Introduction:

Transculturality has been an important topic in philosophy, the humanities and social science for quite some time. Driving this phenomenon from the start has been the globalization of economic cooperation, the production of goods and services and their exchange around the globe by people that were socialized in differing societies and cultures. As early as the 1930s, the American sociologist Robert E. Park noted that “In the long run, however, peoples and races who live together, sharing in the same economy, inevitably interbreed, and in this way if in no other, the relations which were merely co-operative and economic become social and cultural”. Park views the related migration “abstractly as a type of collective action”, that gives rise culturally to “the marginal man” who straddles the border, simultaneously living in different, occasionally even strictly opposed, cultures. The man on the border learns how to handle cultural difference, and this process of acculturation begins on the border between two different cultures (...). In this being situated “in between”, engaged in the continual attempt to fuse cultural difference, arises transcultural competence that leads to a new, dynamic equilibrium and a refined skill at living a civilizing life.

Building on Park’s reflections and looking at transculturality through the economist’s lens, I will develop it as a productive resource and an informal institution for cooperative economic value creation. It is my view that, to date, economists have not occupied themselves with the transculturality phenomenon, even though, as indicated, it already plays an important role in global value chains.