Cultural Analysis: Towards Cross-cultural Understanding

With internationalization, the world is becoming smaller and the opportunity to meet people from other countries and cultures is becoming more common, providing the need for cooperation, shared knowledge, and cross-border trade. Individual cultures tend to understand themselves best and base their understanding of the world and its peoples on ideas they each have come to believe irrespective of reality, and thus make it difficult to reach a proper understanding of other cultures. This book considers intercultural understanding and co-action, partly by means of general insights into the concept of culture and the dimensions which bring about cultural differences, and partly as a methodology to analyze a certain culture - whether one's own or others'. This leads towards an understanding of cultural complexity and cultural differences among people. The book provides a discussion of a number of ethical issues, which almost invariably will arise when people meet and co-act across cultural boundaries. Cultural Analysis offers a theoretical/abstract proposal for cultural understanding, intercultural plurality, and complexity.