Introduction nowadays, more and more firms are interested in servicing foreign market, but they always have to face many problems before entering foreign markets, cultural factors is one kind of those problems which is worth considering. For instance, Atkins-Kruger(2010) noted that as a cultural factor, climate and weather have a direct influence on a company's product category in search market. People in a county with unpredictable weather conditions, such as UK or Singapore, will have more demands on quality weather prediction, so the firm could focus on supplying this kind of information. Therefore, I would give some most considerable cultural factors in the rest of this paper. The first factor is religion, I will introduce some element of it and explain their influence on company activities. Then I will concentrate on style of government, I will describe some kind of government and explain their influence by the examples of Google. And the paper will end by a conclusion section.
The most important Cultural factors
Religion
Religion is a basic cultural factor that exist in all over the world, Hinnells (cited in Rao 2012) indicated that the origin of it is the Latin word “ligare” which means to join or to link. The three biggest religions: Christian , Buddhist and Moslem and other main religions such as Hinduism, Judaism and Shintorism have believers more than half population of the world. Nowadays, people work in a global village where people can travel and contact internationally by various easy ways, we are more directly influenced by the religious beliefs, rules and behaviors of others, so we have a necessary to deepen our understanding of the issues, and processes to manage religion at work (Rao,2012).
Religion has played a important role in management processes and economic development, it can affect every aspects of a firms activities, mainly includes following Points:
1.Surface culture
In Rao's study(2012), he indicated that this point is the most obviously, but the most changeful part of culture. Managers are usually conscious of these cultural representations and try to either manage or adapt them to managing diversity. We can find that many of the cultural clashes and legal issues have happened, surface culture issues just like cloth, observances and symbols. Some manifestations of surface culture that influence international organizations, such as symbols, schedules and calendars, festivals, and the concept of the workweek.
2.Religious symbol and behavior
Some of symbols related to appearance are most obviously to make people impressive(Rao 2012). For example, for Muslims, Jews and Sikhs, male facial hair is a symbol of their faith. In these religions, in order to indicate their faith follower wear head coverings such as scarves, turbans and yarmulke are a mark of faith, but the Christian show their respect by removing a hat .In fact, American firms met a unexpected opposition when they implement moving hat as a pervasive manner at work. In addition, the report from National Employer(cited in Rao,2009) stated a fact that, there was a clash provoked by some prejudices in US between the traditional American habit and Muslim women's wish to wear their headscarves which represents honor, dignity, chastity, purity and integrity In Islamic and Hindu cultures. Actually, there are many other religious habits, such as, women wear loose-fitting clothing to work and Muslim women often wear the veil(Rao, 2012).
Religious behavior are often happen in the workplace(Rao, 2012).For instance, Silks must bring a small sword called a kripan which may broke security principle of workplace, Christians always take the crucifix, Hindus usually wear “bindi” as an indicator of holy mark on their forehead. Some place such as hotels place the holy Bible in their rooms. These kinds of religious symbols means different significant in different cultures that can lead to collision. For example, the
