Cross Cultural Literature Review

This chapter presents an extensive review on literature done on acculturation and cross cultural adjustment in different contexts. First, definitions of culture and cross-cultural adjustment are proposed. Theories, models and previous studies on acculturation and cross-cultural adaptation are also reviewed thoroughly.

Culture definition Revisited

Before commencing a review of the research on cross-cultural adjustment, it is important to discuss the concept of culture and its operationalization as it constitutes the backbone of this ethnographic study.

The dynamic and relative nature of culture inevitably has led researchers not only to define it in different ways but also come up with divergent connotations and point of views. For instance,

The most common essentialist view of culture is that “cultures” are coincidental with countries, regions, and continents, implying that one can “visit” them while traveling and that they contain “mutually exclusive types of behavior” so that people “from” or ‘in” French culture are essentially different from those “from” or “in” Chinese culture. This psychogeographical picture also presents a hierarchical onion skin relationship between a national culture and elements within it, so that “Egyptian school culture” is a subset or subculture of “Egyptian education culture,” and so on (p. 17).

When the common characteristics of culture reviewed, Jiang (2010) points out that culture is a ‘holistic’ and “pervasive” system which is made up of several connected subsystems in each aspect of life such as kinship system, education system, religious system, association system, and political system which all play significant roles in influencing the way we live and

For the purpose of this study, culture is viewed as “embodied in the signs, symbols, and language” as well as the “knowledge people have acquired that shape their worldview and behavior” (Merriam, 2002, p. 236). Moreover, my understanding of culture in this research as the researcher is quite parallel to the definition of Moran (2001):

Culture is the evolving way of life of a group of persons, consisting of a shared set of practices associated with a shared set of products, based upon a shared set of perspectives on the world, and set within specific social contexts” (p.24)

Studies on