The use of cultural dimensions : According to some authors, the usefulness of the concept of culture to explain cultural differences depends on being able to unpack it and identify its components as “Culture is too global a concept to be meaningful as an explanatory variable”. The use of a limited number of dimensions to compare cultures has anthropological roots. Early scholars in this field argued that cultural diversity results from different answers in different societies to similar universal questions: “the existence of two sexes; the helplessness of infants; the need for satisfaction of the elementary biological requirements such as food, warmth and sex; the presence of individuals of different ages and of differing physical and other capacities” delineated cultural pattern variables or cultural dilemmas that define and categorize cultures: affectivity versus affective neutrality; self-orientation versus collectivity orientation; universalism versus particularism; ascription versus achievement and specificity versus diffuseness. These contributions have influenced modal personality studies, focusing on “to what extent do the patterned conditions of life in a particular society give rise to certain distinctive patterns in the personality of its members?” proposed the terms social character, basic personality structure, and national character. Identifying reliable dimensions to synthesize major distinguishing aspects of culture could be a major contribution to cross-cultural research. They would provide an alternative to conceptualize and measure culture as a complex, multidimensional structure rather than as a simple categorical variable. Nonetheless, using dimensions to capture the multidimensional culture construct has not been without criticism. Namely, this approach has been criticized for its failure to fully capture all relevant aspects of culture: It would be a triumph of parsimony if many diverse cultural differences in decision making could be explained in terms of a single cultural disposition, such as individualism collectivism. For this reason, the dispositional approach has attracted many advocates. Yet, the existing evidence for the dispositional view falls short While this criticism is valid, the benefits of this approach for international marketing and cross-cultural research outweigh its limitations: The identification of reliable dimensions of cultural variation should help create a nomological framework that is both capable of integrating diverse attitudinal and behavioral empirical phenomena and of providing a basis for hypothesis generation. Additional emic dimensions are probably needed to characterize unique aspects of particular cultures. However, in the interest of parsimony, it is incumbent on the researcher to demonstrate that an apparently emic cultural variation cannot be represented adequately as a point along a universal dimension