Climate, Affluence, and Culture

This is an innovative way of looking at cultures! Van de vliert is definately a genius in mapping out the world's cultures with an extensive ecological touch. It has been a long debate recently reagrding the future research in cross-cultural studies. The popularity of ecology has been advocated under the new attempt of defining culture with the concern of environment at large. Van de Vliert uses Climate and cash as controlable variables to explain the different value systems. His focus on the categorization of self expression, survival and easy-going cultures will in my opinion becomes a futuristic approach for clustering the cultures. This will be an avnat garde version of the traditional dimension based approach. A very good reading indeed for any one whom into the inter-cultural communication and cross-cultural management. Linjie Chou