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Introduction
The word 'culture' is one of those words which should have a clear and straightforward meaning, but again, often various societal groups and different societies, let alone academics, perceive culture in many different ways. Western societies perceive culture as a social category consisting of beliefs, values, ways of thinking, and language. Most Eastern societies discern culture in a much more complex way as consisting of history, tradition, and most importantly - as a way of life. It is clear that culture is a societal behavioural norm that people sustain as common, and adhere to it. Culture comprises an entire set of social norms, and people's responses to those norms.
Culture being a set of rules commonly shared by a society assumes that the vast majority of society subscribe to those values and follow them in everyday life; in order to label certain behaviour and values as culture, it is of the utmost importance. The culture enables the members of society to share their perception of both the outside world and themselves. Often those perceptions can be (and usually are), partly self-deceiving, but nevertheless, they form a defined cultural pattem. Fundamentally, different groups of individuals develop a social environment as an adaptation to their physical environment, and they pass down their customs, practices, and traditions from one generation to another (Harris and Moran, 1979).
Different contextual factors act to either fan the flames of inter-group conflict and cross-cultural polarisation or encourage members to accept the existing differences and cope with them. Whenever there is a hint of mutual misunderstanding between members of different societies there is a danger that it will be subscribed to cultural differences. However, cultural differences do not automatically create tensions. They rather seem to be a residual category to which people attribute problems in the absence of any other (more supportive) context (Kanter and Com, 1994). However, if we assume that all enterprises are established to yield profit, then all entrepreneurs and managers are consequently the members of one `profit-making group' and cultural, local, geographical or even personal differences can be of marginal importance. There is management literature that is focused strictly upon strategic management in a global context (Prahalad and Doz, 1987; Kogut and Singh, 1988; Lorange and Probst, 1990),...