North European business cultures: Britain vs. Denmark and Germany

Recognizing cultural differences as part of a pattern helps the intercultural manager understand the inner logic of other cultures - and understanding enables him to decide appropriate action for himself rather than rely on lists of dos and don'ts. An unexpected framework for making sense of differences between the business cultures of the three North European countries of Britain, Germany and Denmark is found in the anthropologist Edward T. Hall's notion of high-context and low-context cultures, normally applied to far more dramatically different cultures. Using extensive interview data, Malene Djursaa demonstrates that differences between the three business cultures in the processes involving trust-building and networking as well as communication and information flows can coherently be understood as differences in 'contexting' patterns -- and she goes on to interpret the findings in the light of sociological modernization theories and British social and economic history.