Theorizing National Cultures

In the field of management, two main strands are currently concerned with cultures: one, originating from social psychology, uses attitude scales to characterize national cultures; the other, sociological and anthropological, considers only small groups. This literature did not provide a theory that would serve to interpret satisfactorily what we were observing. We identified two layers in a culture. A first layer corresponds to the existence of a specific way of giving meaning to situations and events, of experiencing power relations, of deciphering the intentions of others. A deeper layer comes from the existence, in each society, of a specific type of concern. The diversity of cultures is precisely related to the fact that the main fears from which one seeks to be free vary significantly from one society to another; so does the organization of social life which has over the years been developed to ward off those fears.