Culture
Researchers
have introduced a number of definitions for culture. As far back as 1952,
Kroeber and Kluckholn (1952) identified 164 definitions of culture in the
literature. Inherent in almost all definitions is that culture is a pattern of
thinking, feeling and acting that is rooted in common values and conventions of
particular societies.
By incorporating three definitions of cultures, a
workable definition can be achieved: Culture is the total way of life in a
society; it is the collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the
members of human groups from another in terms of shared beliefs, the
ideologies, and the norms that influence the organizational action taking.
(Fletcher, 1979; Hofstede, 1984).
An example of the differences can be seen in picture 1 below:
There is a
lot of research from many countries which findings reveal that cultural and
social aspects are very important for peoples learning habits.
Troy Heffernan,
Mark Morrison, Parikshit Basu and Arthur Sweeney in their article “Cultural
differences, learning styles and transnational education” presented research.
The aim of this study was to explore the differences in learning styles between
business students in China and Australia. There were significant differences
between Australian and Chinese students for three of the four learning styles. Chinese
and Australian students were both more active than reflective, Australian
students were significantly more active in their learning. Furthermore,
Australian students were substantially more visual than their Chinese colleagues.
And although Chinese students were found to have a slightly more global learning
style, Australian students were slightly sequential.
No significant difference
between Chinese and Australian students was found on the sensate–intuitive
learning style construct. They found that the Chinese cohort of students were
strongly visual, sensate and global learners. Two potential areas of weakness
are intuition and verbal learning skills, given the very low percentages for
these styles. In terms of what distinguishes Chinese students from Australian
students, Chinese students are much more likely to be global learners, are less
active learners and are less intuitive. The results suggested that there are
substantial differences in learning styles between the two countries and
programs managers need to consider these differences when structuring course
for these students.
Read next: 6-dimensional model of cultural analysis Page
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