomitant changes in other parts of the system. The introduction of a single technological
innovation may set off a whole series of related changes. In other words, culture changes beget
other culture changes.
To illustrate, one has only to look at the far-reaching effects on culture of a single technological
innovation, which became widespread in the early 1950s – the TV set. This one single
technological addition to our material culture has had profound consequences on the nonmaterial
aspects of our culture, including our political, education, and religious systems, to mention only
three. For example, by 1960, the year of the first televised presidential debates in the U.S.,
television had brought the ideas, positions, speaking styles, and physical appearances of the
candidates directly into the living rooms of the majority of voters. Today political candidates,
because of the power of television, need to be as attentive to makeup, clothing, and nonverbal
gestures as they are to the substantive issues of the campaign. In formal education, one of the
many consequences of the widespread use of television has been to lower the age at which
children develop “reading readiness” as a direct result of such programs as “Sesame Street”.
Television has been described by various social commentators as both a blessing and a curse. Yet
however we might feel about its pluses and minuses, we can hardly deny that it has contributed
to profound changes in many cultural systems. And the reason for these changes is that cultures
tend to be integrated systems with a number of interconnected parts, so that a change in one part
of culture is likely to bring about changes in other parts (Ferraro 1998: 32–35).

12. Culture is a descriptive, not an evaluative concept

Sometimes people talk of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. Definitions associated with the former are
that culture is: “i) a state of high development in art and thought existing in a society and
represented at various levels in its members; ii) development and improvement of the mind or
body by education or training” (Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English). This
interpretation of culture is often linked with terms and concepts such as civilised, well educated,
refined, cultured, and is associated with the results of such refinement – a society’s art, literature,
music, and so on. However, our notion of culture is not something exclusive to certain members;
rather it relates to the whole of a society. Moreover, it is not value-laden. It is not that some
cultures are advanced and some backward, some more civilised and polite while others are
coarse and rude. Rather, they are similar or different to each other.

13. Culture is dynamic

Culture is dynamic and thus complex. Culture is fluid rather than static, which means that culture
changes all the time, every day, in subtle and tangible ways. Because humans communicate and
express their cultural systems in a variety of ways, it can be hard to pinpoint exactly what
cultural dynamics are at play. Consider, for example, a conversation about a person’s attitude or
feelings. In this type of conversation, people pay attention to (a) the words, or what is being said;
(b) the tone, or how the words are said; and (c) the visual behind the words, often called the body
language. All of these are aspects of culture that are interpreted differently depending on the
cultural context. Add multiple layers of culture to the conversation—such as time, power and
authority, emotion, age, gender, religion, nationality, and even previous intercultural
interactions—and communication at a cross-cultural level becomes complex and hard to manage.

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 14. Culture is systemic
In systems theory, systems are interrelated, interconnected parts that create a whole. There are
patterns of behaviour, deeply rooted structural systems, which are beneath the waterline. What
we see at the top of the iceberg are the behaviours; we do not see what contributes to those
behaviours. To address the system, one must be able to address the underlying patterns. These
patterns, because they are deeply embedded in the system, will take up significant effort, time,
and resources. Changes to the system are slow and gradual; visible changes may not appear until
months, or even years, later.
Because most people spend their time evaluating and finding solutions to an “event,” they revisit
the issues over and over again, with no positive and sustainable results. Understanding the
thoughts helps them recognize that the thought patterns, when combined and supported
(intentionally or not), are difficult to unravel. The systemic nature of the problem becomes more
complex and chaotic as time goes by and the issues are not addressed.
Imagine a tree as a metaphor for a cultural system—all the things that make up who you are.
The roots of a tree are essential for the survival of the tree. They carry the nutrients needed for
the growth of the tree and store nutrients for later feeding. Roots of trees are generally located in
the ground, not too deep from the surface. The roots are impacted by their surrounding, and
environmental factors contribute to their health and vitality. Just like the roots on a tree, cultural
systems have roots that are impacted by their surroundings. A culture’s rituals, traditions,
ceremonies, myths, and symbols provide it with the nutrients it needs to survive. Environmental
factors can change a tree by uprooting it or letting it die off, making space for new life in its
place. Similarly, environmental changes impact cultural systems, forcing it to adapt and change
to its surroundings or transition into death, creating new cultural stories that carry new life.
In similar ways, we can think about our cultural systems as part of a larger system. Some cultural
anthropologists would describe the cultural systems as “big C” (macroculture) and “little C”
(microculture). The macroculture refers to a larger cultural system, for example, Catholicism is
a culture that is not bounded by geography. Within the macroculture of Catholicism are smaller
units of culture called subcultures. Change is constant in each cultural system, and transitions,
renewal, and rebirth are endless cycles. As cultural shifts occur in the macro- and microcultures,
small and large, gradual and disruptive, the entire system learns to adapt in different ways.

15. Culture is symbolic

Symbols are both verbal and nonverbal in form within cultural systems, and they have a unique
way of linking human beings to each other. Humans create meaning between symbols and what
they represent; as a result, different interpretations of a symbol can occur in different cultural
contexts. Take, for example, a meeting of senior executives who need to make a decision about a
new service. This group of leaders has a team culture that orients itself toward a democratic
process: decision making is based on one vote from each member. Now imagine a similar group
of leaders with the same task but, this time, the group of leaders is comprised of Native
Americans. Leaders who are younger in the group ask their elders for advice. This is an example
of how cultural systems differ in their interpretation and expressions of culture. In some cultural
systems, voting is not an option. The symbol of a vote has different meanings and interpretations,
or simply may not even exist in any practical sense, depending on the cultural background.

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Culture and Related Terms
Culture and Nation
In our everyday language, people commonly treat culture and nation as equivalent terms.
Although some nations are in fact predominantly inhabited by one cultural group, most nations
contain multiple cultures within their boundaries. Nation is a political term referring to a
government and a set of formal and legal mechanisms that have been established to regulate the
political behaviour of its people. These regulations often encompass such aspects of a people as
how leaders are chosen, by what rules the leaders must govern, the laws of banking and
currency, the means to establish military groups, and the rules by which a legal system is
conducted. Foreign policies, for instance, are determined by a nation and not by a culture. The
culture, or cultures, that exist within the boundaries of a nation-state certainly influence the
regulations that a nation develops, but the term culture is not synonymous with nation.
The nation of Japan is often regarded as so homogeneous that the word Japanese is commonly
used to refer both to the nation and to the culture. Though the Yamato Japanese culture
overwhelmingly predominates within the nation of Japan, there are other cultures living there.
These groups include the Ainu, an indigenous group with their own culture, religion, and
language; mainly from Okinawa, Korea, and China; and more recent immigrants also living
there. The United States is an excellent example of a nation that has several major cultural
groups living within its geographical boundaries; European Americans, African Americans,
Native Americans, Latinos, and various Asian American cultures are all represented in the
United States. All the members of these different cultural groups are citizens of the nation of the
United States.

National cultures
However, the concept that nations have distinctive cultures is unproblematically accepted in
cross-cultural research designs. National cultures distinguish similar people, institutions and
organizations in different countries. This approach to assigning to the nation a particular culture
is not universally shared, and this way of thinking about culture is relatively recent in origin. A
rather different perspective is that cultures are interconnected and exchange materials, thus no
culture is due to the authorship of one group of people. Rather, ‘cultures need to be studied in all
their plurality and particular historicity, including their interconnectedness’. According to
professor and theorist Miroslav Hroch, in order to successfully build a nation three central
features are required: 1) a ‘memory’ of some common past, treated as ‘destiny’ of the group – or
at least of its core constituents; 2) a density of linguistic or cultural ties enabling a higher degree
of social communication within the group; 3) a conception of the equality of all members of the
group organised as a civil society.
The concept of national cultures has been challenged and the reasons for that are the following.
In his text Nation and Narration (1990), critical theorist and scholar Homi K. Bhabha argues that
the notion of a static national culture that can be easily measured is flawed, since much of what
constitutes the nation is at the level of discourse rather than practice. Classical antiquity had
republics, municipal kingdoms, confederations of local republics and empires, yet it can hardly
be said to have had nations; ancient Egypt and China were in no way nations. States in the

20
precapitalist period were multinational and the boundaries were dictated by dynastic marriages,
wars, and geographic convenience. This situation changed with the advent of capitalism which
fostered notions of individual citizenship and distinctions between different social classes. The
ruling classes were pressed to legitimate their position of power and did so by inventing symbols
that represented the common culture of the people in the form of a common language, ancestry,
and territory. As a consequence of this process, nations were ‘invented’ or ‘imagined’.
Therefore, nation and national are highly contested concepts. Alternative accounts of nation and
the national draw on a range of theoretical and conceptual ideas relating to globalisation and
multiculturalism and are serving to undermine the notion of cohesive, homogeneous, national
cultures.

Culture and Race

Race commonly refers to genetic or biologically based similarities among people, which are
distinguishable and unique and function to mark or separate groups of people from one another.
However, race is less a biological term than a political or social one. Though racial categories are
inexact as a classification system, it is generally agreed that race is a more all-encompassing term
than either culture or nation. Not all Caucasian people, for example, are part of the same culture
or nation. Many western European countries principally include people from the Caucasian race.
Similarly, among Caucasian people there are definite differences in culture. Consider the cultural
differences among the primarily Caucasian countries of Great Britain, Norway, and Germany to
understand the distinction between culture and race.
Sometimes race and culture do seem to work hand in hand to create visible and important
distinctions among groups within a larger society; and sometimes race plays a part in
establishing separate cultural groups. An excellent example of the interplay of culture and race is
in the history of African American people in the United States. Although race may have been
used initially to set African Americans apart from Caucasian Americans, African American
culture provides a strong and unique source of identity to members of the black race in the
United States. Scholars now acknowledge that African American culture, with its roots in
traditional African cultures, is separate and unique and has developed its own set of cultural
patterns. Although a person from Nigeria and an African American are both from the same race,
they are from distinct cultures. Similarly, not all black U.S. Americans are part of the African
American culture, since many have a primary cultural identification with cultures in the
Caribbean, South America, or Africa.
Race can, however, form the basis for prejudicial communication that can be a major obstacle to
intercultural communication, and categorization of people by race has been the basis of
systematic discrimination and oppression of people of colour.

Culture and Ethnicity

Ethnic group is another term often used interchangeably with culture. Ethnicity is actually a term
that is used to refer to a wide variety of groups who might share a language, historical origins,
religion, identification with a common nation - state, or cultural system. The nature of the
relationship of a group’s ethnicity to its culture will vary greatly depending on a number of other
important characteristics. In some cases, the identification of ethnicity may coincide more

21
completely with culture. For example, in the former Yugoslavia, there were at least three major
ethnic groups – Slovenians, Croatians, and Serbs – each with its own language and distinct
culture. It is also possible for members of an ethnic group to be part of many different cultures
and/or nations. For instance, Jewish people share a common ethnic identification, even though
they belong to widely varying cultures and are citizens of many different nations.

Culture, Subculture, Coculture, and Counterculture

Subculture is also a term sometimes used to refer to racial and ethnic minority groups that share
both a common nation-state with other cultures and some aspects of the larger culture. Often, for
example, Indians, Chinese, Arabs, Asian British, Black British, and other ethnic groups are
referred to as subcultures within the United Kingdom. The term, however, has connotations that
are problematic, because it suggests subordination to the larger European British culture.
Similarly, the term coculture is occasionally employed in an effort to avoid the implication of a
hierarchical relationship between the European British culture and these other important cultural
groups that form the mosaic of the United Kingdom. This term, too, is problematic because
coculture suggests, for instance, that there is a single overarching culture in the United Kingdom,
implicitly giving undue prominence to the European British cultural group. In our shrinking and
interdependent world, most cultures must coexist alongside other cultures, and all these groups
of people are cultures in their own right. There are also many subcultures and countercultures
that are not linked to ethnicity, but to differences in interest, behaviours or beliefs – like Teddy
boys, hippies, Mods, Rastas, punks, skinheads, scallies, and moshers in the UK – who all belong
to the youth subculture (Lustig and Koester 1999: 33–36).

Culture and Identity

Culture is not the same as identity. Identities consist of people’s answers to the question: Where
do I belong? They are based on mutual images and stereotypes and on emotions linked to the
outer layers of the onion, but not to values. Populations that fight each other on the basis of their
different “felt” identities may very well share the same values. Examples are the linguistic
regions in Belgium, the religions in Northern Ireland, and tribal groups in Africa. A shared
identity needs a shared Other: at home, the Brits feel very different from other Europeans, such
as Belgians and Germans; in Asia or the United States, they all feel like Europeans (Hofstede
2001: 10).

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 Typology and Classification of Culture

The very concept of culture has become more complex in the twenty-first century, due to many
reasons, among others and above all globalization and multiculturalism. Cultures – especially
national cultures – are no longer cohesive and/or homogeneous, but mostly have shifting nature
and are becoming interconnected. Twenty-first century identities no longer presuppose
continuous cultures or traditions – on the contrary, individuals and groups the world over
improvise local performances from (re)collected pasts, drawing on foreign media, symbols and
languages.

Classification and Typology

There are different factors that affect the typology of culture and the first one of them is the
context in which cultures exist. Therefore, we have high culture, folk culture, mass culture and
popular culture with reference to context. There are also references to national and regional
cultures, whether at the sub-national or supranational levels. Gay culture, lesbian culture, black
culture, ethnic cultures, diasporic cultures, and transitional cultures relate to forms of difference
that operate both within nations and across the relations between them. The strong association
between the concept of culture and the notion of lifestyles has generated another range of
extensions – from subcultures and counter-cultures to club, street and drug cultures. And finally,
body culture, consumer culture, material culture, sports culture, media culture and visual culture
similarly point to the proliferation of usage of word culture (Raymond Williams, 2005: 63, 64).

High vs. Low Context Cultures (E.T. Hall)

This classification of culture significant for cross-cultural research was introduced by Edward
Twitchell Hall, a famous anthropologist, a cross-cultural researcher and a founding father of
intercultural communication, in his book Beyond Culture (1976). His idea was that each culture
belongs either to high context cultures or low context cultures. In a high context culture there
are the so called “in-groups” (an “in-group” is a group of people that have similar experiences
and expectations, from which inferences are drawn). In a high context culture there is no need for
long messages, metaphors are used, history and tradition are respected, information lies in the
context, so it need not be verbalised. Its characteristics are also non-verbal communication,
reserved reactions, strong bonds and flexible time. Asian, African, Arabic, central European and
Latin American cultures are generally considered to be high-context cultures.
In a low context culture there are no in-groups, everything is clearly said, the topic is handled
straightforwardly and nothing is left for the culture to explain. It is more direct and people focus
on verbal communication. People from a low context culture are rather task-oriented. This

23
culture is present in the UK, the U.S. and most Western European countries (Germany,
Scandinavia, Switzerland, etc.).

Monochronic vs. Polychronic Cultures (E.T. Hall)

Hall also distinguished between monochronic (e.g. Americans) and polychronic (e.g. French)
cultures. This concept refers to the way in which people perceive time, their attitude to it, and
how they succeed in accomplishing tasks over some period of time. In monochronic cultures
people tend to do only one thing at a time, they plan everything thoroughly, and always organize
their time. Monochronic cultures see time as being divided into fixed elements (seconds,
minutes, hours) – temporal blocks that can be organized, quantified and scheduled.
In polychronic cultures people do more things at once, do not organize everything and perceive
time as a whole unit. Exceptionally, some cultures employ both time systems.
Monochronic culture VS. Polychronic culture
- only one thing at a time - more things at the same time
- plan everything thoroughly - do not organize everything
- time divided into fixed elements - see time as a whole unit
- American - French
Japanese, Hawaiian (m+p)

Dimensions of Culture (Trompenaars)

Another classification was introduced by Fons Trompenaars, a Dutch author in the field of cross-
cultural communication. According to him, there are seven dimensions in line with which
cultures can be classified and those are the following:
Universalism vs. Particularism – following rules or creating relationships and believing in
particular cases and exceptions.
Individualism vs. Collectivism – functioning in groups or as an individual.
Neutral vs. Affective – a difference between controlling one’s emotions in a professional way
or showing them and becoming involved.
Specific vs. Diffuse – a dimension which puts up the question about responsibility that can be
specifically assigned or diffusely accepted. Specific cultures stick to facts and data relating to the
case while diffuse cultures use general feelings.
Achievement vs. Ascription – what you do is important and brings status or who you are and
what your contacts are.
Sequential vs. Synchronic – there is a difference between doing things one by one, step by step
or doing things all at the same time.
Internal vs. External control – controlling and directing one’s environment or being influenced
by it and coordinating it.

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Theories of Culture

Scientific Theory
In his book A Scientific Theory of Culture and Other Essay, Polish anthropologist, sociologist
and ethnographer Bronislav Malinowski (1884–1942), who became a British citizen in 1931,
then worked at Yale University from 1939 onwards, shows that anthropology is a science closely
connected to culture and that the real meeting ground of all branches of anthropology
(prehistory, folklore, physical anthropology and cultural anthropology) is the scientific study of
culture. The task of a prehistorian and archeologist is to reconstruct the reality of a past culture
from partial evidence confined to material remnants. The ethnologist uses the evidence of
present-day primitive and more advanced cultures in order to reconstruct human history in terms
of either evolution or diffusion. Thus, the scientific quota in all anthropological work consists in
the theory of culture, with reference to the method of observation in the field. If anthropology
can contribute towards a more scientific outlook on its legitimate subject matter, i.e. culture, it
will render an indispensable service to other humanities. Culture, as the widest context of human
behaviour, is as important to the psychologist as to the social student, to the historian, as to the
linguist. The linguistics of future, especially as regarding the science of meaning, will become
the study of language in the context of culture. Economics, as a means of exchange and
production, may find it useful in the future not to consider economic man completely detached
from other pursuits and considerations, but to base its principles and arguments on the study of
man as he really is, moving in the complex, many-dimensional medium of cultural interests.

Functional(ist) Theory
Culture can also be understood instrumentally and functionally. Culture is a handiwork of man
and a medium through which he achieves his ends – a medium which allows him to live, to
establish a standard of safety, comfort, and prosperity; a medium which gives him power and
allows him to create goods and values beyond his animal, organic endowment. Culture, in all this
and through all this, must be understood as a means to an end. Every differential phase in any
human activity occurs with the incidence of elements of material culture (material objects,
artifacts, consumers’ goods). Even activities such as breathing, digestion, circulation of blood
happen within the artificial environment of culturally determined conditions. There is a constant
interaction between the organism and the secondary milieu in which it exists, i.e. culture. This
represents a form of culture. Culture, however, also includes elements which remain intangible,
inaccessible to direct observation, and where neither form nor function is very evident (ideas and
values, interests and beliefs; motive in folk tales and dogmatic conceptions in the analysis of
magic or religion). This theory (Functionalism) has been critiqued by many sociologists for its
neglect of the often negative implications of social order, because it does not encourage people to
take an active role in changing their social environment, even when such change may benefit
them.

25
 Evolutionary Theory
British evolutionary biologist, ethologist4 and writer Richard Dawkins (1941-) hypothesized that living
beings are mere vehicles for the transmission of the genetic information they bear. In his book
The Selfish Gene (1976), he also postulated the existence of a unit of cultural transmission,
analogous to the gene, which he termed meme. Memes (tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes
fashions, ways of making pots or arches, etc.) are replicators, and the mechanism by which they
produce copies of themselves is imitation. Sociobiology wants to close the gap between social
and natural sciences. Therefore, sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists consider human
behaviour to be the consequence of the interaction of evolved physiological and psychological
variables with the natural environment. They also believe that human culture is biologically
determined by the evolutionary history of the species. However, these claims are tempered by
cultural selectionism approach (gene cultural co-evolution). Memetics is only a subcategory
within cultural selectionism, differing from mainstream coevolutionism in its insistence on
replication as the mechanism of cultural inheritance. If cultural units replicate as genes then they
are defined units, which is a rather strong claim to make. That is why it is challenged by
anthropologists who believe culture constitutes a continuum so any units within it are arbitrary
constructs of observers. Replication is the exception rather than the rule in processes of cultural
transmission -- the rule being almost always transformation (example: varying versions of
rumours). Therefore, mutation is the default case in processes of cultural diffusion.

Function and Purpose of Culture

“The main purpose of culture is to serve human biological, psychological and social needs.”
(Bronislav Malinowski)
Most of the biological needs are rather obvious: nutrition, shelter, protection from enemies,
maintenance of health and – if the society is to persist – biological reproduction. Humans also
have psychological and social needs, such as the needs for love and affection, for security, for
self-expression and for the sense of belonging. The purpose of culture is to fulfill these needs.
Some parts of culture meet individual needs directly, such as knowledge of how to acquire food
or make shelter. Other aspects function to raise and socialize new generations of group members,
such as educational practices and family life. Still others encourage people to adhere to group
values and rules that make cooperation possible, such as religious beliefs and practices and
creative arts. As well as culture helps humans meet their needs it also creates needs that humans
tend to meet. Social and economic conditions under which people live make them need some
things that people of other places and times did not need. Some of the functions of culture are
also: - integration (shared interpretations / meanings), which means that culture carries with it a
framework of meaning and interpretation that enables participants to integrate themselves and
their activities into a meaningful whole; - then there is commitment (emotional "reasons")
meaning that culture provides reasons for participants to be willing to devote energy and loyalty
to the organization; - and, finally, control in the sense that culture legitimates the structure of
authority and organization that control activities within the organization.

4
Ethology is the scientific and objective study of animal behaviour.

26
The Five C’s of Culture = What people need to know about another culture
- Cultural knowledge: Facts, events, holidays, etiquette (monarchy in the UK; difference
between Catholic and Orthodox Christmas)
- Cultural behaviour: Communication, leadership, organisation, social behaviour (Japanese
bow when they greet each other, Indians press palms together in front of the chest, we
kiss 3x, French twice, Brits shake hands)
- Cultural values and attitudes: Values, fears, space, time, motivation (strong influence of
Islam on Muslims)
- Cultural style: Personal cultural style profile (the way people dress, apply make-up or
not)
- Cultural adaptation: Personal qualities, do’s and don’ts (avoid personal topics when
talking to a Brit)

Cultural diversity
The concept of diversity is based on individual acceptance and respect. It is an understanding
that individuals are unique and different. Cultural diversity includes but is not limited to
language, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, dress, socio-economic status, age, physical
ability, family and community responsibilities, and political, religious and other beliefs.

What is cultural knowledge?

One of the fundamental questions that continue to preoccupy theorists in foreign language
learning is WHAT KIND OF KNOWLEDGE IS REQUIRED FOR UNDERSTANDING
ANOTHER CULTURE? Knowledge of a culture varies and there is no consensus, as it is
entirely individual. We can read somewhere that all British people enjoy the traditional breakfast
of eggs and bacon every morning, or we can learn phrases such as “What a lovely day!” as a
conversation opener. Contact with another culture involves not only the acquisition of basic
information but a complex process for the individual. Everyone needs to construct their own map
of knowledge, recognising that any such map will need to be modified as the cultural landscape
shifts and evolves. Moreover, the drawing of the map will vary according to the individual:
someone who is born into a culture and grows up in it will necessarily have a different
perspective from someone who learns about that culture in their adult life.

27
 The Iceberg Metaphor and the Onion Model of Culture

It is the essence of human nature to move frequently, primarily in search of resources. Not so
seldom did those migrations cause numerous conflicts, which was all due to the cultural
differences between the nations/groups involved. However, things have changed throughout the
course of history and people are nowadays more conscious of the diversity between nations and
cultures. In the time of globalisation we need to interact with people from all parts of the globe
and it is crucial for an individual to acquire basic social skills in order to go up in the world,
including one’s career, social status, etc. And that is why only when we learn about culture in
general, can we successfully accomplish this acquisition. Therefore, some scientists have
developed certain metaphors of culture that should help us understand better and visualise what
culture really is.

The Iceberg Metaphor

The first one is the iceberg metaphor developed in 1976 by Edward T. Hall, who was an
American anthropologist and cross-cultural researcher. His metaphor shows a cruise ship sailing
close to an iceberg for a look at this foreign territory. Part of the iceberg is immediately visible;
part of it emerges and submerges with the waves, and its foundations go deep beneath the
surface. Hall distinguished three basic parts of this cultural iceberg; the part above, at and below
the water line.
 Above the water line: Aspects that are over, explicit and are directly taught to us. This
includes written explanations, as well as those thousands of skills and information
conveyed through formal lessons, such as manners or computing long division or baking
bread. Also above water are the tangible aspects: from the "cultural markers" tourists
seek out such as French bread or Guatemalan weaving, to the conformity in how people
dress, the way they pronounce the letter "R", how they season their food, etc.
 At the water line: or the transition zone. That is where the cultural observer has to be
more alert: "now you see it now you don't", the area where implicit understandings
become talked about, explained – mystical experiences are codified into a creed; the area
where official explanations and teachings become irrational, contradictory, inexplicable –
where theology becomes faith.
 Below the water line: "Hidden" culture: the habits, assumptions, understandings, values,
judgments etc. that we know but do not or cannot articulate. Usually these aspects are not
taught directly. Think about mealtime, for example, and the order you eat foods at dinner:
Do you end with dessert? With a pickle? With tea? Nuts and cheese? Just have one
course with no concluding dish? Or, in these modern times, do you dispense with a sit-
down meal altogether? Or consider how you know if someone is treating you in a

28
 friendly manner: do they shake hands? Or do you keep a respectful distance with
downcast eyes? Does someone leap up and hug you? Do they address you by your full
name? These sorts of daily rules are learned by osmosis – you may know what tastes
"right" or when you're treated "right", but because these judgments are under-the-
waterline, it usually doesn't occur to you to question or explain those feelings.

