Does Culture Influence the Website Design of Schools? A Cross-cultural Comparative Study in the Indian, Chinese and American Context

Abstract

Decades of globalization had led website designers to focus more on functionality and standardization catering to the global village. Nevertheless, do cultural dimensions matter in website design. Extant literature in the domain of e-commerce has explored cultural parameters in website design in limited contexts. In the current era, globalization is not just restricted to trade and commerce but subsumes other important categories such as education. This article examines the influence of culture on the design and layout of websites of schools, which has not been explored otherwise. Most prominent developed and developing economies have international schools with international course curriculum and content. It is thus becoming increasingly important to understand whether the schools are following a generic design of websites without considering the individual cultural values or giving more emphasis to local cultural values in developing websites. This study has sampled websites of schools from India, China and the USA and conducted a comparative analysis to get a comprehensive understanding of whether culture influences the website design of schools. For theorizing and initializing cultural parameters, the study refers to the seminal work of Hofstede and uses cultural markers to score websites using an instrument developed for the study. Subsequently, the article uses the well-accepted technique of support vector machine (SVM) to segregate the websites of schools of India, China and the USA based on cultural dimensions. The presence of a large number of misclassified cases indicates that perhaps an emic approach is needed for a better understanding of the design of websites of schools rather than an etic approach wherein we compare the schools using cultural dimensions. The study contributes to the academic literature by developing an instrument and a methodology for analysing cultural markers in website design for schools and may be useful for school administrators and designers to integrate cultural dimensions in website design.