Santa Fe College Communicating Across Cultural Barriers International Case Studies

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Please read the 3 articles in this module and then complete this assignment

Three case studies will be provided below, where a complex situation is presented that will make you take intercultural considerations into account. What often makes the case study challenging is that your actions and decisions impact others, and you know your boss and co-workers well. Sometimes, there can be more than one way to handle the situation, but all actions should reflect an understanding of business etiquette.

For each case study, respond to the following questions:

a. What are some cultural considerations?
b. What are some possible actions/solutions? How will each solution impact others?
c.What would you decide to do in this situation and why?

Intercultural Case Studies
Case Study #1:
You are traveling to Brazil with your boss for a quick two-day visit. You are in the fashion industry and are looking for retail store locations and partner companies to sell your merchandise. Your boss scheduled a meeting with a representative from a major department store back-to-back with a real estate agent who wants to show you the best store location. While in the waiting room for the
first appointment, your boss is starting to get angry and talk to you about the long wait to see the department store representative. Your boss goes up to the receptionist and asks if the representative forgot about the meeting. Five minutes later, your boss tells the receptionist that they are going to miss out on a large deal if you leave Brazil without meeting. About 30 minutes after the appointment time, your meeting starts. The representative asks how you are doing and offers you both coffee. You know you are going to be late to see the real estate agent.

Case Study #2:
You and your co-worker are representing your luxury travel business at a meeting in Japan. Your company is based in the United States and it offers luxury trips to Tokyo where guests stay in 5-star hotels, eat at the best restaurants, ride in a premium coach bus, and gain all-access passes to the main tourist attractions.
The goal is to partner with this travel agency in Japan so you can both promote each other’s services. For example, they offer Japanese travelers luxury trips to New York City and California. There is opportunity to also combine forces and create a luxury trip to Italy. In order for the Italy trip to get off the ground, you need to research hotels, restaurants, itineraries and how to best market the luxury package. Your co-worker takes the lead and starts dividing tasks to look into the restaurants and hotels. Your co-worker tells the representatives from the Japanese company that it will be fair if the marketing is divided evenly, with one group creating a website and one group creating all printed materials. The representatives from Japan say,
“yes, okay.” Your co-worker remarks that this is a good plan for now and you can touch base via Skype in a month. The representatives from Japan don’t stand up to leave the meeting.

Case Study #3:
You have a male and female co-worker with the same title and status in the company. They both just so happen to be around the same age too. They are both co-leading a presentation on advancements in web design and digital marketing to a group in Saudi Arabia. The guests are listening respectfully to the entire presentation. When it comes time for the question and answer period, the questions are all being directed to the male co-worker. As the guests are leaving, they extend their hand to shake the male co-worker’s hand and thank him for the presentation. Both presenters, along with you, are invited to dinner later that evening as a thank you. The female co-worker makes a snide comment that she is glad that she was even included.

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Communicating across Cultural Barriers Nancy J. Adler If we seek to understand a people, we have to try to put ourselves, as far as we can, in that particular historical and cultural background. ... It is not easy for a person of one country to enter into the background of another country. So there is great irritation, because one fact that seems obvious to us is not immediately accepted by the other party or does not seem obvious to him at all. ... But that extreme irritation will go when we think ... that he is just differently conditioned and simply can't get out of that condition. One has to recognize that whatever the future may hold, countries and people differ ... in their approach to life and their ways of living and thinking. In order to understand them, we have to understand their way of life and approach. If we wish to convince them, we have to use their language as far as we can, not language in the narrow sense of the word, but the language of the mind. That is one necessity. Something that goes even much further than that is not the appeal to logic and reason, but some kind of emotional awareness of other people. ... Jawaharlal Nehru, Visit to America All international business activity involves communication. Within the international and global business environment, activities such as exchanging information and ideas, decision making, negotiating, motivating, and leading are all based on the ability of managers from one culture to communicate successfully with managers and employees from other cultures. Achieving effective communication is a challenge to managers worldwide even when the workforce is culturally homogeneous, but when one company includes a variety of languages and cultural backgrounds, effective two-way communication becomes even more difficult (16:1; 10:3-5, 121-128). CROSS-CULTURAL COMMUNICATION Communication is the exchange of meaning: it is my