1 The Culture Iceberg

The Culture Onion Model

The second model is the culture onion which metaphorically represents the various layers and
levels of culture that are integral to every person or society as the layers of an onion. It was Geert
Hofstede who developed this model. He is an influential Dutch social psychologist, who
conducted a pioneering study of culture across modern nations. He wrote numerous books:
Culture’s Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviours, Institutions, and Organizations across
Nations (2001); Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind (1991/2010); Exploring
Culture: Exercises, Stories and Synthetic Cultures (2002); and Masculinity and Femininity: The
Taboo Dimension of National Cultures (1998).
He developed the concept of Mental Programming: “Human behaviour is predictable to some
extent – each person carries a certain amount of mental programming that is stable over time.
Mental programs can be found at individual, collective and universal level.” and he also defined
culture as “the collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the member of one group
of people from another group of people.”

29
Hofstede’s onion model makes a distinction between two basic layers: Values and Practices.
Values represent the core of culture and the core isn’t moving a lot. It mostly remains the same.
Therefore, it is still interesting to learn about things from history. Even if something seems to be
outdated, it can nevertheless subconsciously play a role in a modern society. Values are defined
by Hofstede as preferences for one state of affairs over others to which strong emotions are
attached (bad vs. good, dirty vs. clean, moral vs. Immoral, etc.). Values, which are invisible, are
programmed early in our lives and are non-rational, they show what people actually desire in
comparison to what they think they ought to desire. According to Hofstede, the cultural
differences are commonly found at this level.
Around the core we can find Practices
which can be divided into three layers:
Symbols, Heroes and Rituals. All three
layers can be trained and learned through
practices.
The first layer around the core is described
as Rituals. These can be social and
religious ceremonies, ways of greeting
(e.g. Germans like to shake hands often,
Malay tenderly touch the fingertips and
then point to the heart, etc.), the way of
personal hygiene, the way people relate to
their work, etc. Because this layer is the
closest to the core, it rarely changes.
The second layer are the Heroes. A hero is
a person, either dead or alive, imagined or
real, who plays an important role in a specific culture and it is a role model for the people of one
culture (for instance, the biggest hero in Serbia is Novak Djokovic, but it can also be a national
hero, a scientist, a model, etc.)
The third layer is about the Symbols. Those can be words, gestures, dressing code, objects, art,
in other words, everything that is tangible and visible to an observer. Modern symbols are BMW,
Apple or Louis Vuitton. They usually move according to the momentary fashion.

Eugene Bunkowske’s “Cultural Onion Diagram” is the diagram that Eugene Bunkowske
developed during his early years as Graduate Professor of Biblical Missiology at Concordia
Theological Seminary. According to Bunkowske, the culture of each person has seven physical,
mental and spiritual layers that are used in organising a certain person’s reality and life. These
layers are holistic and integrated as they operate back and forth the core to the outside of the
onion and vice versa.
1. Artifacts are the physical characteristics of a person, the things or objects that are
connected with that person. Artifacts are what people collect.
2. Behaviours are one’s actions, in other words, what and how they do it.
3. Feelings are the emotional evaluations and conclusions about the experiences of
everyday life on a scale of, for instance: calm to angry, happy to sad, and love to hate.
30
 4. Values are mental evaluations and
conclusions about the experiences
of everyday life on a scale of good
to bad.
5. Beliefs are mental evaluations and
conclusions about the experiences
of everyday life on a scale of true
to false.
6. Worldview is the organised
arrangement, the managing
perspective, the internal gyro 5 at
the centre of human and societal
reality. Worldview provides a
mental map of what is understood
to be real.
7. Ultimate Allegiance is the beating heart, the starting point, the trigger and grounding
reality that gives basic direction, cohesion and structure to the underlying stories, mental
mappings, meta-narratives and perspectives in a person’s worldview.

Layers and scales

The outer layers of the cultural onion, artifacts and behaviours, are immediately apparent and
accessible. In-depth linkages are only available as credible connections are made with the core
layers of worldview and ultimate allegiance in a person’s culture. Developing this kind of in-
depth relationships normally takes a good deal of time and effort.

5
An abbreviation for gyroscope, an orientation-stabilising device.

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Layers and levels
There are three basic levels in which layers are divided:
1. Foundational level is the starting point for everything, the deepest and the most hidden
level of culture- therefore it isn’t immediately available for analysis and evaluations. It’s
the mental map, the meta-narrative and the basis for thinking that organizes a society’s
entire perspective on reality. This level supplies an understanding of how we think the
world should really be.
2. Evaluating level provides an automatic system for evaluating, examining, judging, and
drawing. It consists of all the conclusions about the experiences of life. Here, ideas are
measured against the foundational mental mapping in order to see if they’re true, good or
to be enjoyed. Evaluating level provides secondary programmed-mapping patterns that
reflexively examine and negotiate important decisions and conclusions in life.
3. Actualizing level receives the perceived realities and the evaluations concerning those
perceived realities from the internal operations of the culture, makes appropriate choices
on the basis of those perceived realities and responds to those choices with a life of
activities in the external world, acts on fundamental mental mappings and the perceptions
about the reality, responds to these mental mappings and perceived realities by
actualizing them and it acts out the choices that people make when they interact with
God, each other and
with the world in
general.

All of these processes of grounding, managing, evaluating and acting out of perceived reality
happen in a step-by-step, back-and-forth progression, from the foundational inner-core layers of
culture to the actualizing exterior layers of culture, from ultimate allegiance to artifacts. When
necessary, the process can move back again to the inner layers of worldview and ultimate
allegiance for re-formation, reinterpretation or conformation and more complete integration.

32
 Cultural Values: Studies and Models

The study of basic human values by psychologists is not new. Probably the best-known theory of
basic values in psychology is Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs,” which dates from the
early 1940s, a motivational theory in psychology comprising a five-tier model of human needs,
often depicted as hierarchical levels within a pyramid. Maslow stated that human motivation is
based on people seeking fulfillment and change through personal growth. Self-actualized people
are those who are fulfilled and doing all they are capable of. From the bottom of the hierarchy
upwards, the needs are: physiological, safety, love and belonging, esteem and self-actualization.

Needs lower down in the hierarchy must be satisfied before individuals can attend to needs
higher up. This five-stage model can be divided into deficiency needs and growth needs. The
first four levels are often referred to as deficiency needs (D-needs), and the top level is known as
growth or being needs (B-needs). Later on, Maslow's five-stage model was expanded to include
cognitive (knowledge and understanding, curiosity, exploration, need for meaning and
predictability), aesthetic (appreciation and search for beauty, balance, form) and transcendence (a
person is motivated by values which transcend beyond the personal self) needs.

33
Since then, the study of values has been growing, in both volume and empirical quality of
research, not only in psychology but also in other scientific disciplines. From a scientific
perspective, values refer to orientations towards what is considered desirable and preferable by
social actors. Clyde Kluckhohn provides a broader definition describing a value as "a
conception explicit or implicit, distinctive of an individual or characteristic of a group, of the
desirable which influences the selection from available modes, means and ends of action."
(Values and Value-Orientations in the Theory of Action: An Exploration in Definition and
Classification, 1951: 395). The study of societal values has a long history in sociology and
anthropology, whereas individual values have been similarly long investigated in psychology.
The cross-cultural study of both societal and individual values is relatively recent.
Many authors have been interested in this particular topic and have examined human values and
value orientations. Clyde Kluckhohn examined the structure of human values at the “etic” level
(i.e. universal cultural elements; whereas “emic” refers to personal behaviour or a belief). He
assumed that basic values depend on a culture’s conception of the ultimate nature of things and
his typology was represented by three clusters of dichotomies:
1. Man towards nature (e.g. evil - good);
2. Man towards man (e.g. individual - group);
3. Both nature and man (e.g. quality - quantity).
However, the empirical problem of determining the specific value emphasis of a culture
remained unresolved.
On the basis of the classification of values proposed by Clyde Kluckhohn, Florence Rockwood
Kluckhohn and Fred L. Strodtbeck carried out a study of variations of value orientations
(Variations in Value Orientations, 1961) with individuals from five rural and cultural
communities of the American Southwest. Their major assumption was that value orientations
vary from culture to culture in the ranking patterns of component parts. Five dimensions were
singled out as the important ones:
1. Human nature orientation (good, evil, good-and-evil, mutable, immutable);
2. Man-nature(-supernature) orientation (subjugation to nature; harmony with nature;
mastery over nature);
3. Time orientation (past, present, future);
4. Activity orientation (being; being-in-becoming; doing);
5. Relational orientation (lineal, collateral, individual).
This study showed that some general characterisations of cultural groups were possible using
standard value measures but it also had some drawbacks: it imposed a priori grouping on the
results; it was far removed from the "conception of the desirable"; its method proved to be
abstract for most respondents. For that reason more specific value instruments have been
developed. The most famous and widely used is the Rokeach Values Survey (RVS) which
combines the practical requirements of developing short, easy to administer instruments with the
logic of survey research. (Rokeach in Zavalloni. Values. 1980) Rokeach developed two sets of
18 values: terminal values – defined as idealised end-states of existence (e.g. equality, salvation
etc.) and instrumental values – idealised modes of behaviour used to attain the end-states (e.g.

34
courageous, polite etc.). Some authors highlighted that, given its Western origin, RVS may not
sample the whole range of significant human values. Extending the Rokeach survey, Schwartz
and Bilsky used a statistical technique called “smallest space analysis” and showed that seven
out of eight previously defined motivational domains of values emerged. The task their subjects
from Israel and Germany had to perform was to rate the importance of the 36 Rokeach values as
guiding principles in their lives. Thus, they proved that this study was not biased towards
western values.
The study of Geert Hofstede was criticized for the same reason. Geert Hofstede, an influential
Dutch social psychologist who worked for a major international corporation IBM, generated
probably the most influential work in this field. Hofstede administered about 117 000 attitude
questionnaires in two survey cycles (1967- 69 and 1971-73) to employees in IBM subsidiaries in
71 different countries and realized that he could classify them along six dimensions: Power
Distance (PD), Uncertainty Avoidance (UA), Individualism / Collectivism (IND), Masculinity /
Femininity (MAS), Long-Term / Short-Term Orientation (LTO), and Indulgence / Restraint
(IND).
The group of researchers describing themselves as the Chinese Culture Connection carried out
a value survey by asking their subjects from China (100 university students in each of 23
national cultures) to list values of crucial importance to their culture. Their survey revealed that
three out of four factors corresponded to Hofstede’s results.

Shalom H. Schwartz
Another author who is highly significant in this field of research is Shalom H. Schwartz, a social
psychologist and a cross-cultural researcher, whose study represents a refinement rather than
contradiction of Hofstede’s findings. However, Schwartz highlights that his approach differs
from other well-known theories of cultural dimensions conceptually and empirically. His
framework is theoretically driven, more comprehensive with more recent data and the samples
are obtained across more diverse regions (data from 75 countries). The Schwartz Value Survey
(SVS) includes 57 value items and the findings are presented in his book Cultural Value
Orientations: Nature and Implications of National Differences (2008).
According to Schwartz, value emphases express conceptions of what is good and desirable, the
cultural ideals. Cultural value orientations represent and specify “the ways people are expected to
think, feel and act in order for society to run smoothly.” He stresses that these orientations are
characteristic of cultures, not individuals. Shalom Schwartz defines culture as “a latent
hypothetical variable that we can measure only through its manifestations. Culture is outside the
individual. It is not located in the minds and actions of individual people. Rather, it refers to the
press to which individuals are exposed by virtue of living in particular social systems." This
press refers to the primes, demands and expectations that individuals encounter more or less in
their daily life (e.g. expectations to memorise or to question in schools etc.). Manifestations of
the underlying culture find expression in meanings, beliefs, practices, symbols, norms and values
prevalent among people in a society. When researchers try to identify culture by using different
types of manifestations, they usually seek these underlying value emphases.

35
Basic, Universal Human Values
Schwartz reasoned that since values are motivational goals, basic human values might be derived
by considering the most basic needs of human beings, which he divides into three fundamental
categories: our biological needs as individuals, our need to coordinate our actions with others,
and the need of groups to survive and flourish. By considering these needs more or less a priori,
Schwartz derived the following set of ten basic values. Each basic value is described in terms of
its motivational goal, while a set of more specific values that express the basic value is given in
parentheses after each description.
1. Benevolence: Preservation and enhancement of the people with whom one is in frequent
personal contact [meaning especially family]. (helpful, honest, forgiving, responsible,
true friendship, mature love)
2. Universalism: Understanding, appreciation, tolerance, and protection for the welfare of
all people and for nature. (broadminded, social justice, equality, world at peace, world of
beauty, unity with nature, wisdom, protecting the environment)
3. Self-Direction: Independent thought and action—choosing, creating, exploring.
(creativity, freedom, choosing own goals, curious, independent)
4. Security: Safety, harmony, and stability of society, of relationships, and of self. (social
order, family security, national security, clean, reciprocation of favors, healthy, sense of
belonging)
5. Conformity: Restraint of actions, inclinations, and impulses likely to upset or harm
others and violate expectations or norms. (obedient, self-discipline, politeness, honoring
parents and elders)
6. Hedonism: Pleasure or sensuous gratification for oneself. (pleasure, enjoying life, self-
indulgent)
7. Achievement: Personal success through demonstrating competence according to social
standards. (ambitious, successful, capable, influential)
8. Tradition: Respect, commitment, and acceptance of the customs and ideas that one’s
culture or religion provides. (respect for tradition, humble, devout, accepting my portion
in life)
9. Stimulation: Excitement, novelty, and challenge in life. (a varied life, an exciting life,
daring)
10. Power: Social status and prestige, control or dominance over people and resources.
(authority, wealth, social power, social recognition, preserving my public image)

36
Cultural Value Orientations
Schwartz distinguishes seven cultural value orientations (harmony, embeddedness, hierarchy,
mastery, affective autonomy, intellectual autonomy, egalitarianism) summarised in three
dimensions: Embeddedness versus Autonomy, Hierarchy versus Egalitarianism and Mastery
versus Harmony. Cultural value orientations are placed at their poles and they represent the ideal
types, whereas the actual cultural groups are arrayed along these dimensions. Schwartz believes
that these three bipolar dimensions of culture represent alternative resolutions to the three issues
that confront all societies:
1) Nature of the relations and boundaries between the person and the group (To what
extent are people autonomous vs. embedded in their groups?);
2) Whether people behave in a responsible manner in order to preserve the social structure
and consider the welfare of others (To what extent people coordinate and maintain society?);
3) The regulation of people’s treatment of natural and human resources (To what extent
people appreciate and accept the natural world?).

Embeddedness VS Autonomy: Embeddedness appears in situations where individuals are

embedded in a collectivity and find meaning through social relationships, through identifying

37
with the group, participating in its shared way of life, and striving toward its shared goals. In
societies with high embeddedness personal interests are not seen as different from those of the
group and high value is placed on preserving the status quo and avoiding individual actions or
attitudes that might undermine the traditional order of things. Important values in such societies
are social order, respect for tradition, security, obedience and wisdom. However, autonomy
refers to the situation where individuals are viewed as autonomous, bounded entities that are
expected to cultivate and express their own preferences, feelings, ideas and abilities, and find
meaning in their own uniqueness. Autonomy is further broken down into two categories:
intellectual autonomy which refers to the independent pursuit of ideas, intellectual directions
and rights; and affective autonomy, which refers to the independent pursuit of affectively
positive experiences such as varied life, pleasure and enjoyment of life.

Hierarchy VS Egalitarianism: In hierarchical societies individuals and the resources associated

with society are organized hierarchically and individuals within those societies are socialized to
comply with the roles assigned to them in the hierarchy and subjected to sanctions if they fail to
comply. Modesty and self-control are values associated with hierarchy. In egalitarian societies
individuals are seen as moral equals and everyone shares the same basic interests as human
beings. In egalitarian societies people are socialized to internalize a commitment to cooperate
and to feel concern for everyone's welfare. Values associated with egalitarian societies include
social justice and caring for the weaker members of the society, honesty, equality, sympathy and
working for the good of others, social responsibility and voluntary cooperation in the pursuit of
well-being or prosperity for others within the society.

Mastery VS Harmony: Mastery refers to the situation where individuals value succeeding and
getting ahead through self-assertion and proactively seek to master, direct and change the natural
and social world to advance their personal interests and the interests of the groups to which they
belong. Specific values associated with mastery include independence, fearlessness and daring,
ambition and hard work, drive for success and competence. Harmony refers to the situation
where individuals are content to accept and fit into the natural and social world as they find it
and seek to understand, preserve and protect it rather than change, direct or exploit it. Important
values in societies where harmony is valued include world at peace, unity with nature, and
protecting the environment.

According to Schwartz, the seven cultural value orientations are the following:
1. Embeddedness (Conservatism) – appears in situations where individuals are embedded
in a collectivity and find meaning through social relationships, through identifying with the
group, participating in its shared way of life, and striving toward its shared goals. In
embeddedness societies personal interests are not seen as different from those of the group and
high value is placed on close knit harmonious relations, preserving the status quo and avoiding
individual actions or attitudes that might undermine the traditional order of things. Important
values in such societies are social order, respect for tradition, security, obedience and wisdom;
2. Intellectual autonomy – refers to the independent pursuit of ideas and intellectual rights
in a society that recognises individuals as autonomous entities who are entitled to pursue their

38
own intellectual interests and desires, as well as expected to cultivate and express their own
preferences, feelings, ideas and abilities, and find meaning in their own uniqueness;
3. Affective autonomy – refers to the independent pursuit of affectively positive
experiences such as varied life, pleasure and enjoyment of life in a society where people are
entitled to pursue stimulation, hedonism, interests and desire;

HARMONY
Unity With Nature
World at Peace EMBEDDEDNESS
Social Order, Obedience
Respect for Tradition
EGALITARIANISM
Social Justice
Equality
HIERARCHY
Authority
INTELLECTUAL Humble
AUTONOMY
Broadmindedness
Curiosity MASTERY
AFFECTIVE Ambition
AUTONOMY Daring
Pleasure
Exciting Life

Cultural value orientations: Theoretical structure

4. Hierarchy - in hierarchical societies individuals and the resources associated with

society are organized hierarchically and individuals within those societies are socialised to
comply with the roles assigned to them in the hierarchy and subjected to sanctions if they fail to
comply. Modesty and self-control are values associated with hierarchical societies, which
emphasise the legitimacy of hierarchical roles and resource allocation;
5. Egalitarianism (Egalitarian commitment) - in egalitarian societies individuals are seen
as moral equals and everyone shares the same basic interests as human beings, whereas people
are socialised to internalise a commitment to cooperate and to feel concern for everyone's
welfare, with an that emphasis on the transcendence of selfless interests. Values associated with
39
egalitarian societies include social justice and caring for the weaker members of the society,
honesty, equality, sympathy and working for the good of others, social responsibility and
voluntary cooperation in the pursuit of well-being or prosperity for others within the society;
6. Mastery - refers to the situation where individuals value succeeding and getting ahead
through self-assertion and proactively seek to master, direct and change the natural and social
world to advance their personal interests and the interests of the groups to which they belong.
Specific values associated with mastery include independence, fearlessness and daring, ambition
and hard work, drive for success and competence. Such societies facilitate the active mastery of
the social environment and individual’s right to do better than their peers;
7. Harmony - refers to the situation where individuals are content to accept and fit into
the natural and social world as they find it and seek to understand, preserve and protect it rather
than change, direct or exploit it. Important values in societies where harmony is valued include
world at peace, unity with nature and protecting the environment, so it can be concluded that
such a society emphasises harmony with nature.

Transnational Cultural Regions

Countries rarely represent homogenous societies with a unified culture and the inferences about
national culture may depend on the subgroups included in a research project. However, Schwartz
used teacher and student samples from 77 cultural groups in this study and he supported the idea
that countries are meaningful cultural units. Drawing boundary lines on the spatial map of 77
cultural groups reveals eight transnational cultural regions (only eight countries are located
outside their expected region):
1. West European is the highest of all regions in egalitarianism, intellectual autonomy
and harmony; the lowest in hierarchy and embeddedness; a region of democratic, welfare states
with high concern for the environment and control of national wealth. Although West European
countries share a broad culture when compared with other world regions, there is substantial
cultural variation within the region too. Greek culture is the least typical of Western Europe—
higher on mastery and lower on intellectual autonomy and egalitarianism than the others are.
French and Swiss French cultures display a relatively high hierarchy orientation for Western
Europe, despite their emphasis on affective and intellectual autonomy.
2. English-speaking region is high in affective autonomy and mastery; low in harmony
and embeddedness, compared with the rest of the world; and average in intellectual autonomy,
hierarchy, and egalitarianism. The culture in America differs from that in other English-speaking
countries by emphasising mastery, embeddedness and hierarchy; with low intellectual autonomy,
harmony and egalitarianism; so it encourages an assertive, pragmatic, entrepreneurial, even
exploitative orientation to the social and natural environment. With the exception of the USA,
this region is particularly homogeneous.
3. Confucian influenced region combines a heavy emphasis on mastery and hierarchy;
pragmatic, entrepreneurial orientation; rejection of egalitarianism and harmony; emphasises
embeddedness more than all the European and American cultures. Within-region differences are
small except for Japan, which is substantially higher on harmony and intellectual autonomy and
lower on embeddedness and hierarchy.

40
 4. African and Middle Eastern region encompasses cultures that are especially high in
embeddedness and low in affective and intellectual autonomy. Thus, they emphasize finding
meaning in life largely through social relationships with in-group members and protecting group
solidarity and the traditional order rather than cultivating individual uniqueness.
5. South Asian region is particularly high in hierarchy and embeddedness and low in
autonomy and egalitarianism. This points to an emphasis on fulfilling one’s obligations in a
hierarchical system, obeying expectations from those in roles of greater status or authority and
expecting humility and obedience from those in inferior roles. As in Africa, social relationships
with the in-group rather than autonomous pursuits are expected to give meaning to life. With the
exception of India's especially high rating on mastery, all the groups are culturally quite
homogeneous, despite a variety of dominant religions.

EMBEDDEDNESS
HARMONY
East-Central & Muslim

EGALITARIANISM Baltic Europe Middle

Prot/Cath South
West Ea s t & East &
South
Orth

Sub-
Euro x
Latin East Saharan
doo

Europe America Asia

pe

Africa
INTELLECTUAL
AUTONOMY Co
English n
Speaking fu HIERARCHY
c ia
AFFECTIVE n
AUTONOMY MASTERY
Figure 4. Cultural Map of World Regions

Cultural map of world regions

6. East-Central and Baltic European Both these cultural regions (Croatia, Czech
Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovenia, and Slovakia) have stronger
historical and trade links to Western Europe; they are Roman Catholic or Protestant; they are low
on embeddedness and hierarchy compared with Africa and the Middle East and South East Asia,
but higher on these cultural orientations than Western Europe. The East-Central European and
Baltic culture is somewhat higher in harmony and intellectual autonomy and lower in hierarchy
than the Balkan and more Eastern culture.
7. Orthodox East-European cultural region (Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Georgia,
Macedonia, Russia, Serbia, and Ukraine) had weaker ties to the West and historical links to the
Ottoman empire, was deeply penetrated by communism, and practices more conservative and in-
group oriented Orthodox religions. These factors help to explain the relatively low cultural
egalitarianism, harmony and intellectual autonomy, and their higher hierarchy.

41
 8. Latin American region is close to the worldwide average in all seven orientations;
particularly culturally homogenous, excepting Bolivia and Peru, whose populations have been
least exposed to European culture. Some researchers describe Latin American culture as
collectivist, and compared with Western Europe, this seems to be so. Latin America is higher in
hierarchy and embeddedness, presumably the main components of collectivism, and lower in
intellectual autonomy, presumably the main component of individualism. The opposite is the
case, however, when we compare Latin American to African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian
cultures.
This last example highlights the importance of the frame of comparison. The culture of a group
may look different when viewed in a worldwide perspective than when inferred from narrower
comparisons. Most regions reflect some geographical proximity. Some of the cultural similarity
within regions is doubtless due to diffusion of values, norms, practices and institutions across
national borders. On the other hand, shared histories, religion, language and other factors may go
beyond geography factors (some exceptions: French Canada, East Germany etc.).

Social Structural Variables

There are four social structural variables that relate to culture through reciprocal causality:
1. Socioeconomic level (economic development increases individual resources, reduces
dependency on family and group, and fosters cultural autonomy and egalitarianism);
2. Political system (culture encouraging people to treat others as moral equals indicates
higher level of democracy, both regarding civil liberties and political rights);
3. Types of economic system (culture supports or constrains the ideology that underlies
the economic system; competitive economy is congruent with a culture high in
mastery and hierarchy);
4. Family / Household size (the larger the average family, the greater the cultural
emphasis on embeddedness, hierarchy and mastery values; while cultures with high
autonomy and egalitarianism encourage having few children).

Cultural Distance and International Investment

Schwartz also analyses how cultural distance between countries affects the flow of investment
around the world. He believes that cultural distance may deter investment because it increases
transaction costs. Moreover, he underlines that wealthier countries tend to invest in each other
and that the investment flows more to those countries with high egalitarianism, embeddedness
and harmony (contrary to expectations).

