Culture and websites interaction: Issues and perspectives

With the increasing globalization of the business world, websites have become ever more important tools in international business. After the invention of websites, researchers have begun to analyze the websites as they have for traditional communication channels. Websites, as the communication medium of global firms, are not culturally neutral mediums. Website components should be analyzed very carefully in terms of their interaction with cultural issues to come up with culturally adapted websites. In this chapter, 114 studies on culture and websites are critically reviewed, and selected papers among them from a variety of areas such as marketing, communications, management, information technologies, and others, are analyzed in detail to consolidate the existing knowledge and approaches. This chapter aims to analyze how scholarly research on the interaction of culture and websites has developed. The studies are categorized according to the framework developed and selected. Forty of them are discussed in detail under some subcategories. A number of conceptual and methodological issues that deserve more attention are discussed to fulfill the high potential of websites. A state-of-the-art review of several innovative advances in culture and websites is provided to stimulate new streams for future research, and future research recommendations are proposed at the end of the chapter.