attempt to let you know what I mean. Communication includes any behavior that another human being perceives and interprets: it is your understanding of what I mean. Communication includes sending both verbal messages (words) and nonverbal messages (tone of voice, facial expression, behavior, and physical setting). It includes consciously sent messages as well as messages that the sender is totally unaware of sending. Whatever I say and do, I cannot not communicate. Communication therefore involves a complex, multilayered, dynamic process through which we exchange meaning. Every communication has a message sender and a message receiver. As shown in Figure 3-1, the sent message is never identical to the received message. Why? Communication is indirect; it is a symbolic behavior. Ideas, feelings, and pieces of information cannot be communicated directly but must be externalized or symbolized before being communicated. Encoding describes the producing of a symbol message. Decoding describes the receiving of a message from a symbol. The message sender must encode his or her meaning into a form that the receiver will recognize—that is, into words and behavior. Receivers must then decode the words and behavior—the symbols—back into messages that have meaning for them. For example, because the Cantonese word for eight sounds like faat, which means prosperity, a Hong Kong textile manufacturer Mr. Lau Ting-pong paid $5 million in 1988 for car registration number 8. A year later, a European millionaire paid $4.8 million at Hong Kong's Lunar New Year auction for vehicle registration number 7, a decision that mystified the Chinese, since the number 7 has little significance in the Chinese calculation of fortune (20). Similarly, the prestigious members of Hong Kong's Legislative Council refrained from using numbers ending in 4 to identify their newly installed lockers. Some Chinese consider numbers ending with the digit 4 to be jinxed, because the sound of the Cantonese word sei is the same for four and death. The number 24, for instance, sounds like yee sei, or death-prone in Cantonese (9). SOURCE: Adler, N.J. 1991. International Dimensions of Oganizational Behavior (2nd ed.). Boston, MA: PWS-KENT Publishing Company. pp. 63-91. Translating meanings into words and behaviors—that is, into symbols—and back again into meanings is based on a person's cultural background and is not the same for each person. The greater the difference in background between senders and receivers, the greater the difference in meanings attached to particular words and behaviors. For example: Sent Message Received Message RECEIVER SENDER Received Response Sent Response FIGURE 3-1 Communication Model A British boss asked a new, young American employee if he would like to have an early lunch at 11 A.M. each day. The employee answered, "Yeah, that would be great!" The boss, hearing the word yeah instead of the word yes, assumed that the employee was rude, ill-mannered, and disrespectful. The boss responded with a curt, "With that kind of attitude, you may as well forget about lunch!" The employee was bewildered. What had gone wrong? In the process of encoding agreement (the meaning) into yeah (a word symbol) and decoding the yeah spoken by a new employee to the boss (a word, behavior, and context symbol), the boss received an entirely different message than the employee had meant to send. Unfortunately, as is the case in most miscommunication, neither the sender nor the receiver was fully aware of what had gone wrong and why. Cross-cultural communication occurs when a person from one culture sends a message to a person from another culture. Cross-cultural miscommunication occurs when the person from the second culture does not receive the sender's intended message. The greater the differences between the sender's and the receiver's cultures, the greater the chance for cross-cultural miscommunication. For example: A Japanese businessman wants to tell his Norwegian client that he is uninterested in a particular sale. To be polite, the Japanese says, "That will be very difficult." The Norwegian interprets the statement to mean that there are still unresolved problems, not that the deal is off. He responds by asking how his company can help solve the problems. The Japanese, believing he has sent the message that there will be no sale, is mystified by the response. Communication does not necessarily result in understanding. Cross-cultural communication continually involves misunderstanding caused by misperception, misinterpretation, and misevaluation. When the sender of a message comes from one culture and the receiver from another, the chances of accurately transmitting a message are low. Foreigners see, interpret, and evaluate things differently, and consequently act upon them differently. In approaching cross-cultural situations, one should therefore assume difference until similarity is proven. It is also important to recognize that all behavior makes sense through the eyes of the person behaving and that logic and rationale are culturally relative. In cross-cultural situations, labeling behavior as bizarre Communicating across Cultural Barriers Adler 2 usually reflects culturally based misperception, misinterpretation, and misevaluation; rarely does it reflect intentional malice or pathologically motivated behavior. Culturally Bizarre' Behavior: Only in the Eyes of the Beholder While in Thailand a Canadian expatriate's car was hit by a Thai motorist who had crossed over the double line while passing another vehicle. After failing to establish that the fault lay with the Thai driver, the Canadian flagged down a policeman. After several minutes of seemingly futile discussion, the Canadian pointed out the double line in the middle of the road and asked the policeman directly, "What do these lines signify?" The policeman replied, "They indicate the center of the road and are there so I can establish just how far the accident is from that point." The Canadian was silent. It had never occurred to him that the double line might not mean "no passing allowed." Unwritten rules reflect a culture's interpretation of its surroundings. A foreign columnist for the Englishlanguage Bangkok Post once proclaimed that the unwritten traffic rule in Thailand is: "When there are more than three cars in front of you at a stop sign or intersection, start your own line!" This contravenes the Western stayin-line ethic, of course, but it effectively portrays, albeit in slightly exaggerated fashion, a fairly consistent form of behavior at intersections in Thailand. And it drives non-Thais crazy!