42
 Geert Hofstede

In the 1960s, a new subdiscipline of general psychology became institutionalized, called

cross-cultural psychology. Until today, researchers in this subdiscipline have been following
the aim of “comparing” data from several cultures in order to detect intercultural differences,
usually by means of standardized questionnaires. One of the most famous examples is the
work of Geert Hofstede. Hofstede conducted one of the most comprehensive studies on
national values, introducing the dimension paradigm.
Geert (Gerard Hendrik) Hofstede is a Dutch social psychologist, most notable for developing
his cultural dimensions theory. After graduating with an MSc in Mechanical Engineering and
having worked in the industry for 10 years, he received his PhD in social psychology. In
1965 he started his graduate study in Groningen and joined IBM International, working as a
management trainer and manager of personnel research. He founded and managed the
Personnel Research Department. During a two-year sabbatical from IBM from 1971 to 1973
he was a visiting lecturer at IMEDE (now the International Institute of Management
Development). In 1980, Hofstede co-founded and became the first Director for the IRIC, the
Institute for Research on Intercultural Cooperation, located at Tilburg University since 1998.
He holds honorary doctorates from seven universities in Europe, and he is a Fellow of the
Academy of Management and an eminent scholar who has published several works among
which the most important are Culture’s Consequences (1980) and Cultures and Organisations -
Software of the Mind (co-authored with his son Gert Jan Hofstede in 1991), both of which
were revised and expanded in the twenty-first century (Hofstede, Geert, 2001, Culture's
Consequences: comparing values, behaviors, institutions, and organizations across nations,
second edition; Hofstede, Geert and Hofstede, Gert Jan, 2005, Cultures and organizations:
software of the mind, Revised and expanded second edition and third edition in 2010), as well
as Exploring Culture: Exercises, Stories and Synthetic Cultures (Gert Jan Hofstede, Paul
Pedersen, Geert Hofstede, 2002) and Masculinity and Femininity: The Taboo Dimension of
National Cultures (1998). All his books deal with the topic of culture and they offer a
comprehensive insight into Hofstede’s cultural model, which he established with the aim of
developing intercultural cooperation skills.
Hofstede agrees that all people have something in common, that all people share human
nature (use language, empathy, practice various group activities …), however, at the same
time he is aware that all these activities are performed within different cultures and
according to different rules which again differ from culture to culture and that is why he
believes that “Culture is more often a source of conflict than of synergy. Cultural differences
are a nuisance at best and often a disaster.” As a result he underlines that skills in cooperation
across cultures are vital for the survival of mankind.

43
Hofstede’s definition of culture
Geert Hofstede defines culture as the collective mental programming. Namely, Hofstede
assumes that each person carries a certain amount of mental programming that is stable over
time and leads to the same person’s showing more or less the same behaviour in similar
situations, which means that human behaviour is not random but predictable to some extent.
Mental programmes can be found at individual, collective and universal level (i.e.
personality, culture, human nature).
- The basic and the least unique is the universal level that is shared by all humankind.
This level includes activities and practices that all people perform regardless of their
culture (we all laugh, weep, we are sometimes aggressive, sometimes we show
sympathy …)
- The collective level of programming is shared with some but not all people; it is
common for people who belong to the same group or class (it includes language,
gestures, physical distance from other people, and the way we perceive general
activities such as eating, etc. …)
- The individual level is what makes us completely unique, since no two people are
programmed exactly alike.

Another important feature of culture is value. ”A value is a broad tendency to prefer certain
states of affairs over the others.” Values can also be described as feelings that have plus
and minus pole: evil vs. good, dirty vs. clean, moral vs. immoral, paradoxical vs. logical
Values are the core element of each culture and we cannot see them because they are evident
only in behaviour. The visible elements are symbols, heroes and rituals, which are also known
as practices.
- Symbols are things that can be spotted at first sight; it is easy to recognise someone‟s
gestures, words, slang, to see pictures, objects and clothes, all these things appear in the
outer, superficial layer.
- Heroes are individuals that can be alive or dead or imagined but they are supposed to
be some kind of a role model since they possess qualities that are praised and popular
within a particular culture.
- Rituals are group activities such as religious ceremonies, greetings and others that
serve to connect people who belong to the same group or culture, and it is necessary to be
extremely conversant with one culture if you want to understand the meaning of rituals.

Organizational vs. National Cultures

Hofstede makes a distinction between Organisational and National Cultures. According to
him, National Cultures distinguish similar people, institutions and organisations in different
countries, while Organisational Cultures distinguish different organisations within the same
country or countries. Organisational Cultures mainly differ at the level of symbols, heroes
and rituals, together labeled as practices, and National Cultures are based on the deeper level,
level of values.

44
National Cultures
Hofstede carried out a systematic study of work related attitudes (his respondents were
employees of the IBM multinational corporation), and in 1980 he extracted dimensions of
National Cultures which are based on values.6 Moreover, he found out that these elements of
culture affect behaviour and attitudes which are crucial for other spheres of life, not only work
(e.g. Power Distance Index is connected with the use of violence, while Individualism is
correlated with Gross National Product Per Capita and with mobility between social classes).
His research included 77 countries and the results showed that majority of countries are
somewhere between the dimensions and that extreme cases are very rare. These elements
based on values affect the behaviour of societies, people and organisations, and are very
persistent over the time.
Geert Hofstede assisted by others came up with six basic issues that society needs to come to
terms with in order to organize itself. These are called the dimensions of culture. Each of
them has been expressed on a scale that runs roughly from 0 to 100. Hofstede calculated
scores in different dimensions, i.e. numeric values, which allow establishing international
rankings and country clusters. His approach has been evoking extreme reactions, in a positive
as well as in a critical sense. One body of research uses it as a framework for a high number
of cross-cultural research projects. The list of areas in which the model is employed
contains a great variety, ranging from information technology, management controlling,
innovation, leadership styles, over intercultural relations, decision-making, selection, training,
job design, motivation and human resource management to marketing, and market research.
Hofstede himself realizes: “Since the later 1980s the idea of dimensions of national cultures
has become part of […] ,normal science’”.
The starting point for the development of Hofstede’s cultural dimensions theory is best
summarized by the following quotation of Geert Hofstede and his son, Gert Jan Hofstede: “In
the late 1960s Geert Hofstede accidentally became interested in national cultural differences –
and got access to rich data for studying them.” The coincidence was Hofstede’s involvement
in developing and conducting a survey for IBM, an American multinational technology and
consulting company, that aimed at studying the “job attitudes,” and respectively “employee
values” of its employees around the world. Thus, when the IBM-questionnaire was designed,
the idea of cultural dimensions was not present yet.

Hofstede’s six dimensions of culture

1. Power Distance Index (Small vs. Large Power Distance)
2. Uncertainty Avoidance Index
3. Individualism vs. Collectivism
4. Masculinity vs. Femininity
5. Long-Term vs. Short-Term Orientation
6. Indulgence vs. Restraint

6
The fifth dimension was additionally established in 1991 by his son Geert Jan Hofstede, and the sixth in 2010
by their colleague Michael Minkov.

45
Small vs. Large Power Distance (PDI)
This dimension measures how much the less powerful members of institutions and
organisations expect and accept that power is distributed unequally. In cultures with small
power distance index people expect and accept power relations that are more democratic so
they perceive each others as equal regardless of their formal positions. Subordinates in these
countries can discuss the decisions made by those who are in power. Such countries are
Ireland, Australia, New Zealand. Large power distance cultures (e.g. Malaysia) shape their
members to be afraid of those who are in power so that they do not have any opportunity to
consult with them and express themselves, since there is a large emotional distance between
the subordinates and superordinates. It should be highlighted that this dimension does not
measure the real power distribution, but the way people perceive power differences.

Uncertainty Avoidance (UAI)

The following dimension indicates to which extent one culture shapes its members to feel
certain or uncertain when they are faced with something new and unknown (situations, rules,
theories …). Cultures with strong uncertainty avoidance program their people to prefer strict
and explicit rules, people are frequently intolerant of anything new and they are not eager
to take risks. On the other hand, cultures that have weak uncertainty avoidance are relativist
and more flexible, they tend to have as few rules as possible, they are democratically oriented
and are more tolerant when faced with new ideologies, theories and situations in general.
By and large, uncertainty avoidance is high in Latin countries (Spain, Portugal, Italy), Japan and
German speaking countries. It is lower in Anglo, Nordic and Chinese culture countries
(Singapore, Jamaica, Ireland, Denmark, the UK …).

Individualism vs. Collectivism (IDV)

This dimension represents the degree to which individuals are integrated into groups. In
individually oriented cultures children are expected to develop individualism from an early age,
that is, to learn how to look after themselves and to be independent. People from these
cultures are more competitive and they prefer to work alone rather than in teams.
Individualism is dominant in Western countries and in South Africa. Collectivism means that
people are from the early age taught to live within a group. In these cultures people often live in
extended families where members protect and take care of each others, in a nutshell they are
team oriented. Collectivism is present in less developed and Eastern countries.

Masculinity vs. Femininity (MAS)

The dimension which measures whether emphasis is placed on male or female values.
Masculine cultures (the US, Japan, Austria, Switzerland, Germany and some Anglo
countries) praise assertiveness, advancement, challenge, ambition. They also put emphasis on
wealth and material possessions. Feminine cultures (France, Spain, Israel, Thailand …)
highlight relationships, quality of life, modesty. They encourage people to develop the
feelings of mutual caring and sharing.

46
Long-Term vs. Short-Term Orientation (LTO)
This dimension of culture was additionally established on the basis of student data from 23
countries using a questionnaire. Cultures with long term orientation are turned to future, and
they emphasize perseverance and persistence. Such cultures are China, India, Japan,
Taiwan, whereas cultures with short term orientation give priority to the past, they respect
tradition and stability. They find it important that their members protect their face and fulfill
social obligations. Short term orientation is present in Britain, Philippines, Canada,
Australia …

Indulgence vs. Restraint (IND)

This dimension was also additionally established on the basis of World Values Survey analysis
of data obtained from representative samples of national populations for 93 countries.
Indulgence stands for a society that allows relatively free gratification of basic and natural
human drives related to enjoying life and having fun. Indulgence tends to prevail in South and
North America, in Western Europe and in parts of Sub-Sahara Africa. Restraint stands for a
society that suppresses gratification of needs and regulates it by means of strict social norms.
Restraint prevails in Eastern Europe, in Asia and in the Muslim world. Mediterranean Europe
takes a middle position on this dimension.

Also, it can be noticed that a country’s score on one dimension correlates with other data
regarding that culture: e.g. individually oriented societies usually praise masculine values,
whereas feminine values are praised among cultures that are collectively oriented. Strong
uncertainty avoidance correlates with large power distance … However, no culture can be
defined as completely long-term oriented or individually oriented since it is comprised of
individuals whose behaviour and attitudes differ from each other.

As far as Serbia is concerned, after the disintegration of Yugoslavia in 1991, Hofstede

reanalysed the Yugoslav data obtained from 248 respondents in 1971 and was able to split
them into Croatia (Zagreb branch office), Serbia (Belgrade branch office), and Slovenia
(Ljubljana head office). (Hofstede, 2001)

Organisational Cultures
At the organisational level, too, we can define culture as the collective programming of the
minds of group members by which one group distinguishes itself from other groups. An
organisation is less complex and less diffuse than a nation. Geert Hofstede has shown that
cultural differences between nations are especially found on the deepest level; i.e. on the level of
values. In comparison, cultural differences among organisations located within the same national
culture arena are especially identified on the level of practices. We define organisational culture
as the way in which members of an organisation relate: to each other, to their work, to the
outside world that distinguishes them from other organisations. Also, organisational culture is

47
determined by the personalities of the employees, yet the culture is not the sum of all those
individual personalities. Reality is different at the individual level from what is found at the
group level. Another important determinant factor of organisational culture is the history of an
organisation. When people come together to achieve a common goal, group processes unfold,
aimed at integration within the group and at establishing successful relations with the outside
world.
When there is high power distance, the result is the Pyramid culture. This is often seen in
France. The high power distance and the need to steer clear of uncertainty lead to concentrating
power, and strictly structuring the activities of people. However, if the power distance is low, we
come across the Machine culture. This is the case in Germany – they have a well-oiled machine
ideal of organizations. They tend to structure activities without concentrating authority so much.
Similarly, if a country can handle uncertainty and has low power distance we have the Market
culture. The British prefer a village market model and they advocate neither structuring nor
concentrating of decision making power, but improvising and negotiating to make things work.
And, finally, the Family culture stems from a respect for authority, but no structuring of
activities. This is what Hofstede sees in Indian and Indonesian organisations: they form an
extended family in which the owner/manager is the almighty grandfather. Everyone keeps
referring to the boss: there’s a concentration of authority but not so much structuring of
activities.

The Drawbacks of the Hofstede Model

Whereas Hofstede is convinced of the validity of his dimensions, his critics remain
skeptical: “The use of Hofstede’s dimensions […] raises more problems than it solves”
(Baskerville 2003:10). What they find problematic is the dimensions’ face validity, the
wording of the items in the IBM questionnaire and the specificity of the IBM sample.
Hofstede’s critics doubt the wide applicability of his dimensions. They suspect that the
dimensions are IBM-specific constructs and, therefore, only serve as standards of comparison
among IBM employees. The most cited criticism of his work is by Professor Brendan
McSweeney, who argues that Hofstede's claim about the role of national culture indicates too
much determinism that might be linked to fundamental flaws in his methodology.
Another key criticism, which largely focuses on the level of analysis, is by Professor Barry
Gerhart (University of Wisconsin-Madison) and Professor Meiyu Fang (National Central
University, Taiwan), who point out that among other problems with Hofstede's research (and
the way it is widely interpreted) is that his results actually only show that around 2 to 4
percent of variance in individual values is explained by national differences – in other words
96 percent, and perhaps more, is not explained. Other academics, like Brewer and Venaik,
point to a fundamental flaw in the common application of Hofstede’s culture dimensions, and
claim that his culture dimensions and scores are national or “ecological” in nature and do not
apply to individual people living in the sampled countries. One of the main drawbacks is that
Hofstede's study leads to pigeonholing people. Not all individuals can fit into this model,
because as always there are exceptions to the rule. Another question is how accurate the data
is - we have to pay attention to content but to context, too. Finally, we must wonder: how
much does the culture of a country change over the time?

48
 John Mole's Model of Culture

John Mole worked as an independent consultant in cross-cultural management based in New

York and London. His interest in cross-cultural differences related to business arose from his
experience in working in various countries of the world. For fifteen years he worked for an
American bank in the USA, Europe, Middle East and Africa, and he had an opportunity to
experience in what ways differences between members of different cultures can influence their
business. His practical experience coupled with his scholarly approach (he has an MA from
Oxford University in French and German, and an MBA from INSEAD, the European Business
School) resulted in several publications in which he presents his theory of culture and cultural
differences and gives advice to people who have to deal with cultural differences in business.
The most famous and successful among his works is the book Mind Your Manners - Managing
Business Cultures in the New Global Europe.
This book is a very practical guide to cultural differences in business, rich in examples and
illustrations. As the author states in the introduction, the aim of the book is to answer the
question: What do I need to know about people from other European countries that will help us
work successfully together? ‘The New Global Europe’ is a place with a large number of
multinational corporations in which members of different nations work together and whose profit
depends on how well they are able to cooperate and understand each other. That is why cross-
cultural awareness is relevant in modern business. Although the book focuses on the cultures of
European countries, information about countries such as the USA, China and Japan is also
included due to their powerful role in the world economy.

Mole’s definition of culture

John Mole defines culture as "a living, changing system that embraces our personal and social
life. Everything we say or do is a manifestation of culture." He insists that cultures are never
static, that they are constantly changing and he visually represents culture as a spiral. The spiral
is constantly revolving and it is composed of various layers. The outer layers, such as artifacts or
technology are immediately visible, whereas the inner layers such as beliefs or values are not,
and when one comes into contact with another culture it takes more time and effort to understand
them. What all cultures share is the fact that they are invisible until they encounter others, when
the differences become apparent. In Mole’s opinion, the least dangerous differences are the
obvious ones - we notice them and make adjustments. The dangerous ones are those that lie
beneath the surface and overcoming those differences represents the main challenge of cross-
cultural interaction.

49
 technology

artefacts

language

beliefs

values

organizations

Managing the world

Culture as a spiral

The Culture Triangle

When people from different nationalities or cultures come together in teams, meetings,
negotiations, or as employees of the same company, they bring with them different expectations
and beliefs of how they should work together. They have different concepts of what an
organization is, how it should be managed, and how they should behave within it. It is therefore
highly useful to become acquainted with those differences in order to successfully cooperate
with people from different cultural backgrounds. Mole believes that cultural characteristics and
differences can be classified under one of the three general categories which he terms the culture
triangle: communication, organisation and leadership.

Communication

Organisation Leadership

50
 Communication
The first category is communication, which includes both verbal and non-verbal means.
First of all, it is a courtesy to know at least some of the essential politeness words. Most people,
especially if they speak a language of small diffusion, are pleased and flattered that foreigners
make the effort, even if it is only a phrase or two. It is a sign that you do not take it for granted
that they should speak your language and you appreciate the fact that they do. This is especially
important if you are a native English speaker.
Secondly, an acquaintance with someone else’s home language helps you to understand them
when they are speaking yours. If French speakers say “actually” or “delay” or “interesting” when
they are speaking English, they may be using the words in the French and not the different
English sense. When a Russian or a Chinese speaker answers “yes” in their own language to a
negative question they are reinforcing the negative. For example, “Are you not going to sign the
contract today?”— “yes” means that they are not going to sign it. “Are you not going to sign
it?”— “no” means that they are going to sign it. When they are speaking English or another
European language it is possible that they are keeping to their own usage. There might also be a
difference in the way native speakers from America and England use some words. For example,
in American English “quite” does not mean “fairly,” as it does in British English, but “very”, and
in the expression “to table an idea” - in British English “table” means put on the agenda, while in
American English it means take off the agenda. Such nuances are useful to know.
Simultaneous speakers (Ireland) are those who like to interrupt, encourage, interject, finish
sentences, and may appear shallow and rude to serial speakers (Finland). Serial speakers listen
intently often without any verbal or body language except for a disconcerting stare, wait until the
other person has finished, stay silent for a moment while they digest what has been said, and then
reply without any expectation of being interrupted themselves. It is difficult to change your
communication style deliberately, partly because everyone sees themselves as “normal.” It is
more important to avoid drawing wrong conclusions from other people’s styles.
One of the aspects of communication that Mole explores is the notion of explicitness, i.e.
whether members of a culture say clearly what they think. Cultures differ significantly in this
respect. For example, Scandinavians and Dutch are very explicit, they try to say exactly what
they think and support it with facts and figures, whereas the British and the Japanese are more
vague. They are fond of understatement, hints and hedging, which might be an obstacle in
successful communication.
Another interesting aspect is the use of humour in business communication. In some countries,
such as the UK and Denmark, it is normal to use humour in business, while in countries such as
Germany or China this might be considered a sign of irresponsibility and disrespect. Differences
in how loudly members of different cultures speak can also be a source of misunderstanding. In
some countries (e.g. France) people speak loudly and they appear domineering to soft speakers
(e.g. Turkey). The situation is very similar when it comes to gestures – people who use more
expansive gestures, such as Greeks, usually seem aggressive to those more restrained, such as
Germans or Japanese.
When it comes to non-verbal communication, it’s useful to mention the several types of body
language. First are the involuntary postures that express our feelings toward others. While they
may manifest themselves in different ways and with different emphasis, there are some general

51
principles of body language that are common to most cultures. There are two basic groups of
body language postures: open/closed and forward/back. The posture groups combine to create
four basic modes: responsive, reflective, fugitive, and combative. Having at least a general idea
of what one’s interlocutor is thinking or feeling and being able to adjust their behaviour
accordingly can be extremely useful in the business world.
Aside from the involuntary, there are also deliberate gestures meant to communicate something
specific. Most of them are not universal and can be misinterpreted. For example, make a circle
by putting the tip of your middle finger on top of your thumb. In English-speaking countries this
usually means OK, good. In France it means zero, bad. In the eastern Mediterranean it is
obscene. In Japan it means money. Who could forget seeing President Clinton giving the thumbs
up to a mass rally in Nigeria and being greeted by a roar from the audience? It was as if a foreign
dignitary had given the finger to those in the White House Rose Garden.
Within the category of communication Mole also makes a distinction between relationship
cultures and non-relationship cultures. In non-relationship cultures, predominant in Northern
Europe, business is separate from private life and personal relationships. On the other hand, in
relationship cultures, more present in the South, personal relationships and work are inextricably
interwoven. Therefore, Mole advises those who do business with members of relationship
cultures to establish social and personal relationships before they start working together.
People in relationship cultures grow up in networks of mutual obligation, starting with family
and extending to religious affiliation, school and university, home town or region, intake into the
company, or common work experience. These are enhanced and enlarged by favors, gift giving,
hospitality, and other intangible exchanges. There is an expectation that people linked by such
ties are bound to give first preference to each other in whatever social or business context they
interact. To people outside these cultures this sounds like nepotism and cronyism 7, even
corruption. To those inside them it is the foundation of social and business organization.
When employees of different companies do business with each other in non-relationship
cultures, they are seen primarily as representatives of their companies. If the people who did the
deal leave or get transferred the business stays with the companies. In relationship cultures
business is seen to be done primarily between individuals. They have a personal as well as a
corporate responsibility to ensure that the terms are met. This obligation remains even if they get
transferred. If they leave the company, the business will go with them. If the business ceases for
any reason the relationship will continue.

Organisation
The category of organisation includes various aspects of how the work within a company is
organized, i.e. how plans are made, what roles individuals have within a larger system, how
information is shared etc. In cultures John Mole terms systematic the individual is less important
than the system, roles and relationships of individuals are clearly defined. A systematic
organization exists independently of its members and its needs are more important than the needs

7
Cronyism is the appointment of friends and associates to positions of authority, without proper regard to their
qualifications.

52
of individuals. There is a clear distinction between an individual’s identity and their
organizational function. The individual contributes skills to the organization but is never
absorbed by it. If what you do does not meet the needs of the organization, then you have no
reason to belong to it. The extreme form is automatism.
On the opposite end of the leadership continuum are organic cultures. In these cultures, roles
are more loosely defined and the individual is more important than in a systematic culture. The
extreme form is anarchy.

Leadership
Cultures and organizations also differ in the ways in which power is distributed among their
members, that is who makes decisions, what authority is based on, what makes a good boss.
These all fall into the category of leadership. The cultures in which the boss dominates and takes
decisions alone are termed individual, whereas the ones in which all employees have equal rights
are termed group cultures.
Toward the individual end is the belief that individuals are intrinsically unequal and that the
most effective, knowledgeable, or competent take decisions on behalf of the others. Power is a
right to be exercised by superiors over inferiors. It should be emphasized that these are attitudes
shared by everybody in the organization, not merely the bosses. For example, an individual
leadership culture implies not only that bosses take decisions and give orders on their own
responsibility, but also that their subordinates expect them to do so and willingly execute the
orders without question. The extreme form is absolutism.
Toward the group end of the dimension is the belief that while individuals may be unequal in
ability and performance, everyone has a right to be heard and to contribute to all the decisions
that affect them. For the sake of convenience leaders are so designated for as long as they
embody the interests and the voice of those they represent. The extreme form is collectivism.

The MOLE map

John Mole combined the dimension of leadership and the dimension of organisation to get a
cultural map of Europe – the MOLE map. MOLE stands for Multicultural Organisation and
Leadership in Europe and it represents a frame within which countries occupy certain positions
depending on the kind of leadership and organization that predominates in them. The map looks
only at business culture.
According to Mole, this map not only gives us information about the culture of a country, but it
also tells us something about the way different cultural groups perceive each other:
Wherever people are on the map, those on the left of them can be seen as
inefficient and disorganized and those on the right as cold, critical and hair-splitting.
Those beneath them are indecisive and uncompetitive and those above them are
domineering and egotistical.

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 The MOLE map

Mole offers several examples of how members of different cultures perceive each other to
illustrate his theory:
 “They are so arrogant. They think that every meeting, whether it’s one-to-one or
several people, is a chance to show off, to dominate everyone else.” (a German
working with the French)
 “Punctuality? Meetings never start on time. And they always drag on. It is very
frustrating.” (a British manager working with Italians)
 “You have the impression that the French don’t realize they are at a meeting. They
don’t pay attention or they interrupt or they get up and make a phone call.” (an
English director of a Franco-British company)

Conclusion
However different cultures may be, they all have one thing in common: they all see themselves
as "normal." It is therefore rather difficult, in some cases even impossible, for people who belong
to a certain culture to change the way they behave deliberately. But what can be done and what
John Mole emphasizes as the most important is to avoid drawing wrong conclusions from other
people’s cultural styles. Cross-cultural knowledge is therefore an invaluable tool in business
communication of an increasingly globalised world.

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 Edward Twitchell Hall
Edward Twitchell Hall (1914-2009) was an American anthropologist and cross-cultural
researcher, known as one of the founding fathers of intercultural communication. The foundation
of his theories on cultural perceptions of space was set during World War II when he served in
the U.S. Army in Europe and the Philippines.
During the 1950s he worked for the United States Army as a director of the Foreign Service
Institute, teaching inter-cultural communications skills to Foreign Service personnel. The
ultimate goal was to create a team of efficient communicators in cross-cultural interactions, as he
had observed many difficulties created by lack of intercultural communication.
The following Hall's publications deal with difficulties created by a lack of intercultural
communication: The Silent Language (1959), The Hidden Dimension (1966), Beyond Culture
(1976), The Dance of life: The Other Dimension of Time (1983), Hidden Differences: Doing
Business with the Japanese (1990) and Understanding Cultural Differences- Germans, French
and Americans (1993).
Edward Hall's theory tells us about four important cultural factors or dimensions. They are
context, time, space and information.

High Context vs. Low Context Cultures

In his book Beyond Culture, he presented the concept that each culture belongs either to high
context cultures or low context cultures. High context culture and low context culture are
terms used to describe cultures based on how explicit the messages exchanged are and how much
the context means in certain situations. In each culture, members have been supplied with
specific "filters" that allow them to focus only on what society has deemed important.
According to Hall, messages exchanged in a high context culture carry implicit meanings with
more information than the actually spoken parts (usage of metaphor and reading between the
lines), while in low-context cultures, the messages have a clear meaning, with nothing implied
beyond the words used (simplistic, clear messages).
In a higher context culture, word choice, tone, facial expressions, and body language have great
impact on the meaning of the message. On the other hand, in a lower context culture, it is very
important for the communicator to be explicit in order to be fully understood. In low context
cultures ideas are expected to be outspoken very straightforward, and most of the things require
explanation. Less importance is placed on the word choice.
Novelist Amy Tan describes the differences in cultural communication in this way: "An
American business executive may say, 'Let's make a deal,' and the Chinese manager may reply,
'Is your son interested in learning about your widget business?' Each to his or her own purpose,
each with his or her own linguistic path."

