Managers are continually instructed that they should take special care with respect to cultural differences among their customers and employees. This article argues that although problems do occur, the difficulties are easily exaggerated and great resources need not be committed to solving them. Culture is a vague and changeable concept which is too easily used to represent grievances or justify protection for special interests. In reality, the issues can be understood and solved without special training.

A student once defined the Masters of Business Administration degree to me as `common sense, with a dash of pseudoscience.' Whether he was correct or not is a matter of opinion, but an area where criticism does strike home relates to the way culture is presented to aspiring managers. It is presented as far more concrete, explanatory and threatening than is usually the case. Culture, after all, is highly visible in many of its aspects, which readily leads to `attribution bias'—to attributing to it behavior that probably has quite different causes.

The mindset that thinks in terms of cultural explanation is very common, even among academics. Some experts of multi-country studies are actually asked why they have not cited culture as an explanation of the differences reported in the course of their research, even when they have discovered that differences are greater from person to person than when people are grouped by nationality. Furthermore, cultural exceptionalism springs readily to the minds of many in politics, who make claims for the antiquity and significance of a culture that they wish to see protected. Since sets of behavior that can be labeled cultural are so numerous and their characteristics apparently so obvious, it is easy to label any given set as distinct and claim a privileged status for it.

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