How Thai National Culture Can Be Used to Explain Students’ Behavior

Abstract

The notion of culture has multiple and variously inconclusive definitions. Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1963) identified more than 160 definitions of culture. Although there are many ways of defining the concept of culture, the most common use of the word is to refer to national culture. Within this concept, culture comes to be viewed simply as either behavior or fixed values and beliefs, separated from social interaction and reality (Roberts & Sarangi, 1993). This view can be problematic, as it reduces individuals to stereotypical representations of their national culture, suppressing individual differences, and it assumes that the categories used are sufficient explanation for culture differences. As a result, relying on national culture as a device to investigate what is happening between people in any given group might not be fruitful or useful. As an alternative, Holliday (1999) asserts a need to distinguish between the large culture paradigm, which focuses on an explanation of cultural differences based on the notions of ethnic, national, or international culture, and the small culture paradigm, which regards any instance of cohesive behavior within any social grouping as culture in its own right.