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In a high context culture there are the so-called in-groups - groups of people that share similar
experiences and expectations (good friends, families, close coworkers, etc.). A few words can
communicate a complex message very effectively to an in-group, while in a lower context
culture, the messages are much more explicit and the value of a single word is less important.
That is why it is very difficult for a newcomer from a low context culture to take part in
conversations in a high context culture; he/she will not be able to understand everything since
many things are left unsaid.
For instance, employees from high context cultures like China and France share very specific
and extensive information with their in-group members. In comparison, low-context cultures like
the United States and Germany prefer to limit communication to smaller, more select groups of
people, sharing only that information which is necessary.
Examples of high context cultures: African, Arab, Brazilian, Chinese, French, Greek, Hungarian,
Indian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin American, Russian, etc. Low context culture is present in
western countries such as the UK, the US (excluding the South), Australia, Scandinavian
countries, Germany, Switzerland, etc.

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It is important to remember that every individual uses both high context and low context
communication; it is not simply a matter of choosing one over the other. Often, the types of
relationships we have with others and our circumstances will dictate the extent to which we rely
more on literal or implied meanings.

How Higher Context Relates to Other Cultural Metrics?

Diversity - Higher context cultures are more common in countries with low racial diversity.
Tradition and History - Higher context cultures tend to correlate with cultures that also have a
strong sense of tradition and history, and change little over time.
Humour - A high context joke from a high context culture will not translate well to someone of
a different culture (even another high context culture), because humour is very much about
context, and a joke may not be considered very funny if it seems like it is over-explained using
only low context messages.

Adaptation
An individual from a higher context culture may need to adapt because a lower context culture
demands more independence, and expects many relationships, but fewer intimate ones. A high
context individual is more likely to ask questions rather than attempt to work out a solution
independently, and the questions are likely to be asked from the same few people. The high
context person may be frustrated by people appearing to not want to develop a relationship or
continue to help them on an ongoing basis.
An individual from a low context culture needs to adapt because higher context cultures expect
small close-knit groups, and reliance on that group. Groups can actually be relied upon to
support each other, and it may be difficult to get support outside of your group. Professional and
personal lives often intertwine. A lower context individual may be more likely to try to work
things out on their own and feel there is a lack of self-service support or information, rather than
ask questions and take time to develop the relationships needed to accomplish the things that
need to be done.

Uses of Time: Monochronic and Polychronic Culture

In his book The Silent Language, Hall developed the concept of monochronic and polychronic
cultures. People that belong to a monochronic culture tend to do only one thing at a time, they
plan everything thoroughly, and always organize their time. However, people who belong to a
polychronic culture tend to do many things at the same time, they have no strict deadlines and for
them time is continuous. Human interaction is valued over time and material things; being
punctual is not that important in these cultures.

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The typical representatives of a monochronic culture are the Americans, whereas the French
represent a polychronic culture, and the Japanese have characteristics of both monochronic and
polychronic cultures (they plan everything in detail, but when it comes to making decisions, they
are rather indecisive). Hall believed that it can be unsettling for people belonging to
monochronic cultures if they have to confront more than one thing at a time.

Uses of Space: Proxemics

The study of proxemics, developed by E. T. Hall, concerns the use of space for purposes of
communication. Hall categorized the space surrounding people into personal space, social
space and public space. Personal space is the distance from other people that one needs to
maintain in order to feel comfortable. Hall described personal space as a “bubble” each person
carries around with her- or himself at all times. This bubble changes in size according to the
situation and the people with whom one interacts (e.g., close friends are allowed closer than
strangers) and varies by culture.
In contrast, a person’s public space is usually reserved for more impersonal and anonymous
interactions. The layer of space between an individual’s personal and public space is often called
social space. This is the physical space where everyday contact takes place such as on a crowded
train or bus.
He determined that every culture has implicit rules for how space should be used and that these
rules vary from one culture to the next. These unspoken specifications regulate where one works
and where one plays, territorial distinctions for different social units (e.g. family, neighborhood),
as well as acceptable uses of space for men, women, and children. Therefore, proxemics
frequently leads to new insights about specific cultures, as well as to insights into the generalised
concept of culture itself.

The Flow of Information

The speed with which a particular message can be decoded and acted on is an important factor in
human communication. There are fast and slow messages: a headline or cartoon, for example, is
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fast; the meaning that one extracts from books or art is slow. A fast message sent to people who
are geared to a slow format will usually miss the target. While the content of the wrong-speed
message may be understandable, it won’t be received well by someone accustomed to or
expecting a different speed.
Cultures with slow flow of information plan information carefully and structure it. Information
does not flow freely, as it is unusual to give away more than absolutely necessary (the USA, the
Netherlands). Cultures with fast flow of information think that the more quickly the information
is spread, the better it is for all. People move in huge networks and share information naturally
with friends within those networks (China, Morocco, Turkey, Indonesia, Spain).
According to Hall, since it takes time to get to know someone well, ‘in essence a person is a slow
message’ (Hall and Hall 1990: 5). The message is, of course, slower in some cultures than in
others. In Japan, personal relationships and friendships tend to take a long time to solidify. This
is largely a function of the hierarchical system in Japan. Nevertheless, the businessman from
America would do well to attempt to be close friends with the Japanese, for whom closeness in
relationships is a well-developed drive.
In countries such as the United States, developing friendships is easy enough. Foreigners have
often commented on how "unbelievably friendly" the Americans are. However, when Hall
studied the subject for the U.S. State Department, he discovered a worldwide complaint about
Americans: they seem capable of forming only one kind of friendship – the informal, superficial
kind that does not involve an exchange of deep confidences. Of course, there are exceptions, but
as a rule Americans are very different from their Japanese counterparts in this regard. In this
sense, then, Americans will have to take longer to "read" the Japanese than they are accustomed
to.

Conclusion
E.T. Hall helped us: understand our own culture, understand other cultures, communicate more
effectively with those who do not belong to our culture, and adapt more easily to other cultures.
What was particularly innovative about Hall's early work is that instead of focusing on a single
culture at a time, or cross-cultural comparison, as was typical in 1950's anthropology, he
responded to the needs of his students at the Foreign Service Institute of the Department of State
to help them understand interactions between members of different cultures.
Hall's theory consists of four parts: context, time, space and information; an important
observation because it shows that the theory is not too narrow. However, the sections are not
related to each other, hence one part of the theory can be very accurate while another is
erroneous. The theory also calls for criticism because it is guilty of stereotyping and
generalizing. It fails to identify people as individuals; one person is seen as inseparable part of
the corresponding culture, disregarding the fact that people are different.
When working across cultures, one should pay attention to high and low cultures through the
actions of others. For example, if a person is always late, the most logical reasons for such
occurrence would be their laziness or rudeness, not their culture, but if people are late for
meetings it may indeed be because they are polychronic, not because they are disrespectful or
lazy.

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 Fons Trompenaars

Alfonsus (Fons) Trompenaars (born 1953, Amsterdam) is a Dutch-French culturalist,

organisational theorist, management consultant, and author in the field of cross-cultural
communication, known for the development of the Trompenaars' model of national culture
differences. He is also one of the leading commentators on cultural diversity in business.
Coming from a mixed family, he was a perfect candidate for cross-cultural studies. He moved to
the US in his early twenties, which was a turning point for his future career. Having studied
Economics at the Free University of Amsterdam, Trompenaars got his PhD from Wharton
school, University of Pennsylvania, with a dissertation on differences in conceptions of
organizational structures in different cultures.
He is the co-founder of Trompenaars-Hampden-Turner – a consulting group, working with
General Motors, Heineken, British Airways, Nissan, Philips, IBM, AMD, Mars, Motorola,
Johnson & Johnson, PepsiCo, etc.
Selected works of Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner (born 1934, London, a
British management philosopher and Senior Research Associate at the Judge Business School at
the University of Cambridge) include the following: The Seven Cultures of Capitalism: Value
Systems for Creating Wealth in the United States, Britain, Japan, Germany, France, Sweden,
and the Netherlands (1993), Riding the Waves of Culture: Understanding Cultural Diversity in
Business (1997), Building Cross-Cultural Competence: How to Create Wealth from Conflicting
Values (2000), 21 Leaders for the 21st Century: How Innovative Leaders Manage in the Digital
Age (2001), Managing People Across Cultures (2004), Innovating in a Global Crisis: Riding the
Whirlwind of Recession (2009), and Nine Visions of Capitalism: Unlocking the Meanings of
Wealth Creation (2015).

Seven dimensions of culture

Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner identified seven dimensions of culture and
developed a cultural model after spending 10 years researching the preferences and values of
people in dozens of cultures around the world. As part of this, they sent questionnaires to more
than 46,000 managers in 40 countries.
They found that people from different cultures aren't just randomly different from one another;
they differ in very specific, even predictable, ways. This is because each culture has its own way
of thinking, its own values and beliefs, and different preferences placed on a variety of different
factors. Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner concluded that what distinguishes people from one
culture compared with another is where these preferences fall in one of the following seven
dimensions:

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 1. Universalism vs. Particularism
2. Individualism vs. Collectivism (Communitarianism)
3. Neutral vs. Affective (Emotional)
4. Specific vs. Diffuse
5. Achievement vs. Ascription
6. Sequential vs. Synchronic
7. Internal vs. External control

Universalism vs. Particularism

Dilemma: What is more important - rules or relationships?
Universalist culture: People place a high importance on laws, rules, values, and obligations. They
try to deal fairly with people based on these rules, but rules come before relationships.
Particularistic culture: People believe that each circumstance, and each relationship, dictates the
rules that they live by. Their response to a situation may change, based on what's happening in
the moment, and who's involved.
Universalism Particularism
 Rules can be applied to everyone  Different people means different rules
 Detached attitude  Close friendships
 Generalisation  Case study
 Law determines order and people  Ethic and morality depend on
distinguish between right and wrong situational factors
 Contracts should not be altered  Difference is welcome
 Precision  Changeable agreements
 Global standards  Personal opinion
Typical universalist cultures include the U.S., Canada, the U.K, the Netherlands, Germany,
Scandinavia, New Zealand, Australia, and Switzerland. Typical particularistic cultures include
Russia, Latin-American countries, and China.

Individualism vs. Collectivism

Dilemma: Do we function in groups or as individuals?
Individualist culture: People believe in personal freedom and achievement. They believe that you
make your own decisions, and that you must take care of yourself.
Collectivist (communitarian) culture: People believe that the group is more important than the
individual. The group provides help and safety, in exchange for loyalty. The group always comes
before the individual.

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 Individualism Collectivism
 Frequent use of “I”  Frequent use of “We”
 Personal responsibility and  Group responsibility, team success
achievement
 Representatives make decisions  Decision-making delegated to many
members of the group
 Strong personal objectives  Common cause
 Competitiveness  Sharing
Typical individualist cultures include the U.S., Canada, the U.K, Scandinavia, New Zealand,
Australia, and Switzerland. Typical collectivist cultures include countries in Latin-America,
Africa, and Japan.

Neutral vs. Affective

Dilemma: Should emotions be displayed?
Neutral culture: People make a great effort to control their emotions. Reason influences their
actions far more than their feelings. People don't reveal what they're thinking or how they're
feeling.
Affective (emotional) culture: People want to find ways to express their emotions, even
spontaneously, at work. In these cultures, it's welcome and accepted to show emotions.
Neutral Affective
 No open display  Nonverbal and verbal display of
of emotions thoughts and emotions
 Cool and self-possessed conduct  Transparency and expressiveness
 Avoid close physical contact or intense  Intense gestures and welcome
gestures intimisation
 Monotone oral delivery of written  Fluent and dramatic delivery of
materials statement
Typical neutral cultures include the U.K., Sweden, the Netherlands, Finland, and Germany.
Typical affective cultures include Poland, Italy, France, Spain, and countries in Latin-America.

Specific vs. Diffuse

Dilemma: How separate we keep our private and working lives?
Specific culture: People keep work and personal lives separate. As a result, they believe that
relationships don't have much of an impact on work objectives, and, although good relationships
are important, they believe that people can work together without having a good relationship.
Diffuse culture: People see an overlap between their work and personal life. They believe that
good relationships are vital to meeting business objectives, and that their relationships with

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others will be the same, whether they are at work or meeting socially. People spend time outside
work hours with colleagues and clients.
Specific Diffuse
 Distinction between private and  Overlapping of private and professional
professional life life
 More attention to detail  Holistic approach
 Large public or social life  Small public life, but large family
 Independence  Dependence on the family
 Direct in contacts  Indirect in contacts
Typical specific cultures include the U.S., the U.K., Switzerland, Germany, Scandinavia, and the
Netherlands. Typical diffuse cultures include Argentina, Spain, Russia, India, and China.

Achievement vs. Ascription

Dilemma: Do we have to prove ourselves to receive status or is it given to us?
Achievement culture: People believe that one is what one does, and one’s worth is based
accordingly. These cultures value performance, no matter who the person in question is.
Ascription culture: People believe that you should be valued for who you are. Power, title, and
position matter in these cultures, and these roles define behaviour.
Achievement Ascription
 Status based upon accomplishments  Status based upon social position or by
inheritance
 Judging competence  Judging the social importance and
background
 Rare use of titles  Extensive use of titles
 No age or gender, etc. restrictions for  Most managers male, middle-aged
manager positions
 Superiority = efficiency  Commitment to superior = better
position
Typical achievement cultures include the U.S., Canada, Australia, and Scandinavia. Typical
ascription cultures include France, Italy, Japan, and Saudi Arabia.

Sequential vs. Synchronic

Dilemma: Do we do things one at a time or several things at once?
Sequential time culture: People like events to happen in order. They place a high value on
punctuality, planning (and sticking to your plans), and staying on schedule. In this culture, "time
is money," and people don't appreciate it when their schedule is thrown off.

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Synchronous time culture: People see the past, present, and future as interwoven periods. They
often work on several projects at once, and view plans and commitments as flexible.
Sequential Synchronic
 Events are separate items in time  Events happen in parallel
 Sequence after sequence  Events synchronised together
 Order is in a serial array of actions  Order in coordination of multiple effort
Typical sequential-time cultures include Germany, the U.K., and the U.S. Typical synchronous-
time cultures include Japan, Argentina, and Mexico.

Internal vs. External Control

Dilemma: Do we control our environment, or are we controlled by it?
Internal direction culture: People believe that they can control nature or their environment to
achieve goals. This includes how they work with teams and within organizations.
External direction culture: People believe that nature, or their environment, controls them; they
must work with their environment to achieve goals at work or in relationships.
Internal direction External direction
 Thinking and personal judgment  Objective data from the outer world
 Intuitive approach  Rational approach
 Our mind is the most powerful tool  The truth lies around us, in a “real
world”
Typical internal-direction cultures include Israel, the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, and the U.K.
Typical outer-direction cultures include China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia.

Main points:
This model can be used for understanding of people from different cultural backgrounds better,
in order to prevent misunderstandings and enjoy a better working relationship with them. This is
especially useful in case of doing business with people from around the world, or managing a
diverse group of people.
The model also highlights that one culture is not necessarily better or worse than another; people
from different cultural backgrounds simply make different choices.
Above all, people must be treated as individuals, since there are many factors that have a bearing
on communication and interpersonal interaction in general.

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 World Values Survey – Ronald F. Inglehart

Unlike all the previous models, which are synchronic, Ronald Inglehart conducted research
which regards the changing of cultures over time, that is, the diachronic aspect of cultural
values.

Ronald F. Inglehart (born in 1934) is an American political scientist with a Ph.D. in Political
Science from University of Chicago, and Research Professor in the Center for Political Studies at
the University of Michigan. He is also the director of the World Values Survey (WVS), a global
network of social scientists who have carried out representative national surveys of the public in
almost 100 countries on all six inhabited continents, containing 90 percent of the world's
population.
Inglehart has written more than 250 publications, including: The Silent Revolution (1977);
Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society (1990); Modernization and Postmodernization:
Cultural, Economic and Political Change in 43 Societies (1997); “Modernization, cultural
change, and the persistence of traditional values” (2000, with Wayne Baker); Rising Tide:
Gender Equality and Cultural Change around the World (2003, with Pippa Norris); Sacred and
Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide (2004, with Pippa Norris); and Modernization,
Cultural Change and Democracy: The Human Development Sequence (2005, with Christian
Welzel).
In the seventies, Inglehart began developing an influential theory of Generational Replacement
causing intergenerational value change from materialist to post-materialist values that helped
shape the Eurobarometer Surveys, the World Values Surveys and other cross-national survey
projects. Building on this work, he subsequently developed a revised version of Modernization
theory – Evolutionary Modernization Theory, which argues that economic development, welfare
state institutions and the long peace between major powers since 1945, are reshaping human
motivations in ways that have important implications concerning gender roles, sexual norms, the
role of religion, economic behaviour and the spread of democracy. Inglehart's research focuses
on cultural change and its consequences, as he has investigated linkages between the values and
beliefs of mass public, and studied changing values and their impact on social and political life.
The World Values Survey seeks to help scientists and policy makers understand changes in the
beliefs, values and motivations of people throughout the world, on the hypothesis that economic
and technological changes are transforming the basic values and motivations of the public of
industrialized societies. The WVS consists of nationally representative surveys conducted by
using a common questionnaire and currently including interviews with almost 400,000
respondents. The first wave of surveys for this project was carried out in 1981, the sixth wave
was completed in 2014, and the seventh wave is planned for 2017-2019.

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Findings from this research point to the conclusion that intergenerational changes are taking
place in basic values relating to politics, economic life, religion, gender roles, family norms and
sexual norms. The values of younger generations differ consistently from those prevailing among
older generations, particularly in societies that have experienced rapid economic growth.
Because these changes seem to be linked with economic and technological progress, it was
important to include societies across the entire range of development, from low income societies
to rich societies.
Analysis of the World Values Survey data asserts that there are two major dimensions of cross-
cultural variation in the world:
1. x-axis: survival values versus self-expression values
2. y-axis: traditional values versus secular-rational values.
Survival values place emphasis on economic and physical security. They are linked with a
relatively ethnocentric outlook and low levels of trust and tolerance.
Self-expression values give high priority to subjective well-being, self-expression and quality of
life, and may include environmental protection, growing tolerance of foreigners, gender equality,
rising demands for participation in decision-making in economic and political life (autonomy and
freedom from central authority), interpersonal trust, political moderation, and a shift in child-
rearing values from emphasis on hard work towards imagination and tolerance.
The shift from survival to self-expression also represents the transition from industrial society to
post-industrial society, as well as embracing democratic values.
Traditional values emphasise the importance of religion, parent-child ties, deference to
authority, absolute standards and traditional family values. People who embrace these values also
reject divorce, abortion, euthanasia and suicide. Societies that embrace these values have high
levels of national pride and a nationalistic outlook.
Secular-rational values have the opposite preferences to the traditional values. Societies that
embrace these values place less emphasis on religion, traditional family values and authority.
Divorce, abortion, euthanasia and suicide are seen as relatively acceptable.
The shift from traditional to secular-rational values has been described as "essentially the
replacement of religion and superstition with science and bureaucracy".
On the basis of the World Values Survey, Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel made the
Inglehart–Welzel cultural map of the world, which depicts closely linked cultural values that
vary between societies in these two predominant dimensions. Moving upwards on this map
reflects the shift from traditional values to secular-rational ones and moving rightwards reflects
the shift from survival values to self-expression values. According to the authors: "These two
dimensions explain more than 70 percent of the cross-national variance in a factor analysis of ten
indicators—and each of these dimensions is strongly correlated with scores of other important
orientations." (Ronald Inglehart, Christian Welzel. The WVS Cultural Map of the World, 2013)
The authors stress that socio-economic status is not the sole factor determining a country's
location, as their religious and cultural historical heritage is also an important factor.

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The map is not a geographical map but rather a chart in which countries are positioned based on
their scores for the two values mapped on the x-axis and the y-axis, showing where societies are
located in these two dimensions, while nine clusters of countries reflect their shared values and
not geographical closeness: the English-speaking, Latin America, Catholic Europe, Protestant
Europe, African-Islamic, Baltic, South Asian, Orthodox and Confucian. Another proposed way
to cluster the societies is by wealth, with the poor societies at the bottom of both axes, and rich at
the top. It has also been found that basic cultural values overwhelmingly apply on national lines,
with cross-border intermixtures being relatively rare. This is true even between countries with
shared cultural histories. Additionally, even cultural clusters of countries do not intermix much
across borders, which suggests nations are culturally meaningful units. Asian societies are
distributed in the traditional/secular dimension in two clusters, with more secular Confucian
societies at the top, and more traditional South Asian ones at the center of the map. Out of
Western world countries, the United States is among the most conservative (as one of the most
downwards-located countries), together with highly conservative Catholic countries such as
Ireland and Poland. As to the survival/self-expression dimension, Russia is among the most

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survival-value oriented countries, and at the other end, Sweden ranks highest on the self-
expression chart.
The World Values Survey website provides access to all the WVS data, allowing users to carry
out more complex analyses, such as comparing data over time or across different countries.
A somewhat simplified conclusion is that following an increase in standards of living, and a
transit from development country via industrialization to post-industrial knowledge society, a
country tends to move diagonally in the direction from lower-left corner (poor) to upper-right
corner (rich), indicating a transit in both dimensions. However, the attitudes among the
population are also highly correlated with the philosophical, political and religious ideas that
have been dominating in the country. Secular-rational values and materialism were formulated
by philosophers and the left-wing politics side in the French revolution, and can consequently be
observed especially in countries with a long history of social democratic or socialistic policy, and
in countries where a large portion of the population have studied philosophy and science at
universities. Survival values are characteristic for eastern-world countries and self-expression
values for western-world countries. In a liberal post-industrial economy, an increasing share of
the population has grown up taking survival and freedom of thought for granted, with the result
that self-expression is highly valued.

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 Britain after World War II

In the decades immediately after World War II, the social and cultural profile of Great Britain
was transformed to a great extent. The causes of such changes on the domestic scene lie within
two following sets of notions: group-oriented (ethnicity, feminism, youth), and individually-
oriented (commercialization, commodification, consumerism – the three C’s). On the scene of
foreign policy, the British Empire was gradually dismantled after the war ended, while most of
its components were becoming independent countries and members of the Commonwealth of
Nations (initially the British Commonwealth, an intergovernmental organisation of 52 member
states that are mostly former territories of the British Empire).
This impact was felt across the arts and from 1948 governments funded the experimentation in
styles of expression through the Arts Council. The artistic activity of all kinds was increased:
more books were published, more plays performed, there were more operas and concerts, more
dance, design and photography, etc. Most importantly, the arts became accessible to all, not just
the cultivated elite, mainly owing to public subsidies, but also because technology and mass
production enabled it. During the 1980s, however, due to the so-called ‘Thatcherism’ which
represented a belief in a free market and a small state, a culture of individualism replaced the
state benefits and the arts were regarded as any other business. From 1997, the change in
domestic politics resulted in prosperity, but at the same time, commercialization of the arts was
further increased.

Britain in the 1950s

Clement Attlee’s succession to the position of Prime Minister in 1945 marked the beginning of
the post-war period. Attlee, the leader of the Labour party, replaced Winston Churchill who had
led Britain through WWII. The new government started reforming the country first by
nationalising key industries to secure employment. In 1948, a ‘welfare state’ was set up in order
to provide social security and free health care, but that was only the first fragile step of the long-
term development that was to follow, and despite the progress there were still queues and
austerity. From 1951, Tories governed not only in the interest of influential rich people, but in
the interest of the entire society, and the major political parties agreed on what became known as
the ‘post-war consensus’, which encouraged nationalisation, strong trade unions, heavy
regulation, high taxes and a generous welfare state.
In the summer of 1951, the Festival of Britain was organised all over the United Kingdom in
order to commemorate the centenary of the 1851 Great Exhibition and to improve national
morale by giving the people a feeling of successful recovery from the war's devastation, as well
as promoting British science, technology, industrial design, architecture and the arts. This
national exhibition and fair was a triumphant success, as it reached millions of visitors and

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helped reshape British arts, crafts, designs and sports for a generation. Arts festivals were held
throughout the summer as part of the Festival of Britain.
On the other hand, what also marked this era were the ethnic tensions caused by the high level of
immigration. Because of the labour shortage, jobs were offered to Commonwealth citizens in the
West Indies, India, Africa, etc. Soon, the family and relatives were coming to join these
immigrants, many of whom had to accept jobs for which they were overqualified. As the
newcomers settled in Britain, racial tensions grew stronger and there were many race riots8
targeting immigrants and ethnic minority groups. The fiercest riot took place in Notting Hill,
London, in 1958, and those who expressed the greatest hostility towards the newcomers included
the Teddy Boys, Oswald Mosley's Union Movement and other far-right groups such as the White
Defence League, whose slogan was ‘Keep Britain White’. Another huge concern in this period
was the danger of nuclear war, since Britain became the third atomic power in the early 1950s,
so in 1957 artists formed a Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), which even today
opposes military action that may result in the use of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons and
the building of nuclear power stations in the UK, while the CND emblem has become a nearly
universal peace symbol used in many different versions worldwide:
As regards the literary scene of the post-war period, one of the most prominent writers was
George Orwell, who warned of the totalitarian future in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).
This dystopian novel gives an ill-fated image of the whole human society and it made a
significant impact on British culture. For example, the terms ‘Big Brother’, ‘Room 101’, ‘the
Thought Police’, ‘doublethink’, ‘Newspeak’ and many others have become commonly used
when referring to a totalitarian society. The practice of ending the words with ’-speak’ was
drawn from the novel (as in mediaspeak). Moreover, the adjective ‘Orwellian’ has been used
when referring to something similar to Orwell’s writings, especially this novel. A popular theme
in mass fiction, which also flourished in this period, was spying - like in Ian Fleming’s James
Bond novels. In the visual arts, the wish to re-establish European contacts was notable because
of the post-war exhibitions of Picasso, Braque, Van Gogh, etc. Music thrived through the
influence of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). The newspapers expressed the wish to
make the news exciting and this trend lowered their overall quality, especially that of tabloid
journalism. Daily Express, Mirror, The Sun, The Times, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, The
Daily Telegraph, Today, The Independent are some of the newspapers widely read at the time.

