Connections Between Cultures: Using Empirical Distributions for Measuring Cultural Differences

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.