Culture is more than just a set of behaviours. Textbooks refer to culture as the ‘system of shared beliefs, values, customs and behaviours that the members of a society use to make sense of their environment and one another’. While we can identify cultural differences in terms of language, food and dress, recognising differences in behaviour and customs does not go far enough in understanding culture, as it ignores the values behind these. The behaviour of people is the tip of the iceberg. What we are also interested in is why people behave in this way, which depends on their underlying beliefs and attitudes.
The British Army’s CULAD initiative should be of interest to you as a business studies student, because it shows the lengths to which a large, highly reputable, professional and globally active organisation went in order to better understand the country it was working within. Its approach was similar to the way in which a large, well-regarded plc with a multinational footprint might choose to deal with expanding into a new market.
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