Towards a Transactional Approach to Culture: Illustrating the Application of Douglasian Cultural Framework in a Variety of Management Settings

Abstract

Frameworks of national/societal culture approach (NCA), although popular, are unsuitable for cultural sense‐making when: (1) people's national/corporate identities become blurred; (2) the focus is on cultural diversity within an entity; and (3) the cultural phenomenon spans across levels, scales and geo‐ethnic boundaries. To serve as an alternative to NCA in these scenarios, a cultural framework must: (1) explain people's behaviors without evoking nationality‐based behavioral generalizations; (2) lend itself to applications across levels, scales and geo‐ethnic boundaries; (3) explain social change as a never‐ending, unpredictable phenomenon; and (4) explain conformity and diversity of human behavior. In search of such a framework, we review anthropology literature, more precisely Barth's transactional culture approach. Our search leads us to the Douglasian cultural framework (DCF). We show that DCF meets the aforementioned criteria, and has been successfully used by scholars as a transactional cultural tool in scenarios where NCA frameworks are unsuitable.

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