The concept of culture cannot be defined unambiguously; the literature in several fields of science abounds in definitions, and they are generally quite ambiguous. Some of them list factors that culture includes, yet some define culture by what it is not6. The word ‘culture’
has even been claimed to be one of the most complicated words in the English language (Eriksen 2001: 3). The concept of culture, as it is used in science, has been adopted primarily from the field of anthropology (Sackmann 1992; Eriksen 2001). Anyhow, even in anthropology or social theory culture is not a very unambiguous concept; it is generally defined very broadly as the system of values and beliefs in a society
6These lists of what culture is include e.g. norms, values, feelings, thinking, roles, rules, behaviour, beliefs, attitudes, expectations, and meanings (Tayeb 1994); narratives, what kind of tales we heard as a child, who our heroes are, who the villains are (Nahapiet and Ghoshal 1998), and the list of what culture is not: economics, politics, law, religion, language, education, technology, industrial environment, society, or the market (Tayeb 1994).
(Avgerou 2003: 35). Within anthropologists’ definitions there are some disagreements, but Tapaninen (2005) lists four items which are generally accepted to be related to culture:
(1) culture isan inseparable part of humanity (2) culture islearnt
(3) culture isshared
(4) a culture is, at least in some degree,an integrated entity.
After Bourdieu (Tapaninen 2005): “Culture is not something that people have, it is something that people are.” And culture cannot be unambiguously codified; as Dourish (2004) puts it: the world as we perceive it is essentially a consensus of interpretation.
Culture is seen as something that is interpreted and re-interpreted, and constantly produced and re-produced in social relations (Myers and Tan 2002). Thus, culture is not static, but rather a dynamic and emergent phenomenon (Myers and Tan 2002; Walsham 2002). Myers and Tan (2002) define culture as a contested, temporal, emergent, complex and multidimensional concept, and thus it can hardly be studied as a whole, but rather at many different levels, such as international, national, regional, business, or organisational.
Nevertheless, although the study has to be focused on some level, in real life these levels are indeed inter-connected and intertwined.
Furthermore, Martin (2003) states that researchers and members of cultures are subjective in their interpretation and representation of what they observe, and accordingly an objective reality is seldom perceived.
Walsham (2002) defines culture as shared symbols, norms, and values in a social unit, such as a country. Accordingly, although the culture is interpreted individually, the meaning systems, power relations, or behavioral norms are not merely in the mind of one person.
An organisation is one type of social unit, which has its own norms and values, i.e. organisational culture.
Along with globalisation, the contacts between different societies and countries are increasing, and it is increasingly difficult for any group to remain isolated and uninfluenced by other cultures (Walsham 2002). ICT may help interaction between peoples from different cultures technically, but it does not guarantee understanding between people, and thus, culture is an important topic of research for
global information systems (Myers and Tan 2002). Some cultural researchers treat culture as a reified object, something that is “out there” (Martin 2003); to study culture one has to go “there”. In everyday life, people’s own culture – even that of culture researchers – is something which is not really recognised; it is obvious and gives people the sense of order. As Dourish (2004: 24) puts it:
Ordinariness, in addition, is relative to particular communities and sets of activities...Ordinariness, too, is relative to particular sets of circumstances; ordinary ways of acting on airplanes and at parties are clearly different.
People have certain cultural models that represent our conceptual knowledge, and these models are usually tacit. The models help people organise their everyday life and motivate people to act and feel in certain situations in culture-specific ways (Kling and Tillquist 2000). People have intrinsic models which dictate their behaviour; they change it depending on the situation, for instance, people behave differently with a different person in the same situation (e.g. in school a student has a different attitude towards other students than to the teacher) and differently with the same person or situation at different points in time (e.g. outside school a student may have a different attitude towards the teacher) (Kumar and Sankaran 2006). Culture usually only becomes notable and conscious when we are in an alien culture, but it is not only the foreign culture that is to be learned; one has to learn one’s own informal culture (Hall 1989: 197). Cultural models influence the planning for a specific organisational reform, and thus the structure of these models should be recognised, at least on some level (Kling and Tillquist 2000). According to Martin (2003: 396), the cultural models consist of physical manifestations of culture: dress norms, noise and dirt, quiet and luxury:
Even an apparently objective stimulus, such as the set of sounds in a language, may be heard differently by speakers of different languages, as their preconceptions influence the sound distinctions... A cultural artefact, such as a story or a ritual, is important because of how people interpret its meaning.
Despite disagreements about the definition of culture, three factors of culture within organisational science are perceived: (1) culturalvalues and attitudes are different; (2)different cultural groups behave
differently under similar circumstances, and (3) culture plays an important role in shaping work organizations (Tayeb 1994).