Czech-Finnish cultural differences

Even though both Czech Republic and Finland are European countries and they belong naturally to the Western cultural world, there are significant mutual differences between their cultures. The number of Czechs heading towards Finland and vice versa is rising every year mostly thanks to the exchange educational program Erasmus. We can observe steadily increasing trend of both commercial and touristic exchanges as well. The main focus of this master thesis lies in defining Czech-Finnish and Finnish-Czech mutual cultural standards. Cultural standards are defined in compliance with the methodology set by Alexander Thomas which counts with in-depth interviews about mutual differences and social conflicts which respondents went through. All the respondents had to fulfill the minimum criteria of being exposed to the opposite culture for at least three months. There were four main areas of differences which emerged out of the research – verbal and non-verbal communication, the lifestyle, the family life, the attitude related to rules and basic values. Results were put to a confrontation with theoretical findings related to cultural dimensions of Geert Hofstede and Fons Trompenaars. The original research has two outputs where the set of recommendations for the mutual contact being the first one and the verifying of given hypothesis being the other one