Hofstede, G. 1994. Cultures and Organizations. Intercultural Cooperation and its Importance for Survival. Software of the Mind.

London: HarperCollinsBusiness Language differences contribute to mistaken cultural perceptions Language and culture are not so closely linked that sharing a language implies sharing a culture; nor should a difference language always impose a difference in cultural values. Without knowing the language one misses a lot subtleties of a culture and is forced to remain relative outsider. One of these subtetlies is humor. What is considered funny is highly culture specific In intercultural encounters the experienced traveller knows that jokes and irony are taboo until one is absolutely sure of the other cultures conception of what represents humor. There are no standars for considering one group as intrinsically superior or inferior to another. Differences in cultures among groups and societies presupposes a position of cultural relativism. Cultural relativism afirms that one culture has no absolute criteria for judging the activities of another culture as low as or noble. However, every culture can and should apply such judgment to its own activities, because its members are actors as well as observers. Claude Lvi Strauss values are broad tendencies to prefer certain states to affairs over others. Values are feelings with an arrow to it: they have a plus and a minus side. They are among the first things children learn-not consciously, but implicitly. Bennett, M. J. (ed.). 1998. Basic concepts of intercultural communication. Yarmouth, MA: Intercultural Press Culture may be examined at four levels: concrete behavior, values, assumptions and generalised cultural forms(p.157) Values are relatively concrete, discrete, and specific; for instance typical American values are the sanctity of private property, the desirability of physical comfort, and the need for tangible measures of success. Values also have a quality of oughtness and are relatively available to individual awareness. A person will often discuss values when explaining his or her own or others feelings or behavior. A frequent objection made to efforts to analyze any culture is that people differ from one another in many ways, even within a culture, and any attempt to describe a people according to broad generalizations, such as cultural characteristics, results in stereotypes. It is clear that people differ widely with respect to any particulat behavior or value. Nevertheless, certain values and assumptions are dominant in, for example, American culture and are shared to one degree or another by most members. Thus, when we speak of an American value (or assumption), we refer to a peak or modal tendency for a range (distribution) of that value in the culture. All points on the distribution can be found in any society; thus, when two cultures are compared on a given dimension, there is overlap (i.e. some members of culture A will be more typical of Culture B who may be far from the modal point of their culture).

Edward C. Stewart, Jack Danielian, and Robert J. Foster

Bhikhu Parekh C. 2000, 2006 . Rethinking multiculturalism: cultural diversity and political theory / Bhikhu Parekh. Basingstoke, Hamps. : Palgrave Macmillan.

Kim, Y.Y. 2001. Becoming Intercultural. London: Sage. Cross-cultural adaptation is defined as the dynamic process by which individuals, upon relocating to new, unfamiliar or changed cultural environments, establish (or reestablish) and maintain relatively stable, reciprocal, and functional relationships with those environments (Kim Y. Y., 2001, p.31). Adaptation, thus, is an activity that is almost always a compromise, a vector in the internal structure and the external pressure of environment (Sahlins, 1964, p. 136)