(l4) CROSS-CULTURAL MISPERCEPTION Do the French and the Chinese see the world in the same way? No. Do Venezuelans and Ghanaians see the world in the same way? Again, no. No two national groups see the world in exactly the same way. Perception is the process by which each individual selects, organizes, and evaluates stimuli from the external environment to provide meaningful experiences for himself or herself (2;12;16;18). For example, when Mexican children simultaneously viewed tachistoscopic pictures of a bullfight and a baseball game, they only remembered seeing the bullfight. Looking through the same tachistoscope, American children only remembered seeing the baseball game (3). Similarly, adult card players, when shown cards by researchers, failed to see black hearts and diamonds, or red clubs and spades. Why didn't the children see both pictures? Why did the adults fail to see the unexpected playing card colors? The answer lies in the nature of perception. Perceptual patterns are neither innate nor absolute. They are selective, learned, culturally determined, consistent, and inaccurate. • • • • • Perception is selective. At any one time there are too many stimuli in the environment for us to observe. Therefore, we screen out most of what we see, hear, taste, and feel. We screen out the overload (5) and allow only selected information through our perceptual screen to our conscious mind. Perceptual patterns are learned. We are not born seeing the world in one particular way. Our experience teaches us to perceive the world in certain ways. Perception is culturally determined. We learn to see the world in a certain way based on our cultural background. Perception tends to remain constant. Once we see something in a particular way, we continue to see it that way. We therefore see things that do not exist, and do not see things that do exist. Our interests, values, and culture act as filters and lead us to distort, block, and even create what we choose to see and hear. We perceive what we expect to perceive. We perceive things according to what we have been trained to see, according to our cultural map. Communicating across Cultural Barriers Adler 3 For example, read the following sentence: FINISHED FILES ARE THE RESULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTIFIC STUDY COMBINED WITH THE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS Now, quickly count the number of F's in the sentence. Most non-native English speakers see all six F's. Many native English speakers only see three F's, they do not see the F's in the word of because of is not an important word in understanding the sentence. We selectively see those words that are important according to our cultural conditioning (in this case, our linguistic conditioning). Once we see a phenomenon in a particular way, we usually continue to see it in that way. Once we stop seeing of's, we do not see them again (even when we look for them); we do not see things that do exist. One particularly astute manager at Canadian National railways makes daily use of perceptual filters to her firm's advantage. She gives reports written in English to bilingual Francophones to proofread and those written in French to bilingual Anglophones. She uses the fact that the English secretaries can "see" more errors—especially small typographical errors—in French and the French secretaries can "see" more errors in English. The distorting impact of perceptual filters causes us to see things that do not exist. This phenomenon was powerfully demonstrated a number of years ago in a training session for American executives. The executives were asked to study the picture shown in Figure 3-2 and then describe it to a colleague who had not seen the picture. The first colleague then attempted to describe it to a second colleague who had not seen the picture, and so on. Finally, the fifth colleague described his perception of the picture to the group of executives and compared it with the original picture. Among the numerous distortions, the executives consistently described the black and the white man as fighting; the knife as being in the hands of the black man; and the white man as wearing a business suit and the black man as wearing laborer's overalls. Clearly the (inaccurate) stereotypes of blacks (poorer, working class, and more likely to commit crimes) and of whites (richer, upper class, and less likely to be involved in violent crime) radically altered the executives' perceptions and totally changed the meaning of the picture (1). The executives' perceptual filters allowed them to see things that did not exist and to miss seeing things that did exist. CROSS-CULTURAL MISINTERPRETATION Interpretation occurs when an individual gives meaning to observations and their relationships; it is the process of making sense out of perceptions. Interpretation organizes our experience to guide our behavior. Based on our experience, we make assumptions about our perceptions so we will not have to rediscover meanings each time we encounter similar situations. For example, we make assumptions about how