Connections Between Cultures: Using Empirical Distributions for Measuring Cultural Differences

Abstract

The past few decades have seen an explosion in the interest in cultural differences and their impact on many aspects of business management. A noticeable feature of most academic studies and practitioner approaches is the predominant use of national boundaries and group-level averages as delimiters and proxies for culture. However, this largely ignores the significance that intra-country differences and cross-country similarities can have for identifying psychological phenomena. This article argues for the importance of considering intra-cultural variation for establishing connections between two different cultures. It uses empirical distributions of cultural values that occur naturally within a country, thereby making intracultural differences interpretable and actionable. For measuring cross-country differences, the Gini/Weitzman overlapping index and the Kullback-Leibler divergence coefficient are used as difference measures between two distributions. The properties of these measures in comparison to traditional group-level mean-based distance measures are analyzed, and implications for cross-cultural and international business research are discussed.