ABSTRACT
Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is. It is a strange science whose most telling assertions are its most tremulously based, in which to get somewhere with the matter at hand is to intensify the suspicion, both your own and that of others, that you are not quite getting it right. As soon as consultants are engaged by clients to render a service, they encounter cultural issues, be they national, organisational or professional. As any self-aware consultant can attest, culture is a very difficult topic to address directly. The first approach is to deny the existence of culture altogether. A corollary of the minimising approach is coercion. Culture is often perceived as a monolithic concept - a general, sweeping term invoked to explain any and everything in a foreign environment.
