People live their lives and form communities based on certain ideas which they accept as true without much conscious reflection. For example, do you agree with these ideas?

- People need independence to be happy.
- People are fundamentally in charge of their own destiny.
- I am the best judge of whether I am good at something.
- The physical and spiritual world are separate.

Whether these ideas make sense to you or not depends in important ways on the cultural community you grew up in. But these unspoken values and assumptions are so  so "built in" that we don´t notice them. We are like fish who don´t notice water because it´s such a natural part of how we are. We also often don´t notice that other communities may rely on different deep culture assumptions.

What precisely constitutes deep culture categories is not clear. The questions on this site are based in large part (but not exclusively) on the approach of Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner (1998; 2004). They have developed a theoretical framework which attempts to explain cultural difference in terms of fundamental challenges that humans face when organizing social communities. To learn more, see Shaules (2007).

References:

Shaules, J., (2007). Deep Culture: The Hidden Challenges of Global Living. Clevedon, Multilingual Matters.

Trompenaars, F., & Hampden-Turner, C. (1998). Riding the Waves of Culture. New York, NY: McGraw Hill.

Trompenaars, F., & Hampden-Turner, C. (2004). Managing People Across Cultures. Chichester: Capstone Publishing Ltd.