A proliferation of global brands brings diverse cultures to a consumer population that is also growing culturally diverse. Companies are managing a workforce that is also increasingly culturally diverse. This module discusses what globalization is, and how it is connected to five forces: growing multiculturalism, cultural mixing, global competition, information flows and co-creation, and global interdependencies. This module will also analyze what culture is, why cultures emerge, the environmental influences that shape culture, where culture exists, and how it manifests itself. Students will learn that culture exist in our heads as values and beliefs, but also outside our heads in things that surround us, in material objects, and in social institutions. In particular, products, brands, and leadership styles can be tangible representations of culture.

Culture dimensions are to countries what personality dimensions are to people. We can use culture dimensions to describe the culture of a country the same way we can use personality dimensions, such as extraversion or narcissism, to describe a person. This module introduces the cultural framework developed by Geert Hofstede, a pioneer cross-cultural management researcher from the Netherlands. The framework consists of six cultural dimensions that describe values, norms, attitudes, and behaviors around six themes. These dimensions can help explain and predict the consumer behavior of diverse cultural groups.

This module introduces the cultural frameworks developed by Triandis and colleagues. Harry Triandis was a Professor of Psychology here at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is considered the most renowned academic scholar in cross-cultural psychology, and the frameworks inspired by his work illustrate the important role of culture in three crucial domains of human psychology: (1) The Self, or how individuals perceive themselves as a unit, perceive and interpret the world around them, and set and pursue goals; (2) Society, or how the self fits in with others and manages relationships. How other people are perceived and prioritized in relation to one other; and (3) Social Coordination: The normative processes, social structures, and material culture used to create order, coordinate behavior, and reinforce shared norms.

The framework in the past two modules explain culture based on observed patterns of beliefs, values, and behaviors that are shared by members of different societies. This approach to understanding culture is referred to as the descriptive approach to culture. Although cultural prescriptions would determine, overall, how people from a culture differ in judgments and behaviors from those of a different culture, a descriptive approach to culture fails to account for variations of behaviors within the culture. In other words, culture is not deterministic in the sense that people behave as cultural actors all the time. To address this limitation of the descriptive approach to culture for predicting human behavior, researchers introduced the dynamic approach to culture, also known as the dynamic constructivist approach to culture. This module introduces the dynamic approach to culture to address the limitations of the descriptive approach. The module introduces the basic tenets of the dynamic approach to culture and discusses the contexts in which culture is more likely to be salient or “active” to drive people’s judgments and behaviors. The module introduces biculturalism, i.e. ways of acquiring two cultural knowledge networks and identities. The module closes discussing issues of international assignments and culture shock.