Understanding the Culture: Answers from Literature

Abstract

Culture occupies a paradoxical position within the social sciences: it is simultaneously among the most frequently invoked constructs in scholarly and popular discourse and among the most persistently contested in its definition, boundaries and methods of study. This paper attempts to offer a synthesis of culture as an independent domain of research and practice, addressing its historical origin and evolution; its definitional architecture and constituent components; the principal dimensional frameworks through which cross-cultural variation has been operationalized; the ecological, historical, economic, religious, linguistic, political and technological determinants that give rise to cultural variation; the mediating and moderating variables that translate macro-level culture into micro-level cognition and behavior; the categories and typologies through which culture has been classified; the specific contributions of anthropology, sociology, psychology, management, economics, linguistics, communication studies, political science and history; the interdisciplinary borrowing and synthesis that characterizes contemporary culture research; the qualitative and quantitative instruments, data-collection strategies and analytical techniques through which culture has been measured and their underlying scholarly rationale; the major theories, structural models and applied frameworks that scholars have advanced; and the theoretical, methodological, contextual, level-of-analysis, temporal and digital gaps that continue to define the field's research frontier. Each major theme is elaborated across multiple sub-sections, drawing on foundational and contemporary scholarship from Tylor (1871) through Gelfand et al. (2011) and beyond, in order to provide advanced researchers with a single resource capable of orienting further inquiry into culture as a dynamic, multi-level and interdisciplinary construct.