doors work, based on our experience of entering and leaving rooms; thus we do not have to relearn each time we have to open a door. Similarly, when we smell smoke, we generally assume there is a fire. We do not have to stop and wonder if the smoke indicates a fire or a flood. Our consistent patterns of interpretation help us to act appropriately and quickly within our day-to-day world. Categories Since we are constantly bombarded with more stimuli than we can absorb and more perceptions than we can keep distinct, we only perceive those images that may be meaningful. We group perceived images into familiar categories that help to simplify our environment, become the basis for our interpretations, and allow us to function in an otherwise overly complex world. For example, as a driver approaching an intersection, I may or may not notice the number of children in the back seat of the car next to me, but I will notice whether the traffic Communicating across Cultural Barriers Adler 4 light is red or green (selective perception). If the light is red, I automatically place it in the category of all red traffic signals (categorization). This time, like prior times, I stop (behavior based on interpretation). Although people are capable of distinguishing thousands of different colors, I do not take the time to notice if the red light in Istanbul is brighter or duller than the one in Singapore or more orange or more purple than the one in Nairobi; I just stop. Categorization helps me to distinguish what is most important in my environment and to behave accordingly. FIGURE 3-2 Impact of Perceptual Filters SOURCE: Projected picture from experiment on accuracy of communication from the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith Rumor Clinic. As shown in Robert Bolton, People Skills (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1979), p. 74. Copyright  1979 by Simon & Schuster, Inc. Categories of perceived images become ineffective when we place people and things in the wrong group. Cross-cultural miscategorization occurs when I use my home country categories to make sense out of foreign situations. For example, a Korean businessman entered a client's office in Stockholm and encountered a woman behind the desk. Assuming that she was a secretary, he announced that he wanted to see Mr. Silferbrand. The woman responded by saying that the secretary would be happy to help him. The Korean became confused. In assuming that most women are secretaries rather than managers, he had misinterpreted the situation and acted inappropriately. His category makes sense because most women in Korean offices are secretaries. But it proved counterproductive since this particular Swedish woman was not a secretary. Stereotypes Stereotyping involves a form of categorization that organizes our experience and guides our behavior toward ethnic and national groups. Stereotypes never describe individual behavior; rather, they describe the behavioral Communicating across Cultural Barriers Adler 5 norm for members of a particular group. For example, the stereotypes of English and French businesspeople, as analyzed by Intercultural Management Associates in Paris, are described as follows: We have found that to every set of negative stereotypes distinguishing the British and French there corresponds a particular values divergence that, when recognized, can prove an extraordinary resource. To illustrate: The French, in describing the British as "perfidious," "hypocritical," and "vague," are in fact describing the Englishman's typical lack of a general model or theory and his preference for a more pragmatic, evolutionary approach. This fact is hard for the Frenchman to believe, let alone accept as a viable alternative, until, working alongside one another, the French man comes to see that there is usually no ulterior motive behind the Englishman's vagueness but rather a capacity to think aloud and adapt to circumstances. For his part, the Englishman comes to see that, far from being "distant," "superior," or "out of touch with reality," the Frenchman's concern for a general model or theory is what lends vision, focus, and cohesion to an enterprise or project, as well as leadership and much needed authority (7). Stereotypes, like other forms of categories, can be helpful or harmful depending on how we use them. Effective stereotyping allows people to understand and act appropriately in new situations. A stereotype can be helpful when it is • • • • • Consciously held. The person should be aware that he or she is describing a group norm rather than the characteristics of a specific individual. Descriptive rather than evaluative. The stereotype should describe what people from this group will probably be like and not evaluate those people as good or bad. Accurate. The stereotype should accurately describe the norm for the group to which the person belongs. The first best guess about a group prior to having direct information about the specific person or persons involved. Modified, based on further observation and experience with the actual people and situations. A subconsciously held stereotype is difficult to modify or discard even after we collect real information about a person, because it is often thought to reflect reality. If a subconscious stereotype also inaccurately evaluates a person or situation, we are likely to maintain an inappropriate, ineffective, and frequently harmful guide to reality. For example, assume that I subconsciously hold the stereotype that Anglophone Quebecois refuse to learn French and that therefore they should have no rights within the province (an inaccurate, evaluative stereotype). I then meet a monolingual Anglophone and say, "See, I told you that Anglophones aren't willing to speak French! They don't deserve to have rights here." I next meet a bilingual Anglophone and