The Financial Reporting Quality of Public Companies

2 The concept and measurement of cultural determinants in economic sciences

DOI: 10.4324/9781003280088-3

2.1 The concept of culture, diversity, and cultural determinants

The concept of culture is ambiguous, carries a broad meaning, and is used in many academic disciplines. Authors consider and define the term ‘culture’ in many different ways. More than 150 definitions of culture were proposed in the 20th century. According to C. Kluckhohn,¹ culture

consists in patterned ways of thinking, feeling and reacting, acquired and transmitted mainly by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievements of human groups, including their embodiments in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional (i.e. historically derived and selected) ...