Culture in relation to Walmart (ePub)

Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject Business economics - General, grade: 2,0, University of Glamorgan, language: English, abstract: An exact definition of culture is very difficult. Therefore the characterisation of society is very broad. Several authors have tried to define this phenomenon. For instance Foster (1962) defines it very abstract: 'Culture is the way of life of the group of people'. A More detailed description comes from Ball and McCulloch (1999). In their point of view on culture 'the sum total of the beliefs, rules, techniques, institutions, and artefacts that characterize human populations'. Dresser and Carns (1969) have a more practical view on this topic, culture: it enables a communication through a common language, allows a calculation of possible response on the action which had taken place, to define what is wrong or right. These different explanations disclose how complex an understanding of a foreign country could be. All the more the volume of international trade illustrates that a high awareness of local specifics is indispensable. Every year goods and services with a value of 11783 billion dollars were traded around the world. Especially Europe, Asia and North America have been responsible for over 90% of the exchanges. Hence, in nearly 60 years the international trade has grown approximately around 200 times (World Trade Organisation, 2007). Furthermore, the relation between trades to GDP ratio increased around 12.7% in all OECD countries between 1992 and 2005. Today an average trade to GDP ratio from 45% for all OECD states shows how essential international commerce is (OECD, 2007). But why is international trade so attractive for companies? They diversify themselves and get more independent from a single market. The next reason is that they get the opportunity to sell more goods and be more profitable, and they benefit from economy of scale and reduces costs. Getting into a new market has the advantage of gaining technological expertise from the local worker. Moreover a production in the target market enables the company to adopt faster new demands and avoid trade barriers against their goods. Thus, it is no wonder that the 500 largest MNEs got annual sales of 14.9 trillion dollars (Rugman, Collinson, 2006).