Culture has long been regarded being restricted to national borders. In his influential and
comprehensive study, Hofstede (1989) has compared no less than 50 national cultures and
three regions. Such an approach is in accord with the conception of culture as defined by
three criteria: place, time, and language (Georgas & Berry, 1995; Triandis, 1980). The
tendency to mistakenly equate culture with nation or ethnic group is now increasingly
challenged. Rather than focussing on geographical differences, numerous dimensions of
cultural variation have been empirically derived. According to Schwartz (1992), any nation
or subgroup in a nation may be characterised by a distinct cultural value pattern, profile
(Gelfand & Dyer, 2000) or cultural standard (Thomas, 1993). Recent approaches
comprehend cultures as “dynamic open systems that spread across geographical boundaries
and evolve through time” (Hong & Chiu, 2001, p. 181) rather than stable and static entities.