The manifold usage of the word ‘culture’ makes it a very difficult term to
define; but it is beyond the scope of this paper to address it. The term ‘culture’
has been used in diverse ways as in ‘school culture’ (Fullan 2007), ‘culture
of “teaching to the test”’ (Paton 2012), and ‘examination-dominated culture’
(Fok et al. 2006). For the purposes of this article, we take note of six ‘inadequate’
but mutually related and mutually reinforcing conceptions about
culture that ‘greatly diminish the utility of the culture concept as an analytical
tool for understanding social action’ (Avruch 1998: 14). These are: