Divergence is a fact of social life; people select different tastes to distinguish themselves from others and they abandon tastes when others adopt them. But while we know a great deal about conformity, it predicts convergence, and thus is less equipped to explain why people diverge. We suggest people diverge to maintain clear signals of identity. Our approach emphasizes that the meaning of sig...

Received: 13 August 2003 Revised: 20 December 2004 Accepted: 25 February 2005 Online publication date: 2 June 2005 Abstract The paper provides a state-of-the-art review of several innovative advances in culture and international business (IB) to stimulate new avenues for future research. We first review the issues surrounding cultural convergence and divergence, and the processes underlying cul...

In the social sciences, culture is often explored via the use of knowledgeable informants and direct observation. In this paper we present a novel approach for cultural investigation that focuses on the statistical analysis of texts. We use Latent Semantic Analysis to generate a semantic space representing one or more cultures based on a corpus of texts. By comparing the vector representation o...

Understanding the divergence of behavioural signals in isolated populations is critical to knowing how certain barriers to gene flow can develop. For many bird species, songs are essential for conspecific recognition and mate choice. Measuring the rate of song divergence in natural populations is difficult, but translocations of endangered birds to isolated islands for conservation purposes can...

The translation divergence is a challenging problem in the area of machine translation. A detailed study of divergence issues in machine translation is required for their proper classification and detection. The language divergences between English and Sanskrit can be considered as representing the divergences between SVO (Subject Verb Object) and SOV (Subject Object Verb) classes of languages....

The question as to whether cultures evolve in a manner analogous to that of genetic evolution can be addressed by attempting to reconstruct population histories using cultural data. As others have argued, this can only succeed if cultures are isolated enough to maintain and pass on a central core of traditions that can be modified over time. In this study we used a set of cultural data (canoe d...