University of Lethbridge
Course: MGT 3650 – B (Introduction to International Business)
Instructor: Dr. Rehana Afaqi

Research Paper
Three Approaches That Will Help in Comparing Cultural Differences

By
Emmanuel Makoni, Sonia Jerin & Laren Michel
Due Date: November 6th 2014

Introduction: There are around 196 countries in the world and the cultures and values differ between the different countries. There are still similarities in some of the culture traits. In today’s world people are more willing to engage in global business and for this reason they need to be able to adapt to the different cultures. As the cultures vary from country to country, people around the world may face many difficulties during their communication. Many businesses have failed due to the fact that they failed to fully assess the market they were entering in. The paper will portray three different approaches that will aid in understanding cultural differences that can be utilized as effective tools in conducting global business. These approaches are known as the context approach, the cluster approach and the dimension approach. 1. Context Approach: This is one of the three main approaches to understand cultural differences. Context approach is considered as the most straightforward as it relies on a single dimension. In addition, there are two parts of the context approach, known as: (i) High context cultures and (ii) Low context cultures. The two types of contexts have different cultures, values, norms, and ways of thinking.
In low-context cultures such as North American and Western European countries, communication usually takes place at face value whereas, in high-context cultures such as Asian and African countries, communication relies upon unspoken condition. They rely more on the non-verbal communication. For example, countries that are considered high context