When Geert Hofstede famously defined culture as collective programming of the mind, the definition broadly referred to culture as such, including all the layers in his onion model. The title of this volume, Culture's Software, represents a development of this original idea and was inspired by none other than Professor Hofstede himself. He used this phrase over thirty years later when lecturing to an international group of scholars gathered in Poland to debate the idea of cultural communication styles, which has, in recent years, been fruitfully discussed from a fresh perspective by scholars working within cognitive and cultural linguistics. The debate has given rise to this book, which will inspire further research into this fascinating subject.
About the Author: Dorota Brzozowska has a PhD in Linguistics, and is Associate Professor at the Department of Polish and Cultural Studies at the University of Opole, Poland. Her publications include O dowcipach polskich i angielskich. Analiza jezykowo-kulturowa [On Polish and English Jokes. A Linguistic and Cultural Analysis] (2000), and Polski dowcip etniczny. Stereotyp a tozsamosc [The Polish Ethnic Joke. Stereotype and Identity] (2008). She is also the coeditor of ?wiat humoru [The World of Humour] (2000) and Hungarian Humour (2012) and the journal Stylistyka. Wladyslaw Chlopicki, PhD, is Assistant Professor at the Institute of English Studies at Jagiellonian University, Krakow, and Head of the Institute of Humanities of Krosno State College. He published a book-length introduction to humour studies in Polish (1995) and is the editor-in-chief of the Humor and Culture series. He is also the editor of Kognitywizm i komunikatywizm [Cognitive and Communicative Paradigms in Linguistics] (2006) and two volumes on intercultural communication (2007, 2010). He also coedited Cognition and Language (2007). Together they are co-editors of European Journal of Humour Research and editors of Polish Humour (2012), Humor polski (2014), Termin w jezykoznawstwie [Terminology in Linguistics] 2012, and the two volumes of Poland and Estonia: Creativity and Tradition in Cultural Communication (2012, 2013). They are board members of the Cracow Tertium Society for the Promotion of Language Studies and long-time members of the International Society of Humour Studies. They co-organized the 24th ISHS conference in Krakow (2012), and the International Communicational Styles Conferences held in Krosno in 2013 and 2015.