Business

Businesses engaging in international business activity in ignoring culture do so at their peril.

Introduction

Nowadays due to globalization new opportunities opens for businesses. International markets provide new potential customers and opportunities to expand. Businesses should recognize the importance of culture, people from different cultures have own ways of expressing personality, values, law, point of view. Good examples to compare are West and East cultures. Cultures in Middle East are considered as religious countries, people stick more on the rules of religion which is included in their legal system. While in western cultures’ law does not integrate with religion. Firstly, in this essay I am going to discuss importance of culture and its impact on international business. Secondly, I am going to give examples of international businesses such as McDonalds and Wal-Mart. I will demonstrate on these examples how businesses’ activities and their decision making considered to cultural differences and its consequences. Lastly, I am going to talk about how businesses can overcome cross-cultural illiteracy and its possible impact on businesses’ success.

Main body

What do we mean by culture? What is it culture? People still do not agree on one simple definition of culture. Geert Hofstede (1984:13) defined culture as ‘the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the member of one human group from another...’ While sociologists Zvi Namenwith and Robert Weber (1987:8) defined it as “a system of ideas and argue that these ideas constitute a design for living.” We can point out some common points of the definition of culture. Culture is an arrangement of values and social norms which are shared between groups of people and differs from other groups of people. Culture is not inherent, it is acquired. One country might harbour several cultures, and some cultures might link several countries. For example Canada harbours several cultures as Anglo,...