![]() Despite this, to the best of our knowledge, no scientific evidence has ever been produced on the subject. The second reason is that the issue (potential problems caused by the presence of ‘aliens’ in the country) is deeply felt in Italy and is a cause of considerable political controversy. This is precisely what our variables measure, albeit only partially and imperfectly. The first is that we do not know fully what people’s internal beliefs are, but we may observe external social behaviour, which serves as a reflection of culture (and other variables, to be sure). While we admit that this may be a misnomer, and that in all cases the variables that we have may at best reveal only part of the general picture (cultural distance between groups), we believe that this may nonetheless prove of interest for three main reasons. For brevity’s sake, we will sometimes refer to this as (revealed, or actual manifestations of) culture. Unfortunately, overlap between the two surveys is rather limited this forced us to use just a few survey questions, focused on what may be called ‘culturally-driven use of time (with a focus on selected items)’. By merging two similar but independent Italian surveys of 20, we try to assess the cultural distance between Italians and foreigners in Italy. The latter approach, the one that we will adopt here, relates instead to the statistical notion of variability, and can be broadly described as an attempt to estimate how likely it is for individuals of group A to find someone ‘like them’ in group B. Groups have their ‘characteristic’ traits, and distances are built. The former, which is a far more widely accepted concept, relies on the idea of a ‘representative’ (e.g., average, or modal) value, such as national culture. The second issue relates to the type of distance to be measured, distinguishing between what we will call here the collective and the individual approach. Despite the relevance of the topic, we do not devote much space to it because our data do not permit us any choice: we must stick to the few variables that we have (Sect. The first regards the definition of culture and its empirical indicators. In the first part of this paper, we briefly discuss the notion of cultural distance, highlighting two separate issues. This issue is of great cultural and social significance, but research into it is still yet to progress because the abstract concepts of culture and cultural distance are difficult to define, impossible to measure directly (they are latent constructs), and hard to measure even indirectly, because the corresponding manifest variables are typically questionable and partial. But whilst these benefits sometimes occur, they seem to materialize only rarely. There are also potential benefits to it: for instance, it attracts curious tourists, helps to address complex problems from different angles, and contrasts the tendency of the world towards standardisation, under the pressure of globalisation. Finally, Italians with a foreign origin are, as expected, close to Italians tout court, which suggests that cultural convergence is taking place.Ĭultural distance is frequently cited as a potential source of problems: it complicates the management of multinational enterprises, reduces commercial exchanges, arouses suspicion and sometimes hostility, and slows down the integration of foreigners in the host country, etc. Second, foreigners are not all equally culturally distant from Italian natives: the ranking of their cultural distances largely conforms to expectation. Results indicate, first, that no group is homogeneous: Italians, for instance, display a clear North to South gradient. We present the methodology under a new light, investigate several of its properties, and apply it to two Italian surveys of 2011–13. In this paper, we argue that a recently proposed method, called DBS or Distance Between Strata, fits this scope. However, it is impossible to ascertain whether this is true in the absence of a clear, standardised system for measuring cultural distance (whether it be by nationality, length of stay, educational level, etc.). The presence of foreigners in a host country is a contentious issue: opponents claim, among other things, that the cultural distance between them and natives is too large to permit integration.
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