Britain in the 1960s

In the 1960s, due to pressure from the public, the government responded with a retreat from strict
social control and punishment. Three major changes that marked this period in Britain were the
following: capital punishment was abolished (in 1965), gambling and homosexuality were
legalised (in 1961 and 1967 respectively), and eighteen-year-olds were allowed to vote (in 1969).
Technology boomed, goods were mass-produced, and television was in every home. Mass
production and advertising on television enabled the growth of consumerism9 which started to

8
A race riot is a public outbreak of violence due to racial antagonism between members of different races in the
same community.
9
Consumerism is a social and economic order and ideology that encourages the acquisition of goods and services in
ever-increasing amounts. It is one of the Western society’s defining traits.

70
play a dominant role in British culture. Furthermore, commodification10 emerged as a product of
capitalism, and expanded into all corners of social, cultural and political life, with devastating
consequences. It has since then had adverse repercussions for culture in general, as the result of
the loss of values of cultural, social and individual importance.
Many authors, namely Kingsley Amis and John Braine, wrote in their works about the lost
individual in a changing society, while satire was another spirited response to a changing British
society. The satirical show That Was the Week That Was, which was shown on BBC Television
during 1962 and 1963, was a joyful relief.
Another major change which shaped the British society as we know it today was the
improvement of women’s position in society. Abortion for social and health reasons was
permitted by the Abortion Act of 1967, women were enabled to obtain contraceptives, and ‘the
Pill’ (combined oral contraceptive pill) was completely free of charge. Finally, divorce was
facilitated, so all these changes allowed women to decide if they wanted to be mothers or to
pursue a career, and then form a family later on.
With the economic growth, many youth culture movements emerged, and they had a strong
influence on lifestyle, fashion and music of that time. The British youth of the 1960s looked up
to the Americans, forming their own distinctive cults. One of such cults was The Teddy Boys,
whose members would wear clothes that were partly inspired by those worn by dandies in the
Edwardian period. Mods are also a great example of a youth culture movement inspiring a
popular lifestyle during a time of political and social troubles, in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
They were a group of stylish young Londoners that stemmed from the so-called ‘modernists’
because they listened to modern jazz. Skinheads, Rastafarians, Rudies, Punks and many other
groups contributed to the diversity of youth culture.
In music, the 1960s was the period when the British version of Rock’n’Roll separated from the
American version. The most renowned bands are the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, but many
other rock artists also contributed to the creation of a distinctive and diverse British rock culture:
Pink Floyd; Led Zeppelin; The Animals; Genesis; King Crimson; Emerson, Lake & Palmer; Eric
Clapton; Jimi Hendrix (although born American, he reached commercial success in the UK), etc.
The name ‘progressive rock’ is widely used when referring to British rock artists, because R’n’R
music in the U.S. was mainly regarded as business, which ‘suffocated’ musicians that would
come up with something other than a typical 12 bar blues pattern, while each rock artist in
Britain had their own unique sound, their own unique way of making songs and their own
characteristic style.
This was also a period of world-wide student concern over the human rights, so they protested in
many countries in 1968. British Member of Parliament Enoch Powell addressed a meeting of the
Conservative Political Centre in Birmingham and made an anti-immigration speech on 20 April
1968 that sparked demonstrations throughout the country. His speech, in which Powell strongly
criticised mass immigration, especially Commonwealth immigration to the United Kingdom and
the then-proposed Race Relations Bill, and which is now known as the ‘Rivers of Blood speech’,
helped define immigration as a political issue and helped legitimise anti-immigration sentiment.

10
Commodification is the transformation of goods, services, ideas or other entities that normally may not be
considered goods, into commodities, or objects of trade.

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Britain from the 1970s to the 1990s
Immigration rates in the 1970s were the highest, and by 1974 there were over a million African
and Asian immigrants in Britain. The racial tensions increased and the National Front was able to
exploit the growing tensions. Nationalism, terrorism, strikes, violent crimes and football
hooliganism marked this period. More than three million people were unemployed and depended
on the social security. In 1973, Britain entered the European Economic Community (which later
became the EU).
In 1975, Margaret Hilda Thatcher became the leader of the Conservative Party and in 1979 she
became the first female British Prime Minister. She was nicknamed ‘Iron Lady’ for her
uncompromising politics and leadership style. The 1980s were marked by ‘Thatcherism’, which
meant reducing the spending and privatisation of industries in the public sector. This provoked
many riots throughout the cities of Britain, mainly because Margaret Thatcher referred to many
supporters of the Labour Party as ‘the enemies to democracy’. She also addressed the ‘enemy
within’, i.e. the IRA, powerful trade unions, immigrants etc.
The funding for the Arts Council, which was established in 1946 to support the British theatre,
music and the visual arts, was also reduced in the 1980s, so arts productions became less critical,
and more populist. Even advertising and publicity became fine arts, especially after the
American advertising agency ‘Saatchi and Saatchi’ made a logo for the Conservative Party of a
flaming blue torch, while the Labour Party adopted red rose as its logo. Newspapers ceased
publication if they could not attract sufficient advertising.
In the early 1980s Britain’s economic crisis became even worse. Poorly educated and least
skilled were affected the most with the Tory policies. Women from higher social levels now
worked in banks, business and law sectors. But, those who transferred from manufacturing work
to low-paid service industries were in worse positions. After restrictions on money lending were
removed in the mid-1980s, the financial sector boomed, Britain became more affluent and
economy was stronger. Thus the spending was greater and that gave space to consumerism.
The Conservative Party became unpopular, and divisions in the government headed by John
Major, who replaced Margaret Thatcher at the place of Prime Minister in 1990, resulted in
Labour Party’s victory in 1997. The changes in society in the 1990s led to booming cultural
activity and creativity in fashion, design, architecture and music. Britain had a new image as a
youthful place for pop, film and fashion, as ‘Cool Britannia’ (a popular pun on the patriotic song
‘Rule Britannia’, coined by Blair's New Labour government in order to 'rebrand Britain' by
focusing on her distinctive strengths in the creative and cultural industries). This period
celebrated youth and reassertion through the arts and sports (the organisation of the Euro ’96
Tournament), since people wanted to belong to wider communities.
However, the decrease in the funding of arts led to ‘dumbing down’ and commercialisation of
arts. There were many debates about the relationship of the modern culture with the national
history because of the commercial nature of the arts, the rise of cultural studies at universities,
etc. Contrary to the 1960s, when the term ‘culture’ was used in the elitist sense to mark the best
that has been said, written, thought, performed, played, etc, in this period the arts were seen as a
form of entertainment and information, rather than a source of improvement. The new works
were said to be morally and politically empty, though some claimed that it was due to a lack in
inspiration that the artists used to find in wars, religion and political ideology. Many debates
were also led about the relationship of modern culture with national identity, because of the

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commercial nature of arts, political devolution, greater awareness of how media operate, and
increased educational opportunities, due to which the modern audience is better educated with
diverse tastes.

Britain at the beginning of the 21st century

Tony Blair, the leader of the Labour Party, became Prime Minister in 1997, and he introduced
important changes in terms of devolution at home and intervention abroad. In the home nations
(England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland) the political violence was lessened. Blair was
famous for promoting the ‘Third Way’ – a position akin to centrism that tries to reconcile right-
wing and left-wing politics by advocating a varying synthesis of centre-right economics and
centre-left social policies. Blair claimed that the ‘socialism’ he advocated was different from
traditional conceptions of socialism because it involved politics that recognised individuals as
socially interdependent, and promoted social justice, social cohesion, equal worth of each citizen,
and equal opportunity. More people went to universities, but the university fees were introduced.
Health was also a problem, with more and more obese people and binge drinking taking place
more often, which could lead to anti-social behaviour.
On the other hand, public confidence in politicians declined. The Labour Party learned the skill
of advertising and manipulating stories in the media to protect themselves. Among the many
actions that damaged Blair’s reputation were the intervention in the issue of Kosovo in 1999, and
support to President Bush in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The Labour Party has been often accused
to resemble the Tories in attitudes since 2005. So, they cannot automatically rely on certain
groups of people to vote for them. Politics, society and culture in the UK have changed a lot. The
21st century British society has been described as more liberal, tolerant, with a higher living
standard, economically never better. But, the people are also depressed, apathetic and badly in
debt, while social inequality is still present.
Britain has inarguably become a multicultural society due to all the social and cultural changes in
the decades after WWII. Immigration rates are still high, while nearly half of the newcomers live
in London. In 2001, 4.6 million people described themselves as belonging to a minority ethnic
group, but according to the United Kingdom Census 2011, their number has surpassed eight
million, and the ‘White British’ group accounts for 85.67% of the population. According to the
same census, there are almost three million Muslims in the UK (which is 4.5% of the total
population), and their level of integration and achievement is not high. Both racism (especially
anti-Muslim racism) and terrorism continue to be a great problem, in spite of the fact that the
British government has implemented several Acts in order to fight racism (limiting the
immigration, preventing discrimination, and extending opportunities for ethnic and other
minority groups), as well as counter-terrorism laws, of which the last one is The Counter-
Terrorism and Security Act 2015.
When it comes to the status of women, in spite of their progress in the 1960s, men still dominate
in British institutions, and there are relatively few female MPs. In the Church of England they
can be ordained, and since 2014 they can even become Bishops – the first woman to be
appointed as a bishop by the Church of England, that same year, was Libby Lane. Women have
been able to make significant advances in the chosen careers, but those who do so are Caucasian,
middle-class, university graduates. They earn about 20% less than men in business, industry and
government. Almost every second marriage ends in divorce, and due to all of these setbacks

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(work insecurity, divorce rates, etc.) women tend to marry later and have children later than
before.
What marked the end of the first decade of this century was the 2010 general election which
resulted in a ‘hung Parliament’, that is, no party emerging with an overall majority in the House
of Commons, for the first time since 1974. As a result, the first and third parties in terms of the
number of votes and seats, the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats (Lib Dems) respectively,
formed a full coalition, 11 the first since World War II. The Leader of the Conservative Party
David Cameron thus became Prime Minister, and the leader of the Lib Dems Nicholas Clegg was
Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 2010-2015. The Conservatives won at the
general election in 2015, and David Cameron became the first Prime Minister, since 1900, to
continue in office immediately after a full term with a larger popular vote share, and the only
Prime Minister other than Margaret Thatcher to continue in office immediately after a full term
with a greater number of seats (and the first to do both since 1895).

The Brexit Referendum

The United Kingdom European Union membership referendum, commonly referred to as the
Brexit referendum (Brexit = British + exit), was a non-binding referendum that took place on 23
June 2016 in the UK and Gibraltar to gauge support for the country's continued membership in
the European Union. The referendum resulted in an overall vote to leave the EU, by 51.9%. The
result was split between the constituent countries of the United Kingdom, with a majority in
England and Wales voting to leave, and a majority in Scotland and Northern Ireland, as well as
Gibraltar, voting to remain.
Those who favoured a British withdrawal from the European Union (‘leave’ voters) argued that:
the EU has a democratic deficit and being a member undermined national sovereignty; it would
allow the UK to better control immigration, thus reducing pressure on public services, housing
and jobs; as well as make its own trade deals; it would save billions of pounds in EU
membership fees; and free the UK from EU regulations and bureaucracy that they saw as
needless and costly. Those who wanted to remain inside the European Union (‘remain’ voters)
argued that: in a world with many supranational organisations any loss of sovereignty was
compensated by the benefits of EU membership; leaving the EU would risk the UK's prosperity;
diminish its influence over world affairs; jeopardise national security by reducing access to
common European criminal databases; result in trade barriers between the UK and the EU; and
lead to job losses, delays in investment into the UK and risks to business.
The Brexit referendum plunged the main British political parties into turmoil, with both main
parties (Conservative and Labour) being divided about Britain's relationship with the European
Union, by opposition between pro- and anti-Europeans. Immediately following the result of the
Brexit referendum, the Prime Minister David Cameron announced he would resign, having
campaigned unsuccessfully for a "remain" vote. Labour MPs overwhelmingly passed a vote of
no-confidence in their leader Jeremy Corbyn, who was repeatedly accused of showing only half-
hearted support for his party's official position, which is in favour of Britain remaining in the
European Union, and called to step down. However, in September, Corbyn was re-elected as

11
A full coalition is a parliamentary government in which multiple political parties cooperate, reducing the
dominance of any one party within that coalition.

74
leader of the Labour Party, with an increased majority, thanks to a surge in membership. Of the
three main traditional parties, only the Liberal-Democrat party emerged intact from the chaos:
the Lib-Dems always have been, and remain, firmly pro-European. In July 2016, Theresa May,
the former Home Secretary since 2011, and a person with years of experience at the top level of
government, took over from David Cameron as the leader of the Conservative Party, and was
appointed Prime Minister by Queen Elizabeth II, becoming only the second female British Prime
Minister after Margaret Thatcher, and the first female British Prime Minister of the 21st century.
During the Brexit referendum campaign, May campaigned for Britain to remain in the European
Union, so it was not clear exactly how she would be able to oversee a British exit from
Europe. She pledged to take Britain out of the European Union, and to start formal negotiations
on this before the end of March 2017; but it was certain that any hasty move on this highly
divisive issue would be met with massive opposition across the UK – especially after opinion
polls suggested that more than a million people who voted in favour of Brexit already regret
having done so. Furthermore, May believed that her government has a ‘Royal prerogative’ (a
vestige of the ancient powers of the Monarch to rule without the assent of Parliament) to take
Britain out of the European Union without consulting Parliament. However, many Members of
Parliament contested the Prime Minister's right to take Britain out of the EU without their assent,
and in November 2016 the British High Court ruled that Prime Minister Theresa May could not
trigger Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty on European Union and begin two years of Brexit talks
with the 27 remaining EU members without parliamentary backing.
In March 2017, the British Parliament finally passed the law to authorise May triggering the EU
walk out process, and the European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill came into effect
when Royal Assent was given on the morning of 16 March 2017. This Act of the Parliament of
the United Kingdom empowered the Prime Minister to give to the Council of the European
Union the formal notice – required by Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty – for starting negotiations
for the United Kingdom's withdrawal from the European Union. The process of leaving the EU
formally began on 29 March 2017, when May triggered Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty. The UK
was given two years from that date to negotiate a new relationship with the EU. Questions have
swirled around the process, in part because Britain's constitution is unwritten and in part because
no country has left the EU using Article 50 before (Algeria left the EU's predecessor through its
independence from France in 1962, and Greenland – a self-governing Danish territory – left
through a special treaty in 1985).
Since it was generally thought that the early election should bring stability to the UK, which
would have been good for Brexit negotiations, in the hopes of entering negotiations with a more
unified Parliament, Theresa May called a snap election, 12 which was held on 8 June 2017, even
though one was not due for another three years. Before the election, May’s Conservatives
controlled 330 of the House of Commons’ 650 seats. This was a very narrow majority, which
made it hard for her to pass major legislation. She had good reason to believe she would win by a
massive margin as Labour was down by about 16 points in the national polls and its leader
Jeremy Corbyn had a net-negative approval rating among voters from his own party. The key
turning came when the Conservatives released their manifesto, the British equivalent of a party
platform. Their approval margin started dropping almost immediately after that day, falling more
than 6 full points. The main problem with the manifesto was a proposal to require individuals

12
A snap election is an election called earlier than expected.

75
who need in-home support services, like a nurse, to pay for these services on their own if their
combined savings and assets, including property, total 100,000 pounds or higher. Currently, the
UK’s social care system pays for this kind of in-home assistance for many more people than
would be covered under the Conservatives’ plan. The proposal was an immediate disaster.
Critics dubbed it the ‘dementia tax’, as many people who rely on social care are elderly
individuals afflicted with dementia. It came across as unnecessarily cruel, once again playing
into a longstanding sense that the Conservatives aren’t really interested in helping Britain’s most
vulnerable. Another factor that probably cemented the Conservatives' destiny was May's inability
to ‘sell voters’ on her personal qualities. Many deemed her as ‘robotic’ during the campaign trail
and criticised her refusal to participate in a debate among leadership candidates, thus giving off
the impression that she took everything for granted. The Labour leader Corbyn, by contrast, held
big rallies showcasing his ability to work a crowd. There is also some reason to believe that
Corbyn’s ideas may have energised new voters, as he is a socialist with proposals such as
abolishing tuition for British universities, renationalising Britain’s rail system and suggesting the
reopening of coal mines.
As a result of the election, May’s Tories lost 12 seats in Parliament. They remained the largest
party – having won 318 out of 650 total seats – but no longer held an overall majority. Having a
hung Parliament was a big deal in the situation in which May was attempting to work out a
complex Brexit deal with the European Union. The opposition Labour Party, led by Jeremy
Corbyn, surged and gained 29 seats in Parliament, managing to mobilise a huge coalition of
voters who did not typically turn out to back his platform. Seven seats short of majority, The
Conservatives came to a ‘confidence and supply’ agreement with The Democratic Unionist Party
(DUP), a right-wing Eurosceptic Northern Irish party that opposes the Northern Irish
independence movement. In this type of agreement, the DUP agree to back the Conservatives in
key votes – such as a Budget and a confidence motion – but are not tied into supporting them on
other measures. The agreement also includes additional funding of £1 billion for Northern
Ireland, highlights mutual support for Brexit and national security, expresses commitment to the
Good Friday Agreement and indicates that policies such as the state pension triple lock and
winter fuel payments will be maintained. After the election, both Theresa May and the Brexit
movement were significantly weakened in the eyes of both the EU and Britain, but there has
been little appetite among Conservative MPs for either another general election, given Jeremy
Corbyn's rise during the one just finished, or a leadership contest to replace Mrs. May.
When Britain voted to leave the EU, Scotland fulminated. A combination of rising nationalism
and strong support for Europe led almost immediately to calls for a new independence
referendum. Scotland joined England and Wales to form Great Britain in 1707, and the
relationship has been tumultuous at times. Founded in the 1930s, the Scottish National Party
(SNP) did not win a seat in Westminster until 1970. By 2010 it had just 6 seats, but the following
year it formed a majority government in the devolved Scottish Parliament at Holyrood, partly
owing to its promise to hold a referendum on Scottish independence. That referendum, held in
2014 and with a turnout of 84.6%, saw the pro-independence side lose with 44.7% of the vote.
Far from putting the independence issue to rest, though, the vote fired up support for the
nationalists. The SNP won 56 of 59 Scottish seats at Westminster the following year. Once-
dominant Scottish Labour's seat count plummeted from 41 to one (the Liberal Democrats and
Scottish Conservatives also took one seat each). The SNP overtook the Lib Dems to become the
third-largest party in the UK overall, and Britain's electoral map suddenly showed a glaring

76
divide between England and Wales, dominated by Tory blue with the occasional patch of Labour
red, and all-yellow Scotland.
According to the UK's Electoral Commission, not one Scottish local area voted to leave the EU.
The country as a whole rejected the referendum by 62.0% to 38.0%. Because Scotland only
contains 8.4% of the UK's population, however, its vote to ‘remain’ – along with that of
Northern Ireland, which accounts for just 2.9% of the UK's population – was vastly outweighed
by support for Brexit in England and Wales. The demands grew louder when the Supreme Court
ruled in November 2016 that devolved national assemblies cannot veto Brexit, because that
would constitute a violation of the Lisbon Treaty, according to which the integrity of a member
country is explicitly put under protection, which also means that separate negotiations of the EU
institutions with Scotland or Northern Ireland are not possible. On 13 March 2017 SNP leader
Nicola Sturgeon called for a second Scottish independence referendum, to be held in the autumn
of 2018 or spring of 2019 – "when the shape of the UK's Brexit deal will become clear", as she
said. Holyrood backed her by a vote of 69 to 59 on March 28, the day before May's government
triggered Article 50. Sturgeon's preferred timing is significant, since the two-year countdown
initiated by Article 50 will end in the spring of 2019, when the politics surrounding Brexit could
be particularly volatile. May's government is likely to try to push the vote to a later date, if it
allows it to be held at all. Even independence, however, might not allow Scotland to avoid
"being dragged out of the EU against its will," as the SNP's website describes Brexit. Namely,
Scotland would have to apply to join the EU, rather than remaining a member. Scotland's bid
would face the threat of a veto from Spain, which wants to avoid sending pro-independence
messages to the restive autonomous region of Catalonia. Scotland's economic situation also
raises questions about its hypothetical future as an independent country. The crash in the oil price
has dealt a blow to government finances. The estimates are based on the country's geographical
share of North Sea drilling, so they illustrate what it might expect as an independent nation.
Among the problems created by the ‘leave’ vote for the unity of the United Kingdom and for its
domestic politics is also the Irish border issue, since bringing back a ‘hard border’ between
Ireland and Northern Ireland after Brexit could undermine the peace process. Jonathan Powell,
one of the architects of the peace process in Northern Ireland, says that Brexit threatens the peace
in Northern Ireland, and despite the promises that a hard border would be avoided, the problem
has not been solved yet. In fact, a final decision on the Northern Irish border cannot be made
until a UK-EU trade deal has been agreed, in particular since exports of goods to the United
Kingdom account for nearly one-third of Ireland’s total output, and also the flow of Irish labour
to the United Kingdom might be curbed after the UK leaves the European Union.
Like eggs and cheese, Britain's departure from the European Union supposedly comes in both
hard and soft versions. Supporters of a ‘soft’ Brexit imagine a future where the UK retains some
form of membership of the European Union single market in return for a degree of free
movement. For those who back a ‘hard’ Brexit - or ‘clean’ Brexit as supporters prefer - the better
option is to leave the EU and the single market entirely and then have a relationship based - at
least initially - on World Trade Organisation rules. In any of the two ways, Britain’s decision to
leave the European Union will undoubtedly have major economic consequences. Many
international companies, including Japanese conglomerate Hitachi, have announced that they
might move some of their European business outside the UK. Some American banks based in
London have said privately that London’s legal status to provide banking activities to the EU is
an indispensable part of their business model. At the same time, the UK’s main trading partner is

77
the European Union. Britain relies on the EU as an export market far more than the EU relies on
Britain. The absence of seamless access to European markets may also mean fewer exports and
foreign investments.
Because the exit process could stretch for two years, it might have longer-term effects.
Predictions about Brexit's future impact on British citizens are mostly speculation; however,
experts suggest that Brexit is likely to mean slower economic growth for the country. A
slowdown in investments may also lead to fewer jobs, lower pay and higher unemployment rates.
Additionally, consumers and employers reacting to ‘doom and gloom’ news about Brexit's
potential fallout alone may contribute to an economic slowdown as companies hire fewer people
and consumers spend less money. Furthermore, if the domestic economy of the UK does slip into
recession, it will keep the Bank of England from raising interest rates to protect the currency,
further compounding the problem. The referendum's result already severely impacted markets
worldwide, though in some cases the effects were short-lived. The British pound crashed by
11.1% against the dollar (its biggest-ever one-day fall), before paring its losses to 8.1%. If
Britain can no longer rely on continental Europe for barrier-free trade and mobility, there is a
strong chance that capital will leave the country to avoid getting stuck there. In other words,
investors may sell pounds (or pound-denominated assets) to purchase those denominated in
dollars or euros. A sharp fall could last for longer than anticipated as politicians and deal makers
try to establish new trade agreements and economic pacts that can take many months or even
years to ratify. Last but not least, Theresa May came under fire for her willingness to give up on
crucial human rights EU legislation, as she said human rights laws will be changed if they ‘get in
the way’ of tackling terror suspects.
In November 2017, May's cabinet agreed to increase the Brexit ‘divorce’ bill offer to £40 billion
in the hopes of continuing negotiations, and a post-Brexit transitional deal of extending the full
body of EU law to the UK, without EU membership, was under consideration. The European
Union (Withdrawal) Act which became law in June 2018, however, allows for various outcomes
including no negotiated settlement. In that context, the term ‘blind’ Brexit was coined to describe
a scenario where the UK leaves the EU without clarity on the terms of a future trade deal. EU
and British negotiators would then have until 31 December 2020 to sign off on a future trade
deal. This would be the last date of the transition period, and during this time the UK would
effectively remain a member of the EU, but with no voting rights. The UK had been due to leave
the EU on 29 March 2019, but the departure date was delayed to 31 October, after gridlock in
parliament twice forced the government to seek an extension in order to avoid a ‘hard’ Brexit or
leaving without ratifying a deal with the EU.
The delay forced the resignation of Prime Minister Theresa May, and on 7 June 2019 she stepped
down voluntarily as leader of the Conservative Party, after facing severe pressure to resign and
failing three times to get the deal she negotiated with the EU approved by the House of
Commons. She was replaced by Boris Johnson – a former Mayor of London, foreign minister,
and editor of The Spectator, who received his royal appointment as Prime Minister on 24 July
2019. After an early general election, held on 12 December 2019, Johnson returned to Downing
Street with a big majority, and the UK left the European Union on 31 January 2020. Following
the Labour Party's unsuccessful performance in the 2019 general election, Jeremy Corbyn
announced his intention to resign as Leader of the Labour Party and on 4 April 2020, the 2020
Labour Party leadership election was won by Keir Starmer who received 56.2 per cent of the
vote on the first round, taking over from Corbyn.

