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nguage as examples of how culture differs. But culture is much more complex to go beyond such relevant and at the same time superficial differences. When the foreigner gets some skills in another language, some “hidden” differences become more noticeable, for example how and when “natives” use humor, how rules of formality are used according different contexts. Other interesting aspects is the different meaning and uses of silence, gender, position that are not expressed in the language but in the reality. According to Edward T. Hall (1959), culture controls people's behaviour in such deep ways, many of which are outside of awareness and therefore beyond conscious control of individual.

 

Clifford Geertz (1973) perceives culture more importantly to be the means by which people perpetuate, communicate and develop their knowledge about and attitudes towards life. The difficulty of finding terms in which to explore cultural differences does not seem to stop people from talking and writing about culture as if it were “a thing”. On international negotiations, many times the deals are not done simply because one of the parts did not share the same cultural background, or the parts involved were “culturally too different”. The point is that the perception of differences between cultures is so important and so definitive for negotiations, that an explanations of cultural misunderstanding is most of the times accepted even when most of the people involved in the negotiations would have a difficult time trying to explain what that might really means (cultural differences) except in terms of superficial examples. According to Hall (1976), culture is not a thing, which can be experienced directly through the senses, and is not directly tangible or visible. There are ideas constructed inside a society. Culture does not exist in a simple and easily form for a determined number of people in a bounded area, and a society, is not a uniform group of individuals with equal mental characteristics or personalities.

 

So, what is the real meaning of culture? According to anthropologists Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1952 p.357), the definition is:

 

“Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behaviour acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievement of human groups, including their embodiment in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional (i.e., historically derived and selected) ideas and especially their attached values; cultures systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of action, on the other, as conditioning elements of future action.”

 

Hofstede (2004) defined culture as a collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one category of people from another. Certainly the key expression in this definition is “collective programming”. It describes a process in which all members of one society have been subjected immediately after birth, through the lessons of parents, family and teachers. Parents and teachers try to give children the best advice本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。