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 British Literature after World War II

The 1950s – Angry Young Men

The early 1950s in Britain saw a major upheaval in the field of both lifestyle and art. The terrible
consequences of the six war years had shaken the foundations of the old values. There was an
omnipresent dissatisfaction with the political and religious establishment. It is well-known that
social circumstances dictate creative work; however, instead of favouring pro-governmental or
escapist literature, full of comfort and reassurance, the post-war life in Britain gave rise to
rebellious and revolutionary writing. One of the 50s hallmarks were certainly the so-called
Angry Young Men – a group of young new playwrights, poets and novelists who did not
hesitate to express their resentment and impatience with the tradition, authority and ruling class.
They were righteously called “the Movement”, as they broke the conventional rules of depicting
the lives of the wealthy high classes. Their stories rather centred around an undisciplined hero,
an aspiring working-class youth, full of frustration and anger, powerless in a conservative society
marked by all kinds of inequality. Naturally, the topics of class conflict, sexuality and frustrated
ambition were considered subversive and provocative at the time, and literary critics claimed
them to be threatening to the establishment. Namely, their work promoted social realism and,
consequently, they even propagated communist ideology.
By this term, we usually refer to: John Osborne (Look Back in Anger, 1956, and The Entertainer,
1957), Colin Wilson (The Outsider, 1956), John Wain (Hurry on Down, 1953), Alan Sillitoe
(Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, 1958), Kingsley Amis (Lucky Jim, 1954, and The Old
Devils, 1986) and John Braine (Room at the Top, 1957). Because of their introduction of
ordinary, everyday life in British literature, theatre and film, they were also popularly known as
“the Kitchen Sink authors”. The setting was always a depressed city in the industrial north. The
dialogue was conducted in regional dialect, as a clear marker of social and educational
background. Instead of uptight and conservative upper classes, these works brought to the stage
the real lives of average people with no opportunities whatsoever. The Kitchen Sink authors,
though originally working-class men just like their protagonists, managed to obtain higher
education. Ironically, the main protagonists are all males, although the kitchen is a symbol of a
wife’s role in the household. Kitchen Sink drama, however, concentrates on the masculine point
of view and women’s discontent and suffering are always the result of the suffering of men.
The movement’s name derives from John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger. He was one of
the first writers to address Britain's purpose in the post-imperial age, and the first to question the
point of the monarchy on a prominent public stage. For this play, Osborne also drew inspiration
from his personal life and failing marriage. This play and the idea of the Kitchen Sink drama in
particular were a revelation for British theatres. The stylings of most British theaters before Look
Back in Anger favoured Victorian dramas and comedies or stagings of classical plays. In a
general sense, the Victorian plays dealt mostly with polite themes from the late 19th and early

79
20th century upper ruling class. In contrast, Osborne's play depicted the raw emotions and living
conditions of the working class. This style of theatre was given the name Kitchen Sink because
of its focus on the interior domestic and emotional lives of ordinary people. In the case of Look
Back in Anger, the kitchen is literally a part of the set.

The 1960s
All this resentment developed into a counter-cultural movement in the 1960s, focussing mostly
on the following topics: human freedom, the battle between good and evil, and the rapidly
distorting sense of personal morality, especially among the young population.
John Fowles made a rather courageous step when he had his The Collector (1963) published.
Had he known that it would serve as an inspiration to numerous serial killers13, he might have
thought twice. It is a psychological thriller about a butterfly collector who kidnaps an attractive
art student and keeps her captured, hoping that she would eventually grow to like him. Although
he is physically stronger, the girl proves to be more powerful of the two, and uses her femininity
and mental strength to dominate his wicked mind. Fowles himself explained that the point was to
show the danger of class and intellectual divisions in a society where prosperity for the majority
was becoming more widespread.
Anthony Burgess also counts among the major authors of the period. His highly controversial
novel A Clockwork Orange (1962) is set in a future England, where a gang of teenage “droogs”14
rob, rape, torture and murder. The main character is captured and undergoes a Pavlovian-like
treatment, which eventually disables him to commit crime. Burgess invented a gang slang, based
on anglicised Russian, called Nadsat, which serves the delinquents to distance themselves from
conventional society and intensify their sense of collective identity. The story was made into a
successful film by Stanley Kubrick in 1971.

The 1970s
The issue of youth subcultures was also treated in the ‘70s by Richard Allen (real name: James
Moffat, who had at least 45 pseudonyms, including Etienne Aubin and Trudi Maxwell), a
Canadian-born UK writer who wrote more than 290 novels in several genres. He presented their
brutal behaviour with detailed description of vandalism, football hooliganism, violence and sex.
The behaviour of his brute protagonists from the mean industrial conurbations was copied and
widely imitated by the young generation (skinhead, bootboy and suedehead subcultures). He is
most famous for his Skinhead series.
The 1970s were a prolific period for a new genre, called the campus novel, which captured the
liberal and progressive atmosphere of university life and satirised its petty problems, rivalries
and jealousies. As it can be seen in novels by Charles Percy Snow, Malcolm Bradbury and David
Lodge, they often draw comic comparisons between the American and British university life.

13
For instance, Christopher Wilder, a serial killer of young girls, had The Collector in his possession when he was
killed by the police in 1984; and in 1988, Robert Berdella held his male victims captive and photographed their
torture before killing them. He claimed that the film version of The Collector had been his inspiration when he was a
teenager.
14
a slang term for "friend"

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David Lodge is best known for novels satirising academic life, particularly for his "Campus
Trilogy" – Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses (1975), Small World: An Academic
Romance (1984) and Nice Work (1988). In 1960, he obtained a job as a lecturer at the University
of Birmingham, where he met the novelist Malcolm Bradbury, who was to become his "closest
writer friend"; Bradbury's comic writing was a major influence on the development of this aspect
of Lodge’s own work. In 1998, Lodge was appointed CBE for his services to literature.

Feminist Literature
Feminist literature was possibly the most noticeable movement of the period. Its impact was felt
on a global scale, as there was a major overturn in politics, law, social and family life regarding
women’s role in society. Literature was the crucial medium for the feminist propaganda. New
feminist-oriented publishing houses were established, and Departments of Women’s Studies
became popular among university students. They promoted female authors like Stevie Smith,
Margaret Storm Jameson, Barbara Pym, Jean Rhys and Rebecca West (who was involved
in the women's suffrage movement, participating in street protests, and also worked as a
journalist for the feminist weekly Freewoman and the Clarion, drumming up support for the
suffragette cause). The new authoresses drew attention to the repetitive nature of most women’s
lives, spent in cooking, cleaning and looking after children. Realist fiction, describing women’s
lives, work and relationships, was a mainstay of feminist literature produced during the 1960s,
‘70s and ‘80s. Describing the everyday world of women was a crucial initial task and an
important step towards detailing the suppressed and unvoiced oppression women experienced in
daily life. Women wrote about single motherhood, their husbands’ adultery, being a female
immigrant in Britain, and even lesbian fiction.
Fay Weldon’s Down Among the Women (1971) is a prime example of the female resentment,
anger and revenge, that were once reserved for the Angry Young Men. Another important novel
is The Female Eunuch (1970) by Germaine Greer, which was the unofficial feminist manifesto.
Germaine Greer15 is regarded as one of the major voices of the second-wave feminist movement
in the latter half of the 20th century. Her goal is not equality with men, which she sees as
assimilation. Greer argued in her book The Female Eunuch that women do not realise how much
men hate them, and how much they are taught to hate themselves. When it was first published,
one woman wrapped it in brown paper and kept it hidden under her shoes because her husband
would not let her read it. In sections entitled "Body", "Soul", "Love" and "Hate" Greer examines
historical definitions of women's perception of self. Greer argues that change had to come about
via revolution, not evolution. Women should get to know and come to accept their own bodies
and give up celibacy and monogamy. She has been described as a very radical and controversial
feminist, not sparing even Kate Middleton from her criticism, saying she "has lost her
personality" due to being the wife of prince William and "was pressured into getting pregnant"
again, as well as Meghan Markle, who "is not allowed to outshine Kate", according to Greer.
Margaret Drabble’s novels deal with careers and personal lives of her female protagonists, as
well as social deprivation and the faltering welfare state in mid-70s Britain. Another female
author who was of crucial importance for the 20th century British literature – Iris Murdoch had

15
Though she is originally Australian, Greer has held academic positions at the Universities of Warwick and
Cambridge, specialising in English and women's literature, and she now divides her time between Australia and the
United Kingdom.

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gained world-wide acclaim by the time she issued her last, twenty-sixth novel in 1995. She was
an Irish-born novelist, philosopher and political activist (member of the Communist party). She
was made a Dame of the British Empire, having accrued various honours for her literary works,
among which were the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Black Prince (1973) and the
coveted Booker Prize for The Sea, the Sea (1978). In her final years, Murdoch suffered from the
early stages of Alzheimer's disease, one of the symptoms of which is a reduced vocabulary and
decreased word fluency. Researchers at University College in London found in 2004 that the
language used in her final novel Jackson's Dilemma (1995) is noticeably simpler than in her
earlier works.
Unlike Murdoch, Doris Lessing declined a damehood twice, in 1977 and 1992, "as an honour
linked to a non-existent Empire". She was also the winner of numerous prizes, including the
Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007, making her the oldest person ever who has been awarded the
Prize in this category, while in 2008 The Times ranked her fifth on a list of "The 50 greatest
British writers since 1945". Among the numerous novels, short story collections, essays, plays
and poems written by Doris Lessing, who published over 200 books, the most renowned are The
Grass is Singing (1950) and The Golden Notebook (1962).

Literature of a multicultural Britain

In the mid-twentieth century Britain became a multicultural society, as migrants from countries
in Asia and the Caribbean region came to live and work in the major industrial cities. This influx
created a variety of religious and ethnic groups within the wider British society and bi-cultural
authors were among the most prominent ones, starting from the 1980s. The most popular of these
authors have been Hanif Kureishi, Salman Rushdie and Kazuo Ishiguro.
Hanif Kureishi’s Buddha of Suburbia (1990) explores the life of a Pakistani family in Britain.
The novel is said to be very autobiographical, and it caused Kureishi’s family to stop speaking to
him as they felt he had “sold them down the line”. On the first page of the novel, the main
character introduces himself as follows: "My name is Karim Amir, and I am an Englishman born
and bred, almost". Within the problems of prejudice and racism lies one of the themes of the
novel: the quest for identity, which is among the recurring themes of the Bildungsroman genre.
However, probably the most interesting author from the cultural studies’ point of view is Salman
Rushdie. He was born in Bombay (now Mumbai), but graduated in history at King’s College,
University of Cambridge, and has dual British and American citizenship. His works include the
following novels: Grimus (1975), Midnight's Children (1981) – which was the winner not only
of the Booker Prize but even of the Best of the Booker (the Booker of Bookers), Shame (1983),
The Satanic Verses (1988), The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999), Fury (2001), Shalimar, the
Clown (2005), The Enchantress of Florence (2008), Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight
Nights (2015) and The Golden House (2017). His novel The Satanic Verses provoked
international havoc, as it was found blasphemous by some Muslims and Ayatollah Khomeini of
Iran demanded that Rushdie be killed. In Britain and some other countries, Muslims publicly
burned the book, while some bookshops withdrew it from sale and others were firebombed. The
Italian translator of the book was attacked, whereas the publisher in Norway and the Japanese
translator were murdered. Rushdie was forced to live under police protection for several years,
and the United Kingdom even broke diplomatic relations with Iran over the Rushdie controversy.
Here is an example of the controversial content of the book: “So India’s problem turns out to be

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the world’s problem. What happened in India has happened in God’s name. The problem’s name
is God.” The death threat or fatwa was finally withdrawn by the Iranian government in 1998.
Japanese-born writer Kazuo Ishiguro is the recipient of the 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature.
Ishiguro’s novel An Artist of the Floating World was awarded the Whitbread Prize in 1986, and
for The Remains of the Day he received the Man Booker Prize in 1989. In his works, he has
obsessively returned to the same themes, including the fallibility of memory, mortality and the
porous nature of time. His novels are often written in the first person, with his latest one - The
Buried Giant (2015) - being an exception. His narrators are mostly unreliable and in denial about
truths that are gradually revealed to the reader. In the dystopian novel Never Let Me Go (2005)
Ishiguro explores the futility of human life, its eventual "completion" (the euphemism Ishiguro
uses for “death”) and how we all choose to deal with the inevitable end.
When it comes to modern poetry, immigrants have given a great contribution as well, above all
Benjamin Zephaniah, who was the candidate for the post of Poet Laureate. His verse resembles
rap and reggae and he often recites it at political and social events. Zephaniah has said that his
mission is to fight the dead image of poetry in academia, and to "take [it] everywhere" to people
who do not read books, so he turned poetry readings into concert-like performances. In 2003,
Zephaniah was offered appointment as an OBE, but publicly rejected it. His reaction to learning
about being considered for the award was: "Me? I thought, OBE me? I get angry when I hear that
word 'empire'; it reminds me of slavery, it reminds of thousands of years of brutality, it reminds
me of how my foremothers were raped and my forefathers brutalised... Benjamin Zephaniah
OBE – no way Mr Blair, no way Mrs Queen. I am profoundly anti-empire." In 2015 he called for
Welsh and Cornish to be taught in English schools, saying: "Hindi, Chinese and French are
taught [in schools], so why not Welsh? And why not Cornish? They're part of our culture." His
music career was also very successful. His 1982 album Rasta featured a tribute to Nelson
Mandela, gained him international prestige and, interestingly enough, topped the Yugoslavian
pop charts. A most versatile man, he is also an actor, and he has been starring in the British series
Peaky Blinders as Jeremiah Jesus, the priest.

Today’s popular genres

Today’s popular genres include biographies, detective novels (whodunit), science fiction, epic
fantasy and chick-lit. Chick-Lit (chick = girl – slang + lit = literature) is a genre which addresses
issues of modern women humorously and lightheartedly. A prototype of the main protagonist is a
career-driven woman in her twenties or thirties, who is obsessed with her appearance, fashion
and romantic relationships. Some of the best-sellers belonging to this genre are Helen Fielding’s
Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996) and Sophie Kinsella’s Shopaholic series.
The hugely successful Harry Potter saga written by J.K. Rowling won the hearts of readers and
critics alike, appealing to a wide audience. The main story arc concerns Harry's struggle against
Lord Voldemort, a dark wizard who intends to become immortal. According to Rowling, the
main theme is death, while other major themes in the series include prejudice, corruption, and
madness. The success of the books and their film adaptations has allowed the Harry Potter
franchise to expand, including a spin-off called Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and
the amusement park The Wizarding World of Harry Potter.

83
Julian Patrick Barnes is another post-war British writer who certainly deserves to be
mentioned. Barnes won the Man Booker Prize for his book The Sense of an Ending (2011), and
three of his earlier books had been shortlisted for the Booker Prize: Flaubert's Parrot (1984),
England, England (1998) and Arthur & George (2005). He has also written crime fiction under
the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh. In addition to novels, Barnes has published collections of essays
and short stories. Barnes's breakthrough novel Flaubert's Parrot departed from the traditional
linear structure of his previous novels and featured a fragmentary biographical style story of an
elderly doctor who focusses obsessively on the life of Gustave Flaubert. In reference to Flaubert,
Barnes has said: "he’s the writer whose words I most carefully tend to weigh, who I think has
spoken the most truth about writing." Flaubert's Parrot was published to great acclaim,
especially in France, which comes as no surprise since Barnes is a keen Francophile.
Ian Russell McEwan is a novelist and screenwriter. McEwan began his career writing sparse,
Gothic short stories. The Cement Garden (1978) and The Comfort of Strangers (1981), his first
two novels, earned him the nickname "Ian Macabre". He won the Man Booker Prize with
Amsterdam (1998), while his following novel, Atonement (2001), garnered acclaim and was
adapted into an Oscar-winning film. In 2008, McEwan publicly spoke out against Islam for its
views on women and on homosexuality. He was quoted as saying that fundamentalist Islam
wanted to create a society that he "abhorred". McEwan, an atheist, also said that certain streams
of Christianity were "equally absurd" and that he did not "like these medieval visions of the
world according to which God is coming to save the faithful and to damn the others."

Brexit (in) Literature

The British EU Referendum on 23 June 2016 once more threw into relief Britain’s conflicted
relationship to and with the rest of Europe. While newspaper discourse and political rhetoric
have been the focus of much popular and critical attention, debates around the referendum and its
likely consequences have not been limited to journalists and politicians. Writers and academics
were among those publicly commenting on Britain’s position in Europe, from J.K. Rowling,
whose vocal tweets courted controversy among her fans, to EU law expert Professor Michael
Dougan (University of Liverpool), whose videos on the subject of the Brexit campaign and its
impact have been viewed by millions of people in Britain and abroad. As early as in 1972, in
Daphne Du Maurier's novel Rule Britannia, the UK is brought to the brink of bankruptcy after
withdrawal from the EEC. Then, in 2014 – two years before the Brexit, Andrew Marr managed
to get quite a few details right in his dystopian book Head of State, which he subtitled “A
Political Entertainment”. It was followed by Ali Smith’s Autumn, written in 2016 – in the wake
of the EU referendum, heralded by critics on its publication as the first great Brexit novel, and
shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker Prize.
2017 saw the emergence of novels which engage with a post-Brexit Britain, quickly dubbed
BrexLit, including high-profile titles published near the anniversary of the vote, such as: Adam
Thorpe’s Missing Fay, Douglas Board’s Time of Lies, Anthony Cartwright’s The Cut, Amanda
Craig’s The Lie of the Land, Mark Billingham’s Love Like Blood, The Remains of the Way by
David Boyle, Stanley Johnson's Kompromat and Rabbitman by Michael Paraskos.
Missing Fay is a composite portrait of Lincolnshire (the Ground Zero of Brexit) told from the
perspectives of various visitors and locals: a self-regarding Kiwi environmentalist, shocked at the
smallness and meanness of England and the mismanagement of its countryside; a retired

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industrial worker whose friends rail against foreign workers, fluorescent yellow jackets and other
examples of “Eurobollocks” 16; a wonderfully vampish children’s clothing boutique owner; a
Romanian care worker, hard-working and beautiful. The novel is really about our prejudices and
exposes the truths of how we fail to communicate them to one another and how we fail to
connect with each other.
Time of Lies is a Brexit satire, a comic political thriller set at the time of the first post-Brexit
general election, in 2020: Brexit negotiations are rumbling on, Jeremy Corbyn’s disastrous
leadership has split the Labour party in two and a general election is being fought by eight
political parties. Into this political vacuum moves “Britain’s Great”, a sort of turbo-charged
fusion of UKIP and the BNP17 led by a violent right-wing ex-football hooligan named Bob
Grant, who wins the election and is swept to power after stirring up anger against a motley
coalition of foreigners, bankers and the abstract machinations of the EU.
Uniquely among these novels, Cartwright’s The Cut was written as a direct response to the
Brexit vote. The publisher describes how she “realised that I had been living in one part of a
divided country” and explains that she commissioned the novel because she wanted to learn
“what fears — and what hopes — drove my fellow citizens to vote for Brexit?”
Post-Brexit Britain is also the setting for The Lie of the Land, a satirical novel set ten years after
the vote to leave the European Union, in which an impoverished middle class couple from
Islington in north London are forced, after they have both been made redundant, to move with
their family from the heart of the pro-European Union capital, to the heart of the pro-Brexit
countryside in Devon. It was prompted by the realisation, Craig has said, that parts of Devon
“are poorer than Romania”, and is a cautionary tale about what Craig calls “the great
unmentionable fear of middle-class life, that a person can be downwardly mobile, rather than
upwardly”.
Love Like Blood is a crime thriller in which Brexit sees a rise in xenophobic hate crime. In The
Remains of the Way, Brexit is depicted as a conspiracy led by a forgotten government quango,
still working away in Whitehall, originally set up by Thomas Cromwell in the 16th century
during the reign of King Henry VIII, and now dedicated to a Protestant Brexit. Kompromat is a
political thriller that suggests the vote to leave the European Union was a result of Russian
influence on the referendum, although the author has insisted his book is not intended to point
the finger at Russia's secret services, but is "just meant to be fun."
Rabbitman is a dark comic fantasy in which the events that lead to the election of a right-wing
populist American president, who happens also to be a rabbit, and Britain's vote to leave the
European Union, were the result of a series of Faustian pacts with the Devil. As a result,
Rabbitman is set partly in a post-Brexit Britain in which society has collapsed and people are
dependent on EU food aid.

16
Eurobollocks was a fascinating exhibition called Britain’s relationship with ‘Europe’ 1957-2007 that was mounted
of old British newspaper cartoons relating to the country's ties with Europe (see more at
https://www.societyofeditors.org/soe-news/02-october-2007/Eurobollocks).
17
The UK Independence Party (UKIP) is a Eurosceptic and right-wing populist political party in the United
Kingdom. It currently has 3 representatives in the House of Lords and 16 Members of the European Parliament,
making it the third-largest UK party in the European Parliament. British National Party (BNP), a British far-right
and fascist political party in the United Kingdom, has no elected representatives at any level of UK government.

85
The most striking thing about the Brexit novel, as evidenced above, is that Europe – as a
geographical reality and political idea – is largely absent from its pages. Though there are walk-
on parts in these books for eastern European economic migrants, they stand more as ciphers for
what Brexiters take Europe to be than arguments in its favour. Like the Remain campaign itself,
most of these novels are in the end not at all interested in showing us what the European project
has done, and what it might continue to do were it allowed to. The Brexit novel, so far, turns out
not to be about Europe at all, but about the littleness of Britain

To sum up, the time from the end of World War II up to the second decade of the 2000s has been
a very prolific period in British literature, during which many new genres, styles, themes and
movements have been created. The British literary scene in the post-war climate proves that
literature and culture are inseparable concepts and should therefore be analysed together, which
will be further confirmed by the fact that literary studies was one of the scientific fields which
prompted the development of British Cultural Studies.

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 British Cultural Studies

The development of British Cultural Studies

The study of British culture was on the margins of the academic world outside Britan for a long
time and in the universities it usually took the form of ’background information’. This usually
involved a series of lectures on life in the UK and British institutions, or ‘British civilisation’.
The content consisted largely of dates and historical facts, which students were expected to
reproduce in examinations. The development of the study of British culture started from the
1950s, when the focus shifted on British history, civilisation and institutions, while a key
institution in the field of cultural studies was the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural
Studies.

In the 1980s, the study of ‘British civilisation’ became interdisciplinary by also including the
study of arts and cultural studies in general. In the late 1980s, a new interdisciplinary subject –
known as British Studies or as British Cultural Studies – began to appear on the syllabus in a
number of different countries. This subject was mostly linked to English language learning, and
its objective was to study life, institutions and culture in the UK, on the basis of the belief that
successful communication can only be achieved when one is fully aware of the cultural context
within which a language is used. Since it was intertwined with the study of the English language,
it was primarily studied outside the English-speaking world.
From the early 1990s onwards, a more dynamic approach to the study of British culture was
adopted, with a much stronger emphasis on contemporary social and political issues, as well as
cross-cultural communication (one way direction). Nowadays, in the 21st century, British
Studies can be regarded as the multidisciplinary study of contemporary Britain, calling on
history, literature, linguistics and the social sciences to explore the distinctive features of British
culture and society, in order to raise intercultural awareness (two way direction).
The aim of British study courses is to explore the richness and diversity of British culture
through a detailed examination of some of the key texts and cultural artifacts - written, spoken,
musical, visual - that reflect and help to shape the social, economic and political realities of
contemporary Britain. The relationship of contemporary to the past, understood in terms of
historical development, is also an important factor. Such study emphasises the pluralism that is
the result of differences in nationality, class, race, gender, language, place and generation;
politics, the evolving institutions of government, finance, industry and the welfare state; the arts,
the media and their interpretation.

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Context and changes
British Cultural Studies has very specific historical roots in post-war Britain, where the revival of
capitalist industrial production, the establishment of the welfare state and the Western powers’
unity all inflected into a representation of a ’new’ Britain. This was a culture where class was
said to have disappeared, where post-war Britain could be congratulated for its supposed
discontinuity with the pre-war Britain, and where modernity and the Americanisation of popular
culture were regarded as signs of a new future. Major developments in technology led to the
massive distribution of cultural forms such as popular novel, the women’s magazines, the
cinema, the popular press, the popular music, and television. British Cultural Studies emerged
from this context.
Within the social sciences, there was a substantially revived interest in the nature of communities
and the culture of the working-class, which became ’bourgeois’. Cultural studies had its origins
in adult education, in the extramural courses offered by Raymond Williams, Edward Thompson,
Stuart Hall and Richard Hoggart - known as ’the founding fathers of British Cultural Studies’.
One of the theoreticians claims that ’the formation of cultural studies was, first and foremost, a
political project aimed at popular education of working class adults’ (Steele 1997: 15). The pre-
war means of entrance to higher education changed since the educational opportunities were
expanded and scholarships were provided for a significant number of the working-class or lower-
middle class students. Williams, Hoggart and Thompson shared a common concern about what
was understood by ’culture’ in post-war Britain. They believed that culture involved ’a whole
way of life’ and therefore was not the privilege of any particular class or intellectual elite.
What became known as ‘British Studies’ or ‘British Cultural Studies’ was prompted in part by
the changes in the teaching of literary and cultural studies at British universities. Degree courses
in English literature became more and more diversified, as critical interest developed in Irish
literature, Scottish literature, and also in new literature in English. New degree courses in areas
such as Irish Studies and Canadian Studies appeared, and it was only a matter of time before
British Studies became a focus of academic interest.
Cultural studies was a relatively new discipline, involving methodologies taken from literary
criticism, linguistics, history, sociology and philosophy, but also taking as its object of study a
new range of cultural artifacts, including film, drama, television, popular literature and press. It
is important to mention that the term ’cultural studies’ was not originally used by the founding
fathers in their own writings, but gained credence after the establishment of the Birmingham
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies.

Movements, institutions, events

Formed in the early 1950s, the Independent Group (IG) were a radical group of young artists,
writers and critics who met at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in London. They
challenged the modernist culture which was dominant at the time and tried to make it more
inclusive of popular culture. This movement, like cultural studies later, was primarily interested
in everyday culture, not in elite culture, and focused particularly on the influence of American
popular culture on British life. However, the IG’s relish for post-war style and modernity was not

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widely shared within the British academic world, as the supporters of the so-called ‘culture and
civilisation’ tradition were concerned by the development of popular culture.

The 1960 National Union of Teachers (NUT) conference was a seminal event. It was aimed at
finding ways of dealing with popular culture that did not dismiss it categorically but would
acknowledge its place within the everyday lives of school pupils.
In 1964, the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (BCCCS or CCCS) was
founded, and its first director was Richard Hoggart. The Centre and the theorists associated with
it took an interdisciplinary approach to the study of culture, incorporating diverse elements such
as Marxism, post-structuralism, feminism and critical race theory, as well as more traditional
methodologies such as sociology and ethnography. When the Department was closed in 2002,
concerns were expressed that it was being ‘belatedly punished’ for its political radicalism.

The Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies

The BCCCS was a crucial institution for creating and reshaping the field of cultural studies. The
Centre was the focus for what became known as the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies, or,
more generally, British Cultural Studies. It was established at the University of Birmingham in
1964 with the aim of focusing at cultural forms, practices and institutions and ‘their relation to
society and social change’. The definition of cultural studies has always been contested and it
stands for the concept of culture which is debatable even today. However, the dominance and the
importance of the BCCCS’s publications are not debatable. The first academics who dared to
establish this institution wanted to make a breakaway from the American influence: their culture,
civilisation, tradition and the empirical aspects of social science research.
The foundation of the BCCCS meant blending certain aspects of these two interrelated
disciplines - Sociology and English. This is why many academics expressed resentment toward
the Centre. Another confinement was that it provided only postgraduate studies, and the
undergraduate degree programmes did not start until late 1980s. The Centre primarily
concentrated on subcultures, popular culture, and media studies. The main focus was the
functioning of the media as a major ideological force, which was the crucial means of conveying
political, social and ideological messages. Students and academics from the BCCCS successfully
explained the principles of media’s impact on audience. The Centre’s theorists, above all Stuart
Hall, emphasised the reciprocity in how cultural texts are used, questioning the valorised division
between ‘producers’ and ‘consumers’ that was evident in cultural theory, such as that of Theodor
Adorno.
The first director of the BCCCS (1964-1969) was Richard Hoggart. He mainly tackled the
concept of ‘lived’ cultures, which would later be embodied within the study of mass media. He
focused on the ‘effectivity’ of the media, rather than its ‘effect’, thus concentrating on the
inquiry into structures of power, the ‘politics’ of the media.
Hoggart was replaced by Stuart Hall, who was the BCCCS's director from 1969-1979. The
succession of a new director meant the shift of the emphasis. During his term, the research was
mainly to do with the relationship between media and ideology. It was investigated by analysis
of the signifying systems in texts. Other kinds of works prospered too, some of them being

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examining subcultures, especially their resistance (opposing to the culture out of which they
emerged), incorporation (integration with other subcultures), urban youth subcultures (the field
that Hoggart had decisively dismissed), their relationship with parents and dominant cultures, as
well as feminism, the influence of the television and their interrelation, class histories, histories
of popular culture, popular memory, and others.
Richard Johnson, who succeeded Hall in 1979, focused on historical construction of
subjectivities rather than on media texts. He expressed decisive scepticism and criticism about
the rich tradition of ethnographic work in the BCCCS.
Jorge Lorrain made a significant change in the Centre’s institutional role in the 1980s, when
there was an international campaign run for its ‘survival’ (there had been an intention for the
BCCCS to be reabsorbed into the Department of English). In late 1980s, it became the
Department of Cultural Studies and started offering undergraduate programmes.
The BCCCS earned its worldwide reputation by encouraging students to publish their works, to
read and conduct research. This was sometimes considered more important than attending formal
courses or even completing degrees.
The Department was dramatically closed in 2002, a move the university's senior management
described as 'restructuring'. Four of its fourteen members of staff were to be 'retained' and its
hundreds of students (nearly 250 undergraduates and postgraduates at that time, many from
abroad) to be transferred to other departments. In the ensuing dispute most department staff left.
There were protests against the decision to close Cultural Studies and Sociology from around the
world and the University received much adverse criticism. It all started in April 2002, when,
according to student testimonies, rumours began to circulate that the Department was going to be
closed down because it had received a 'very bad' mark in a recent Research Assessment Exercise
(RAE). Another argument of the campaigners was that the Department was being closed down
because of economic pressures related to the public funding of British universities in accordance
with RAE marks. The Department of Cultural Studies was accused of spending more than it
made, whereas ironically, it was a top money-making unit inside the School of Social Sciences.

Other cultural studies centres and institutions in the UK

An interest in media and popular culture was also institutionalised in:

- The Centre for Television Research in Leeds (1966)
- The first chair in Film studies, which was established at the University of London (1967)
- The Centre for Mass Communication Research, University of Leicester (1966), influenced
by empiricist communication theory, media sociology and political economy

Institutions that also conducted their own research related to the media production included:
- Glasgow Media Group, which is well known for its ground-breaking empirical and
interpretative research on the impact of the media in shaping public opinion, expressed in their
numerous publications, such as: Bad News (1976), More Bad News (1980), and Really Bad News
(1982)
- Open University’s Mass Communication and Society Course (1977)

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 - Open University’s Degree in Popular Culture (1982-1987)

Philip Schlesinger’s book Putting ‘Reality’ Together (1978) was also an important study in
which the author investigated how the industrial production of news was ideologically
constrained.
Journals assumed a significant role in the history of cultural studies. Some of the most important
journals in which critiques, analyses and reviews were published are:
- New Left Review - local and international debates, translations
- Theory, Cultures and Society – commenced in 1982 and published cultural studies articles,
acting as an interrogator of the field
- Marxism Today - critiques on inadequacy of the Left’s response to Thatcherism
- The film journal Screen - contributions to the textual analysis of film and television

Nowadays, cultural studies research is done by the Goldsmith’s College, University of London,
as well as the University of Lancaster and Sunderland Nottingham Trent University. All of them
apply multidisciplinary and diverse approaches for a variety of topics. Due to the process of
institutionalisation, ‘cultural studies’ is becoming ‘popular cultural studies’.

Founding fathers of British Cultural Studies

Hoggart, Williams, Thompson and Hall are the most important figures in the development of
British Cultural Studies. Developing a novel approach to the way culture should be studied, they
broadened the scope of cultural studies, while their representative works made a breakthrough in
British Cultural Studies.

Richard Hoggart (1918-2014)

Richard Hoggart was born in a working class family in Leeds in 1918. He was educated at his
hometown University. He served in the British army in World War II. Hoggart worked as an
adult education tutor at the University of Hull for a while. Teaching literature and interpreting
more complex literary concepts for those who were much of the same social and economic
background as he was made a huge impact on his future professional and personal development.
He founded the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham,
alongside with Stuart Hall. After being the first director of the BCCCS, he left that position to
become assistant director at UNESCO. The Centre set out to tackle the old British separation
between high culture and 'real' life, between the historic past and the contemporary world. The
project blended three approaches: historical-philosophical, sociological and literary-critical.
Richard Hoggart was among the first analysts of culture who claimed that culture does not only
refer to high culture (opera and books), but is actually much more. It is the way in which an
individual speaks, dresses, looks at others and forms his habits, simultaneously sending a
message about his social class and his time. He wrote many books, including: The Uses of
Literacy (1958), Teaching Literature (1963), Contemporary Cultural Studies: An Approach to
the Study of Literature and Society (1969), Only Connect: On Culture and Communication

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(1972), An Idea of Europe (1987), Everyday Language and Everyday Life (2003), and Mass
Media in a Mass Society: Myth and Reality (2004).

Hoggart's major work, The Uses of Literacy, was an attempt to understand the changes in culture
in Britain caused by ‘massification’. It incorporates both high academic discourse and simple
ideas with which an individual of lower economic, social or class background could be
addressed. This book gives an immensely detailed picture of British urban working-class people
in the years spanning World War II, caught at the point where their lives, values and culture were
being changed by post-war advertising, mass media influences and Americanisation.
The book somewhat invokes a personal experience of the author. He reminisces of
neighbourhood practices, popular entertainment and family relations, representing them all with
authenticity using analytical skills. He applied the protocols of literary studies to a wider range of
cultural products: music, newspapers, magazines, popular fiction. He contrasted the following
social strata and occurrences in order to draw valid and applicable conclusions:
- public culture (pubs, clubs, sports) vs. everyday life practices (family roles, gender roles,
language patterns, community’s common sense)
- rural vs. urban class - positive and negative sides, e.g. domestic and neighbourhood/street
violence
- pre-war working class culture vs. post-war mass culture - he was openly in favor of the
former.
Moods which prevail in this book are nostalgia and critique. Hoggart accused the new culture
(modern popular music, American television, jukebox, popular crime and romance novels, cheap
magazines) of displacing old values but not offering a substitute for them. He always provided
solid philosophical or any other theoretical evidence for his claims and conclusions. He felt
authorised to criticise newer trends and to determine the concepts of 'the decent', 'the healthy',
'the trivial', 'the serious', he made distinctions and set the standards of distinction.
The greatest significance of the book is that it fosters understanding of “the network of shared
cultural meanings which sustains relationships between different facets of culture” (C. Critcher,
1979). Warning of a gradual process of cultural debasement, the book influenced the social and
political insights of a generation. It proved decisive in popularising cultural studies as an
international academic discipline.

Hoggart's work and especially his construction of working-class life also influenced the creation
of the longest-running TV soap opera not only in Britain but also in the world - Coronation
Street (9,339 episodes since 1960) - which takes place in a fictionalised northern environment.
Some of his opponents satirically called it ‘Hoggartsborough’.

Raymond Williams (1921-1988)

Raymond Williams was a Welsh academic, novelist and critic. His writings on politics, culture
and mass media are a significant contribution to the Marxist critique of culture and the arts. His
work laid foundations for the development of cultural studies and cultural materialist approach.
His most representative and comprehensive work is Culture and Society 1780–1950, published
in 1958. In this book, Williams explores relations between cultural products and cultural
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relations, and gives an important definition of culture: “Culture is a whole way of life, material,
intellectual and spiritual”. He underscores the cultural experience, its meaning and patterning,
and the language itself. The words and sentences which particular men and women have used in
trying to give meaning to their experience is what matters. However, the concept of culture is not
yet fully developed in this book. Williams admits the relevance of Marxist perspectives in
Culture and Society, but he is both critical and distanced from the traditional Marxism in this
book.
His next influential and important work is The Long Revolution, published in 1961. It emerged
from the increasing intensity of contemporary debates about the cultural impact of the media.
Unlike Hoggart, Williams is not pessimistic about the accounts of the popular culture and media,
but rather focuses on the cultural institutions, ideologies and discourses, as well as media
products. Stuart Hall called this book “the seminal event in English post-war intellectual life”. It
sees British society as a progressive and gradual revolution through industrialisation,
democratisation and culture transformation. In the second chapter of this book, Williams
proposes “the 'social' definition of culture, in which culture is a description of a particular way of
life, which expresses certain values and meanings not only in art and learning but also in
institutions and ordinary behaviour”. Williams sees culture as a process, as a whole way of life,
and introduces the term “the structure of feeling”, which he explains as the culture of a period,
since every culture has a particular and characteristic colour. This book largely helped spread the
working-class cultural values and develop the common culture of socialism.
The programme of cultural change laid out in The Long Revolution reappears in
Communications, published in 1962. This book, influenced by American communications
research, deals with the increasing role of mass media in the 'swinging Britain' of the 1960s. It
establishes the media analysis as the central plank of the new field of cultural studies. Williams
insists that the cultural revolution is “part of a great process of human liberation, comparable in
importance with the industrial revolution and the struggle for democracy”. Common culture and
cultural revolution will be accomplished through mass communication technologies and
institutions. Art and culture are separated, caught in the web of complexities and contradictions.
Television: Technology and Cultural Form was published in 1974. It marks the beginning of a
new breed of British accounts of television, rejecting the accounts of technologies and their
social effects produced by the American research in communications. It is the first book-length
study to employ such an approach to the medium of television. Williams examines the
relationship between society and technology, asking whether society shaped technology or it was
the other way round. He concludes that far from technology having an inescapable internal logic
of development, innovation takes place within specific social and economic contexts, which
means that there was no pre-determined outcome to the evolution of communications
innovations but a series of complex interactions between innovations and the world into which
they emerge. Williams was a noted critic of technological determinism (a reductionist theory
assuming that a society's technology determines the development of its social structure and
cultural values), which according to him failed to assess the significance of social power
relations, interaction, and social circumstances. On the basis of his claims that technology is not
independent of history, which is the determining force that produced both us and the medium of
television, some recent theoreticians have even challenged the simplistic proposition that 'the

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Internet has changed our world', highlighting the ways in which contemporary social relations set
limits on the development of the Internet as a democratic medium.

Marxism and Literature was published in 1977 and is marked by the struggle between his
humanism and socialism. He invites the Marxist thought as a means of resolving the many
contradictions within his thinking about art, culture and communications. It is an
autobiographical account of his own relationship with and resistance to Marxism. As seen from
this perspective, culture represents the constitutive social process, creating specific and different
ways of life. He values semiotics and underscores the importance of Saussure’s work. He
believed that there was a relative autonomy of cultural forces and gave answer to this in
Gramsci’s theory of hegemony which states that cultural leadership is not achieved by force or
coercion, but is secured through the consent of those it will ultimately subordinate and they do
that because they are convinced that this will serve their interests. The achievement is sustained
only through the continual winning of consent.

Edward Palmer Thompson (1924-1993)

The most important work written by Edward Palmer Thompson is The Making of the English
Working Class, published in 1963. It explores the popular culture, class and subcultures from
within sociology, anthropology and ethnography. Thompson resists simple notions of economic
determinism in order to recover the importance of culture. A lived network of practices and
relationships that constitute everyday life, within the role of the individual subject, had to be
foregrounded.
His view of culture is conflict-based. Unlike Williams, he emphasises that culture is not the
whole way of life, but rather represents the struggle between the ways of life. Thompson further
emphasises that in looking at culture, the historical voices of both the winners and losers must be
considered. It would be ahistorical, he believes, to make judgements where “only the successful
are remembered” and “the blind alleys, the lost causes and the losers themselves are forgotten”.
He attacks orthodox labour and social histories for leaving out the working class: “In some of the
lost causes of the people of the Industrial Revolution we may discover insights into social evils
which we have yet to cure. Moreover, the greater part of the world today is still undergoing
problems of industrialisation, and of the formation of democratic institutions, analogous in many
ways to our own experience during the Industrial Revolution”.
The Making of the English Working Class contributed greatly to the conceptualization of cultural
studies as it examines the struggle of the working class in terms of a working class culture.

Stuart Hall (1932-2014)

Stuart Hall was one of the most influential figures in cultural studies. Having succeeded Hoggart
as the director of the BCCCS, he expanded the scope of cultural studies to deal with race and
gender. He saw people as producers and consumers of culture at the same time. For him, culture
is not something to be simply appreciated or studied, but “a critical site of social action and
intervention where power relations are both established and potentially unsettled”. He led British

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debates around the character of a multicultural and multiethnic “Britishness”. He wrote and
lectured extensively on the subjects of race, identity, social change in Britain and Britain’s
shifting role in the world. He became celebrated as the “godfather of multiculturalism”.
His most important work is The Popular Arts, which he wrote with Paddy Whannel in 1967. It
rejects the conventional contrast between the organic culture of pre-industrial England with the
mass-produced culture of today. It discriminates among the media, not against them.
Hall’s influential paper “Encoding/Decoding”, which is an edited extract from Encoding and
Decoding in the Television Discourse (1973), had an important impact on cultural studies.
According to it, public cultural background of the audience plays an important role in
interpreting a message, because the audience is not a passive recipient. Hall explores the subject
of how media messages are produced, created, disseminated and consumed, proposing a new
theory of communication, referring particularly to television. There are three instances of the
mass communication model:
1. Meaning is not fixed or determined by the sender;

2. The message is never transparent;

3. The audience is not a passive recipient of the message.
Distortion is built into the system and it happens between the moment of the production of the
message (encoding) and the moment of its reception (decoding).

At the end of his life, when he was writing his last articles, Hall said the following about the
legacy of British Cultural Studies:
“Against the urgency of people dying in the streets, what in God's name is the point of cultural
studies? At that point, I think anybody who is into cultural studies seriously as an intellectual
practice, must feel, on their pulse, its ephemerality, its insubstantiality, how little it registers, how
little we've been able to change anything or get anybody to do anything. If you don't feel that as
one tension in the work that you are doing, theory has let you off the hook.” (Stuart Hall,
“Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies”)

Periods in the development of British Cultural Studies

We have so far seen that certain historical factors have shaped the development of British
Cultural Studies. In the works of Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart, British Cultural
Studies emerged from literary criticism but wanted to break with its formalism, elitism and
aestheticism, as well as the naïve subjectivism of traditional literary study.
Therefore, Williams and Hoggart turned to the social sciences: to sociology, ethnography and,
above all, history and social history, for ways to set the text in a context, to flesh out the sense of
reading and response as forms of culture produced by the activity of a whole society. But in
leaning on the social sciences and their notion of the objectivity of the social formation, they
wanted to retain from literary study a sense of ‘genuine personal response’, individual
experience, subjectivity as lived actively in the creation of culture.

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Williams and Hoggart were determined to stress culture as a process, as transformation, as active
construction and experience. The foundational project of British Cultural Studies, then, was to
bring together into a single intellectual perspective a conception of objectivity with a conception
of subjectivity. This means that the problematic of British Cultural Studies is the relation and
interaction between objective structural conditions and subjective experience, between culture as
constructed collectively, on the one hand, and on the other as experienced by a class, group or an
individual. In exploring this issue British Cultural Studies has so far been through three broadly
separate movements. The first of these may be termed Culturalism.

Culturalism
In 1930, Frank Raymond Leavis (1895-1978, English literary critic who championed seriousness
and moral depth in literature and criticised what he considered the amateur belletrism of his
time) set out the following position on the role and significance of the high cultural tradition:
“In any period it is upon a very small minority that the discerning appreciation of art and
literature depends…. The minority capable not only of appreciating Dante, Shakespeare,
Baudelaire, Hardy (to take major instances) but of recognizing their latest successors constitute
the consciousness of the race (or of a branch of it) at a given time. Upon this minority depends
our power of profiting by the finest human experience of the past; they keep alive the subtlest
and most perishable parts of tradition. Upon them depend the implicit standards that order the
finer living of an age, the sense…that the centre is here rather than there.”
This means that high culture is an elite preserve for defence against ‘mass civilisation’ (popular
culture), while the qualifying term ‘culture’ is reserved exclusively for high culture and denied to
the rest of the members of society, the actual majority, who are seen as simply without culture.
This liberal elitist tradition is challenged in the work of Raymond Williams. In Culture and
Society 1780–1950 (1958), he represents culture as an attribute of all members of a society, not
merely the economically privileged. Culture, he argues, pertains not to the development of a
single class but to ‘the development of a whole society’. His aim is to validate working-class
culture precisely as culture. In The Uses of Literacy (1957), Richard Hoggart also defends
traditional working-class culture, and attacks what he terms ‘candy floss’ culture represented by
such 1950s commercial products as cheap magazines, popular newspapers, popular songs, and
what he calls ‘spicy books’.
Williams and Hoggart together stand for the Culturalist phase of British Cultural Studies. Their
work exposes some problems that might be schematically listed as follows:
1. Culturalism fails to distinguish adequately between texts and society – rather, they are
deliberately run together as ‘culture’.
2. It is humanist, conceiving people as freely expressive (and this appears symptomatically
in the way Williams at this juncture objects to Marxism on the grounds that it denies freedom to
the human subject, whether individual or collective).
3. It is moralising, referring always to politics arising primarily as a form of moral choice
and in terms of personal experience.
4. Although it aims to contest the dominance of the high cultural artistic tradition, in effect
it leaves that tradition in place since it seeks merely another place for working-class culture as

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well (sometimes termed the ‘enclave’ theory).
5. Its method and procedure, as it might be expected in the Anglo-Saxon culture, is
empiricist, pragmatic and descriptive; there is simply no attempt at theory.
The next stage in British Cultural Studies, that may be called ‘Marxist Structuralism’ or
‘Structuralist Marxism’, takes off very much from a sense of the limitations of the preceding
work of Williams and Hoggart.

Marxist Structuralism
In 1964, Richard Hoggart helped to found the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural
Studies, with himself as Director, a position later taken over by Stuart Hall. The 1960s witnessed
the rise of the so-called ‘New Left’, associated particularly with the Structuralist Marxism of
Louis Althusser. Stuart Hall and the Birmingham Centre were deeply influenced both by
Althusserian Marxism and by the semiology of Roland Barthes, whose work Mythologies first
came out in France in 1957.
The Structuralist moment in British Cultural Studies arises through a critique of the previous
Culturalism. It refuses to see people as freely expressive and culture as a matter essentially of
group or individual experience and choice. Structuralism, therefore, envisages human
subjectivity as determined by structures, which are at once economic, ideological and
semiological.
1. Structuralism rejects the humanism and moralising attitudes of Raymond Williams and
Richard Hoggart, replacing the notion of culture with that of ideology, replacing the notion of
experience with that of signs or representations which provide a position for the subject.
2. It also rejects the view of working-class culture as at best an enclave within society,
proposing instead a Marxist analysis of cultural forms in relation to the economic structure of
society as a whole (since the political economy is capitalist, ruling-class culture [high culture]
and working-class culture [popular culture] are not free and separate developments to be
assessed from some external point – rather, they depend on each other and are produced together,
just as capital depends upon labour).
3. Similar arguments maintain also for semiological structures; by drawing on Saussure’s
distinction between langue and parole it was proposed that as rules generate linguistic texts, so
all texts have to be understood as the effect of larger linguistic and discursive structures.
4. Marxist Structuralism does distinguish text from society, attributing an autonomy to the
text, but it believes text and society should be understood together within a concept of totality, in
terms of Althusser’s account of the relative autonomy of specific practices (popular novels, for
example, would be one of these practices).
5. Marxist Structuralism was systematic, rationalist in method and theoretically explicit, in
striking opposition to the empiricism of the previous Culturalist wave.
If Culturalism presided over the 1960s, Structuralism dominated the 1970s. In 1980 Stuart Hall
published a famous paper, “Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms“ which, in assessing Culturalism
versus Structuralism, tended to point beyond both, in evidence of a need to find a further
synthesis for subject and object. The essay ends as follows: “Culturalism and

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Structuralism…define where, if at all, is the space, and what are the limits within which such a
synthesis might be constituted.“ The third movement of British Cultural Studies comes about as
a response to these difficulties.

Post-Structuralism and Cultural Materialism

During mid-1970s, a number of intellectual forces compelled a more general shift of position.
One of these was certainly the question of the relation between capitalism and patriarchy, as it
became increasingly obvious that a feminist politics could not be theorised inside the Marxist or
Althusserian sense of totality.
Another contribution to the pervasive rethinking came from recognition of the decentring of the
subject. Psychoanalysis, first introduced into the cultural studies debate by Althusser’s account
of ideology, refused to stay in place, for it admitted the view that subjectivity is determined in
and through the process of the unconscious in a way that exceeds any notion of the subject as a
position determined by ideology. In controversy, then, is the conception of totality.
The postmodern/post-Structuralist turn in cultural studies (dominant from 1980) directed fresh
attention towards textuality and the neglected question of subjectivity, the individual’s own
response to and involvement in culture and cultural practices.
At this point Raymond Williams returned to the field and affirmed the central importance of
practice in cultural studies. In an essay published in 1973, Williams proposed that works of art
(symphonies, plays, poems) were ‘not objects but notations’; and he took this somewhat
enigmatic assertion as warrant that cultural studies should proceed by looking “not for the
components of a product but the conditions of a practice“ (that is, we should set aside formalist
questions about texts and concern ourselves with the conditions of their production and
reproduction). With the slogan of ‘culture as practice’ Williams promises to reintroduce the
analysis of culture as a process of active transformation.
The founders of ‘cultural materialism’, Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, wrote in Political
Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism (1985):
“‘Materialism’ is opposed to ‘idealism’: it insists that culture does not (cannot) transcend the
material forces and relations of production. Culture is not simply a reflection of the economic
and political system, but nor can it be independent of it. Cultural materialism therefore studies
the implication of literary texts in history.”
They further explained that texts are to be considered not in terms of the material forces
surrounding their moment of origin but rather that of their reproduction, in other words, the
continuing cultural practices in which they are presented:
“A play by Shakespeare is related to the contexts of its production ... Moreover, the relevant
history is not just that of 400 years ago, for culture is made continuously and Shakespeare’s text
is reconstructed, reappraised, reassigned all the time through diverse institutions in specific
contexts. What the plays signify, how they signify, depends on the cultural field in which they
are situated.”
Cultural Materialism, indebted as it is to the work of Michel Foucault with its post-Structuralist
refusal of notions of totality, truth and centredness, retains the political theme of Raymond
Williams (if not much else), and has this to its credit over some other post-Structuralist versions

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of cultural studies. It does not, however, succeed any better at a coherent analysis of object and
subject in cultural studies, or rather, it resolves the problem only by equating subjectivity with
response, albeit response in a ‘cultural field’.
During Margaret Thatcher’s 'reign', from 1979 to 1990, due to reduced funding to universities
and drastic restructuring they experienced, researchers undertook only a variety of ’modest’
projects on Marx's conception of ideology, historical materialism, economic development and
colonialism. For a time, it was thought that the BCCCS would become part of the English
Department at the University of Birmingham, but eventually this post-graduate research institute
became the Department of Cultural Studies with substantial undergraduate teaching
responsibilities. These changes had a negative impact on researchers' output and damaged the
Centre's influence.
After this period, Cultural Studies has become an international movement and many universities
across the world, even beyond Anglophone countries, started offering CS programmes.

New centres of Cultural Studies

What is remarkable is that the establishing of BCS had an impact beyond the borders of Britain,
inspiring similar institutions and science to arise in other Anglophone countries such as the US,
Canada and Australia, where CS developed in mid-1980s.
In the US, analysts focused on the ethnographies of audiences; they studied media texts and the
role they played creating popular cultural formations, while the link between CS and political
action was seen as undesirable.. American scholars 'institutionalised' CS fairly rapidly,
developing a technical language, drawn from semiotics and literary theory. Key figures included
James Carey, Janice Radway and Larry Grossberg.
In Canada, the focus was on the so-called 'Canadian experience', and research revolved around
questions like: How can people of such a diverse background living across vast and
underpopulated territory be transformed into a coherent nation. How can the Canadian culture(s)
resist the onslaught of American popular culture? Key figures, including Martin Allor and Will
Straw, have studied issues of self-definition in Canada.
In Australia, CS has found a home in departments of film and media studies, as well as in the
multi-disciplinary field of Australian studies. All of these disciplines are concerned with
identifying distinctive features of Australian life.

Summary
British Cultural Studies in phase 1. Culturalism (1960–9), tended to elide object and subject into
a single, vague notion of culture. In phase 2. Marxist Structuralism (1970–9), a synthesis was
achieved in which subjectivity was defined as the effect of objective ideological and
semiological structures: the subject was a position. But the synthesis was merely temporary,
resting as it did on a notion of totality which by the mid-1970s had begun to prove incomplete
(you cannot have a partial totality). Phase 3. Post-Structuralism and Cultural Materialism (since
1980), in a double movement really, emerged from a postmodern rejection of totality and the
death of the Grand Narratives.

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Across these variations, British Cultural Studies has struggled over all these years to find a
powerful and analytically coherent theoretical frame within which to hold together both text and
society, culture as subjective experience and culture as objective historical structure. No such
totalising synthesis has been found, and maybe objective and subjective cannot be integrated in a
single theory. The reason for this is that text and context always slide past each other. Although
texts are always read in contexts and within institutions, they always exceed any given context of
reading with the power to engage other readings in other contexts (these contexts are not
determined in a voluntarist manner, by the whim of the individual reader, but by the field of
different historical forces which produce interpretations). This is also the case with subject and
object; subjective process and objective conditions, although always in relation, are never in an
even or commensurate or totalisable relation.
The aim of British Cultural Studies was to theorise object and subject together as culture.
Cultural studies, having already followed a trajectory anticipating this perception, should
continue to be promoted and encouraged, especially if it can keep this epistemological sense of
subject and object at the heart of its developing enterprise.

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 Stereotypes

Any attempt to understand and deal with stereotypes presupposes an understanding of the
essential meaning(s) of the term. Stereotypes have been defined by scholars from a range of
disciplines, each capturing the nature, content and functions of stereotypes in interpersonal,
interracial, intercultural and international relationships. If you check the meaning of the same
word in various dictionaries, you may find some variation between the definitions, which may
cause misunderstandings if you assume that words have fixed meanings.
Before we focus on how stereotypes are created and whether they should/can be overcome, we
ought to try to define the meaning of the term stereotype (noun + verb). This compound stems
from the Greek language and means “a solid impression”. Originating in 1798 from the field of
technology, the word stereotype refers to the method of printing from a plate, or the printed
image thus produced. Since the plate is usually metal cast from the same mould, the printed
image is inevitably fixed, formulaic, and conventional, with a set form or image; as no
distinction or change is involved in the process, what is stereotyped is the same. When applied to
people, stereotypes take the whole social groups as possessing the same traits. And when the
same stereotypes are duplicated through various channels of media and interpersonal
communication, those stereotypes become widely shared, leaving little to no room for
individuation and diversity.
The term stereotype was first introduced by Lippman (1922) to liken the cognitive stereotyping
process to the way a printing press works when it prints the same identical symbols repeatedly,
but the definition was later developed by Allport (1954) who explained it as “an exaggerated
belief associated with a category”. Gaertner et al. (1996) review definitions of stereotypes that
have been presented since the term was first introduced, noting that earlier definitions tended to
focus on their flawed nature, whereas later definitions emphasised their status as necessary
cognitive processes that help us make sense of a highly complex world.
Stereotypes can be seen in terms of advantages and disadvantages. Brislin defines the stereotype
as a double-edged sword: on the one hand, a “useful and important aspect of intelligent and
efficient thinking” and on the other “any categorization of individual elements concerned with
people that mask differences among those elements” (Brislin et al. 1986: 44). Gaertner et al.
(1996) more recently defined it as “a generalization about beliefs about groups unjustified
because of faulty thought processes, over-generalization, factual incorrectness, inordinate
rigidity, inappropriate attributions, rationalization from prejudiced attitude or discriminatory
behaviour”. (cf. Houghton 2014: 15-16)

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Defining Stereotypes across Various Disciplines
Let us start with a most comprehensible stereotype definition: “A stereotype is a commonly held
popular belief about specific social groups or types of individuals.” (Gordon and Miller 2005)
When a group is perceived to be different from the norm of those who make subjective
evaluations, stereotypes are harboured. Stereotypes are mostly related to the nationality, ethnic
origin, religion, age, gender, sexuality, culture, heritage of the Other, to name a few areas.
However, it can rightly be stated that a stereotype is “a fixed, over-generalised belief about a
particular group or class of people.” (Cardwell 1996)
The following two definitions also show why stereotyping is usually wrong and therefore should
be avoided:
- Stereotype is “a fixed idea that people have about what someone or something is like,
especially an idea that is wrong” (e.g. racial/sexual stereotypes), for instance: “He doesn't
conform to the national stereotype of a Frenchman.” (Cambridge Advanced Learner’s
Dictionary)
- Stereotype is “an over-simplified idea of the typical characteristics of a person or thing”
(Pocket Oxford English Dictionary)
Stereotyping is a form of prejudgment. Brown's definition of stereotyping through prejudice is
the “holding of derogatory social attitudes or cognitive beliefs, the expression of negative effect,
or the display of hostile or discriminatory behaviour towards members of a group on account of
their membership to that group”. (Brown 1995) Generalisations ignoring subtle differences
among members of groups, individuals in a society and the application of broad categories can
all lead to stereotyping, as it is shown by the following illustration:
It occurred in the Portland, Oregon Rose Parade, where a float was entered honoring Sapporo,
Japan, Portland’s sister city. Dignitaries flown from Japan were quite upset when they
observed that some of the young women waving from the float were Chinese, not Japanese.
The parade director, when questioned on the point, responded with a statement of stereotypic
perception: “Japanese…Chinese—close enough”. (Lebedko 2013: 6-7)
Stereotype definitions vary depending on the trends in scholarly research and approaches. Since
the intercultural communication paradigm is becoming more fundamental and multidisciplinary,
and as scholars draw on findings from related disciplines in the humanities, it is essential to
include views on stereotypes from a variety of these contiguous fields. Lippmann’s (1922: 3)
basic definition of stereotypes as “pictures in our heads” remains the generally accepted and
classical sociological definition to date.
In linguistics, theoretical interest has recently turned to the study of language representations of
stereotypes considered to be cognitive constructs. Stereotypes are often realised by
ethnophaulisms/ethnic slurs (derogatory or disparaging words) creating negative mental images
of alien groups in linguistically diverse patterns such as transformations, associations,
metaphorical and metonymical transfer – e.g., acey = Englishman (Russian from English ‘I say’)
or cent = North American. Stereotypical invectives are most often applied to minorities. Many
stereotypes are linguistically represented in folklore by sayings, proverbs, and idioms such as ‘to
see Indians’ meaning “to be in a delirium” and ‘to be a regular Indian’ meaning “to be a habitual
drunkard” (cf. Lebedko 2013: 7)

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Cognitive linguistics regards the stereotype as a mental category that people easily apply to all
members of that category. “A stereotype is, thus, a socially determined minimum set of data with
regard to the extension of a category” (Geeraerts 2006: 157). Pinker assumes that “…people’s
ability to set aside stereotypes when judging an individual is accomplished by their conscious,
deliberate reasoning” (2003: 205). However, being distracted or in need to respond quickly,
people “are more likely to judge that a member of an ethnic group has all stereotyped traits of the
group” (ibid.).
Sociology defines stereotypes as cognitions held by one social group about another social group
(Elligan 2008), or as oversimplified standardised images (Moore 2006). Psycho-sociology
focuses on psycho-sociological functions ascribing negative characteristics to the stereotype
regarded as stable, reinforcing prejudices and stipulating the barriers in communication
according to Bartminski (2009), who also highlights the unstable and changeable character of
stereotypes and the connection between hetero-stereotypes (perception of others) and the history
of neighboring countries. For example, immediate neighbors perceive Poles negatively, but the
farther away the country, the more positive is the stereotype.
Social psychology treats stereotypes on the basis of the relationship between individuals and
groups, considering them to be central factors of any society and of importance in inter-group
perceptions. “These perceptions of groups are called stereotypes” according to McGarty, Yzerbyt
and Spears (2002), who define stereotypes as “psychological representations of the
characteristics of people that belong to particular groups”, or “generalisations about a group of
people whereby we attribute a defined set of characteristics to this group”. They developed three
guiding principles for understanding stereotypes: “stereotypes are aids to explanation” implying
that their formation may help the perceiver make sense of a situation; “stereotypes are energy
saving devices,” implying that they may reduce the cognitive effort of the perceiver; and
“stereotypes are shared group beliefs”, implying that norms of social groups and views are
shared by the perceiver.

Characteristics of stereotypes, in-groups and out-groups

The first characteristic of stereotyping is over-generalisation. The second feature and
characteristic of stereotyping is the exaggeration of the difference between one’s own group (the
in-group) and the 'other' group (the out-group). Through stereotyping and categorisation we
exaggerate the differences between the groups. This process is called ‘othering’ (cf. Gallaher
2009).
A stereotype is a popular belief about specific social groups or types of individuals. Stereotypes
are standardised and simplified conceptions of groups based on some prior assumptions.
Stereotypes focus upon and thereby exaggerate differences between groups. Competition
between groups minimises similarities and magnifies differences. By designating one's own
group as the standard or normal group and assigning others to groups considered inferior or
abnormal, it provides one with a sense of worth. Generalisations about cultures or nationalities
can be a source of pride, anger or simply bad jokes. Some people say that in all stereotypes there
is some basis in reality, as they do not develop in a vacuum.
“A stereotype is an oversimplified and usually value-laden view of the attitudes, behaviour and
expectations of a group or individual. Such views, which may be deeply embedded in sexist,

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racist or otherwise prejudiced cultures, are typically highly resistant to change, and play a
significant role in shaping the attitudes of members of the culture to others. Within cultural
studies, the role of stereotypes is possibly most marked in the products of the mass media
(including the portrayal of women and ethnic minorities in drama and comedy, and in the
shaping and construction of news coverage), although they are also significant in education,
work and sport (in channeling individuals into activities deemed appropriate to their stereotyped
group.” (Edgar and Sedgwick 2008)
We all stereotype. We live in a complex social environment, which we need to simplify into
groups, or categories. Sociologist Charles E. Hurst (2016: 196) says that "One reason for
stereotypes is the lack of personal, concrete familiarity that individuals have with persons in
other racial or ethnic groups. Lack of familiarity encourages the lumping together of unknown
individuals." In addition to the effects of stereotyping upon individual perception, stereotyping
(or categorisation) processes also contribute to the formation and maintenance of group
boundaries, which relates directly to ethnocentrism. Negative evaluations can be accentuated by
illusory correlation, a form of cognitive bias, which takes place when distinctive but unrelated
events are associated during information processing. Behaviours of out-group members noted
and evaluated negatively on different occasions may bias the observer to associate and remember
them as beliefs about the group. This may lead to a tendency to evaluate those members
negatively on every occasion thereafter, reinforcing the in-group and out-group distinction, and
enhancing the self-esteem of the individual concerned in the process.
Stereotypes thus play a role in the definition of group boundaries. Social Identity Theory
suggests that stereotypical categorisations help define group boundaries and lie at the heart of
inter-group attitudes. A person’s identity consists of both personal and social identity. Personal
identity refers to “self-categories that define the perceiver as a unique individual in contrast to
other individuals”, whereas social identity “refers to social categorisations of self and others,
self-categories which define the individual in terms of his or her shared similarities with
members of certain social categories in contrast to other social categories” (Turner 2012: 33).
Social categorisation of people into distinct groups can cause discrimination as the in-group is
favoured over the out-group, which is rooted in a basic human need for self-esteem (Tajfel
1981), although the universality of this tendency has been questioned. It seems to be generally
accepted, however, that stereotypical categorisations do lie at the heart of inter-group attitudes.
Negative evaluation of the out-group can be seen as a mechanism for forming and maintaining
group boundaries, which relates to the ethnocentric need for positive social identity (Houghton
2013: 160).

Stereotypes and prejudice

In order to define the notion of stereotypes, it is necessary first to define what prejudices are,
because stereotyping makes a part of a prejudice. Prejudice is an unfair and unreasonable
negative attitude, opinion or feeling toward out-group members, especially when formed without
enough thought or knowledge. Brislin (1986) identifies key aspects of prejudice as pre-judgment
based upon labels applied to people originating in factors differentiating people such as race, sex,
skin colour, occupation, religion or political affiliation, whereby people are judged based on
perceived membership of the labelled category, rather than as individuals. He highlights the
point that prejudicial judgments are evaluative. In addition to making judgments about facts,

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individuals also make judgments about the goodness, worth or desirability of other people based
on the labels applied which are sometimes so strongly held that they are impervious to the
introduction of new facts which, from a rational point of view, should affect attitudes towards
others. Prejudice thus finds its roots in social categorisation and involves the tendency to
evaluate negatively. (cf. Houghton 2013: 160-161)
Stereotype refers to the cognitive part of a prejudice, and it represents the oversimplified opinion
about a person, group, institution, etc. However, stereotypes cannot be easily rooted out, because
we need them for better orientation in a society. In his work Social stereotypes and social groups
(1981), Henri Tajfel explains that stereotypes can have social functions. It was once believed that
only narrow-minded people use stereotypes, but this theory has been rejected due to the fact that
the identification of an individual with a certain group accounts for a shared set of stereotypes.
Groups feel that they have to be distinct from each other, and therefore perpetuate positive
stereotypes about themselves or negative ones about other groups in order to preserve their
favourable image. Emotions tend to be involved in this process. If other groups pose no threat to
this image, there is no need for stereotyping to occur. Apart from this differentiating function,
stereotypes can also have the function of justification for the actions of one group towards
another (see Allport below).

How stereotypes are formed

To avoid the potential negative effects of stereotyping processes, one needs to understand the
process through which stereotypes are formed. Categories are often based on visually obvious
attributes such as race or gender and may vary in saliency, relevance or differentiation according
to the social context. Once a category has been set up in the mind, knowledge, beliefs and
expectancies are added and individuals within the category are thereafter imbued with the
characteristics attached to the category (Hamilton and Neville Uhles 2000). Such categorisation
processes form and maintain the group boundaries that underpin ethnocentrism and prejudice.
Through interaction with people who do not fit into the broader category, category sub-types are
set up to account for the differences. Though still general in nature, category sub-types contain
more detail than the main category and can have one of two effects upon the main category: they
may isolate atypical members from the main category, thus preserving the existing stereotype, or
they may “increase perceived diversity of the group diminishing ability to make sweeping
generalizations” (Hamilton and Neville Uhles 2000: 469). Thus, stereotype categorisation may or
may not break down in response to new information (Houghton 2013: 161).
There are five factors that account for the formation of stereotypes:
a) Correspondence bias refers to the attribution of a person’s behaviour to his personality
and not situational factors (a cabbie cuts us off in traffic because s/he is selfish and reckless,
not because s/he is rushing a sick person to the hospital);
b) Illusory correlation is a phenomenon where two statistically rare events co-occur, leading
to them being erroneously correlated. This factor is to blame for the stereotype of black
criminals, as black people are a minority in the US, and crime is less frequent than lawfulness.
The coinciding of the two led to the emergence of what is known as racial profiling (or ethnic
profiling in Europe) = the use of race or ethnicity as grounds for suspecting someone of
having committed an offence (Oxford English Dictionary). This is such a common occurrence

105
 in the US that the term “driving while black” was coined to highlight the probability of being
pulled over by the police based on racial profiling and without just cause;
c) Common environment;
d) Socialisation and upbringing;
e) Intergroup relations: two groups are encouraged to behave in a way which is defined as
stereotypical when compared to the other group because of the need for differentiation.

Stereotyping: reasons, results and effects

Though stereotypes are not exclusively negative; since they may be formed in a feeling of
admiration for the group or country in question, they are often disapproving and discriminative.
Stereotypes are usually negative caricatures of some positive traits of a group, emphasised even
to ridicule. Prejudices and stereotypes are a consequence of people’s tendency to overgeneralise
and to classify the world into certain categories. Stereotypes are ingrained/deeply rooted,
conventional and oversimplified manners of thinking about certain events, groups of people
(judging according to their occupation, nationality, religion, race, social class, sexual orientation
and other). They represent group concepts of one group towards another. Creation of stereotypes
is based on: oversimplification, exaggeration of the generalisation and stating one’s cultural
attributes as ‘inborn’ or ‘natural’.
The reasons why stereotypes are deeply rooted in our historic backgrounds and contemporary
cultures may be defined as follows:
a) it becomes almost impossible not to get influenced by our perception and preconceived
opinions in the everyday life since we feel that our senses and judgments can hardly deceive
us;
b) the world we live in is so complex that we cannot ‘‘take in all of the complexities of other
people as individuals”;
c) we make stereotypes to compare our qualities with those of some other group and in
order to feel good about ourselves;
d) some stereotypes are preconceived in childhood by the values which parents, peers,
society, media and education system left upon a developing individual;
e) we often possess limited, inaccurate information from unreliable resources such as
television, products of popular culture and minimal contact with members of the stereotyped
group.
Nevertheless, stereotypes can be changed through education and getting to know the stereotyped
group. Prejudices are formed on the basis of stereotypes, and can result in severe discrimination.
The results of stereotyping can be thus summed up:
a) A person might become unsure whether their failure is to be attributed to their own
shortcomings, or a stereotype working against them;
b) A person might become anxious that they will conform to a negative stereotype about
themselves;
c) A person might be treated according to a stereotype, thus enforcing it;

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 d) Discrimination;
e) Self-stereotyping: people might evaluate themselves based on a stereotype about them.
Though the very idea of stereotypes is often negatively valenced, their effects are not always
bad. Stereotypes are basic to human thought (Brislin, 1986), and information held in the category
can be considered a source of knowledge used to make inferences about people when other kinds
of information are not available, which can be useful if the information is correct (Hamilton and
Neville Uhles 2000: 466-470). Additional adjectives are necessary when referring to wrongs
such as prejudicial stereotypes or hostile stereotypes. On the other hand, stereotypes are beliefs
that are over-generalised and since the categories become the focus of response, individual
elements are glossed over and the information held in the stereotype may be inaccurate.
Therefore, the danger of stereotyping lies in its potentially harmful effects, as follows (Houghton
2013: 158-159):
 Stereotypes are over-generalized beliefs that can distort perception adversely affecting
communication as they disrupt the objectivity of perceptual processing.
 Since they are based upon exaggerated points of difference, stereotypes form a source of
inaccurate information, distorting perception of the other and increasing the likelihood of
misunderstanding.
 Stereotypes can lead to inaccurate predictions about behaviour.

Positive and negative stereotypes

The ability to categorise others is in human nature because it enables us to simplify, predict and
organise our world. If we do generalise about characteristics in a particular group, we try to
establish a pattern about that group and predict their values and behaviour. No matter how
educated or open-minded individuals are, they may start to subconsciously stereotype or label
others to some extent. Such stereotypical behaviour may become easily noticeable in their
everyday interactions with other people. However, what is important to remember when it comes
to stereotyping is that not only stern, inflexible people are prone to this way of behaviour, but
also more tolerant people.
As Gordon Allport says in The Nature of Prejudice (1954), there are so many people whom we
encounter in our daily routine that we "must group them, form clusters. We welcome, therefore,
the names that help us to perform the clustering". Some of the labels are especially powerful:
"They tend to prevent alternative classification, or even cross-classification. Ethnic labels are
often of this type, particularly if they refer to some highly visible feature, e.g., Negro, Oriental.
They resemble the labels that point to some outstanding incapacity – feeble-minded, crippled,
[however,] there may be genuine ethnic-linked traits, making for a certain probability that the
member of an ethnic stock may have these attributes. But our cognitive process is not cautious.
The labeled category, […] includes indiscriminately the defining attribute, probable attributes,
and wholly fanciful, nonexistent attributes. When these labels are employed we can be almost
certain that the speaker intends not only to characterise the person’s membership, but also to
disparage and reject him." As an example to prove his point, Allport emphasises that "In his
novel Moby Dick, Herman Melville considers at length the remarkably morbid connotations of
black and the remarkably virtuous connotations of white." Thus, as Homi K. Bhabha states in
The Location of Culture (2003), “whiteness is related to positivity, rationality, universality,

107
progress, cultural supremacy and the idea that there is a desire on behalf of the colonised to
identify with the humanistic, enlightenment ideal of Man”, while blackness is linked with tragic
experience, discrimination, despair, belatedness”. These are racial stereotypes, whereas the term
national stereotype is used to describe a system of culture-specific beliefs connected with the
nationality of a person. This system includes beliefs concerning those properties of human beings
that may vary across nations, such as appearance, language, food, habits, psychological traits,
attitudes, values, etc.
Such classifications can be positive or negative, for instance when we stereotype some
nationalities as friendly and others as unfriendly. Stereotypes are misleading since they do not
acknowledge the individuality and complexity of the representatives in some group. Negative
effects of stereotypes should be noticed, such as: being judgmental and unwilling to reconsider
the formed opinion; having false perspectives of people, countries, societies, cultures;
cooperating with greater difficulty; preventing integration of stereotyped groups and their
involvement in diverse activities; lacking empathy towards those who are different.
"Whether favourable or unfavourable, a stereotype is an exaggerated belief associated with a
category. Its function is to justify (rationalise) our conduct in relation to that category." -
stresses Allport and adds that, regardless of the fact that "stereotypes may or may not originate in
a kernel of truth, they aid people in simplifying their categories, they justify hostility, sometimes
they serve as projection screens for our personal conflict. But there is an additional, and
exceedingly important, reason for the existence of stereotypes. They are socially supported,
continually revived and hammered in, by our media of mass communication – by novels, short
stories, newspaper items, movies, stage, radio and television. In an analysis of 100 motion
pictures involving Black African characters, it was found that in 75 cases the portrayal was
disparaging and stereotyped. In only 12 cases was the Black African presented in a favourable
light as an individual human being."
Allport’s conclusion is, therefore, that: "While it is important to bear in mind that biases may be
pro as well as con, it is none the less true that ethnic prejudice is mostly negative." Similarly,
Henri Tajfel gave an example for the justification of colonialism and imperialism, based on the
belief that the white man came to the colonies to help to enlighten the savages and bring them
culture. This practice was dubbed “the white man’s burden” after Rudyard Kipling’s poem of the
same name, wherein the white man found justification for his actions.
However, other authors underline the positive effects of stereotyping, as well: “Shared
stereotypes, for example, are useful for predicting and understanding the behaviour of members
of one group to another” (McGarty, Yzerbyt and Spears 2002); or: “stereotypes serve to simplify
our social worlds and to make them comprehensible” (Stangor 2000).

Ways in which stereotypes can be modified

Although stereotypes are rarely changed and our pre-conditioned wrong beliefs remain relatively
stable even if we are surrounded by ‘disconfirming evidence’, they can also be reversed as
illustrated in this example:
During World War II, when the Russians were allies of the United States and the Germans
were enemies, Americans judged Russians to have more positive traits than Germans. Soon

108
 afterwards, when the alliances reversed, Americans judged Germans to have more positive
traits than Russians. (Lebedko 2013: 7)
There are three theoretical ways in which our stereotypes can be modified or adjusted:
1. Bookkeeping model: Our stereotypes are adjusted to the new information despite the fact that
it may be contradictory and controversial to a previously supposed truth. Only a lot of repeated
information makes us change our views because each individual evidence is considered to be ‘an
exception that proves the rule’.
2. Conversion model: We throw away the old stereotype and start again, usually due to strong
disconfirming evidence.
3. Subtyping model: We create a new stereotype that is a sub-classification of the existing
stereotype, particularly when we can draw a boundary around the sub-class. Thus, if we have a
stereotype for Britons, a visit to London may result in us having a ‘Londoners are different’ sub-
type.

Conclusion
Stereotypes are inevitable indeed, but those striving to be educated and to avoid media
manipulation should try to obtain wider knowledge on the ‘unknown’ and the ‘other’, thus
analysing critically the potential bias and the approach in informing mass audience. It is quite
difficult to measure to which extent stereotypes change and it is widely believed that they
actually remain constant even when the fluctuations happen in the society and a lot of time
passes after difficult groundbreaking events. In order to learn more about the changing variables
of stereotypes, we should bear in mind the study of Yueh-Ting Lee and his associates who have
established an EPA Model (an acronym formed from the initial letters of these three words:
Evaluation, Potency, Accuracy) with three dimensions of stereotypes and categorical knowledge.
"E" represents evaluation or valence (e.g., stereotypes and human categories can range from
positive to negative), "P" represents potency or latency of activation from the memory of human
knowledge (e.g., stereotypes or human categories can range from automatic activation to little or
no activation), and finally, "A" represents accuracy (e.g., stereotypes and human categories can
range from accurate to inaccurate). In practice, stereotypes may transform to these following
dimensions only when the reality changes, following the changes in human perceptions.
To conclude, each of us can contribute to creating less stereotypical image about us. Here, ‘us’
means belonging to some nation, age and religious group, gender, educational, cultural and
political establishment. As Ms. Vesna Goldsworthy observed: “Everything changes at the speed
of lightning. In 1903 British looked upon Serbia with horror, and in 1914 with admiration: what
does eleven years mean in our lives?” (quoted from a 2005 interview with Vesna Goldsworthy in
Vreme)
It is well-known that stereotypes are the basis of many jokes worldwide, but one book especially
deserves mentioning as it is an expert blending of cartography and satire, and a reliable weapon
against bigotry of all kinds. Yanko Tsvetkov, Bulgarian illustrator and graphic artist living in
London, analysed wittily the European relations and attitudes through the medium of his
‘stereotype maps’, and published his Atlas of Prejudice: The Complete Stereotype Map
Collection (2017).

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