conclude, "He must be American because Canadian Anglophones always refuse to learn French." Instead of questioning, modifying, or discarding my stereotype ("Some Anglophone Canadians speak French"), I alter reality to fit the stereotype ("He must be American"). Stereotypes increase effectiveness only when used as a first best guess about a person or situation prior to having direct information. They never help when adhered to rigidly. Indrei Ratiu (17), in his work with INSEAD (Institut Europeen d'Administration des Affaires—European Institute of Business Administration) and London Business School, found that managers ranked "most internationally effective" by their colleagues altered their stereotypes to fit the actual people involved, whereas managers ranked "least internationally effective" continued to maintain their stereotypes even in the face of contradictory information. For example, internationally effective managers, prior to their first visit to Germany, might stereotype Germans as being extremely task oriented. Upon arriving and meeting a very friendly and lazy Herr Schmidt, they would alter their description to say that most Germans appear extremely task oriented, but Herr Schmidt seems friendly and lazy. Months later, the most internationally effective managers would only be able to say that some Germans appear very task oriented, while others seem quite relationship oriented (friendly); it all depends on the person and the situation. In this instance, the stereotype is used as a first best guess about the group's behavior prior to meeting any individuals from the group. As time goes on, it is modified or discarded entirely; information about each individual supersedes the group stereotype. By contrast, the least internationally effective managers maintain their stereotypes. They assume that the contradictory evidence in Herr Schmidt's case represents an exception, and they continue to believe that all Germans are highly Communicating across Cultural Barriers Adler 6 task oriented. In drawing conclusions too quickly on the basis of insufficient information—premature closure (12)—their stereotypes be come self-fulfilling (19). Canadian psychologist Donald Taylor (4;5;21) found that most people maintain their stereotypes even in the face of contradictory evidence. Taylor asked English and French Canadians to listen to one of three tape recordings of a French Canadian describing himself. In the first version, the French Canadian used the Francophone stereotype and described himself as religious, proud, sensitive, and expressive. In the second version, he used neutral terms to describe himself. In the third version, he used terms to describe himself that contradicted the stereotype, such as not religious, humble, unexpressive, and conservative. After having listened to one of the three versions, the participants were asked to describe the Francophone on the tape (not Francophones in general). Surprisingly, people who listened to each of the three versions used the same stereotypic terms—religious, proud, sensitive, and expressive—even when the voice on the tape had conveyed the opposite information. People evidently maintain stereotypes even in the face of contradictory information. To be effective, international managers must therefore be aware of cultural stereotypes and learn to set them aside when faced with contradictory evidence. They cannot pretend not to stereotype. If stereotyping is so useful as an initial guide to reality, why do people malign it? Why do parents and teachers constantly admonish children not to stereotype? Why do sophisticated managers rarely admit to stereotyping, even though each of us stereotypes every day? The answer is that we have failed to accept stereotyping as a natural process and have consequently failed to learn to use it to our advantage. For years we have viewed stereotyping as a form of primitive thinking, as an unnecessary simplification of reality. We have also viewed stereotyping as immoral: stereotypes can be inappropriate judgments of individuals based on inaccurate descriptions of groups. It is true that labeling people from a certain ethnic group as "bad" is immoral, but grouping individuals into categories is neither good nor bad—it simply reduces a complex reality to manageable dimensions. Negative views of stereotyping simply cloud our ability to understand people's actual behavior and impair our awareness of our own stereotypes. Everyone stereotypes. In conclusion, some people stereotype effectively and others do not. Stereotypes become counterproductive when we place people in the wrong groups, when we incorrectly describe the group norm, when we inappropriately evaluate the group or category, when we confuse the stereotype with the description of a particular individual, and when we fail to modify the stereotype based on our actual observations and experience. Sources of Misinterpretation Misinterpretation can be caused by inaccurate perceptions of a person or situation that arise when what actually exists is not seen. It can be caused by an inaccurate interpretation of what is seen; that is, by using my meanings to make sense out of your reality. An example of this type of misinterpretation (or misattribution) comes from an encounter with an Austrian businessman. I meet my Austrian client for the sixth time in as many months. He greets me as Herr Smith. Categorizing him as a businessman, I interpret his very formal behavior to mean that he does not like me or is uninterested in developing a closer relationship with me. (North American attribution: people who maintain formal behavior after the first few meetings do so because they dislike or distrust the associates so treated.) In fact, I have misinterpreted his behavior. I have used the norms for North American business behavior, which are more informal and demonstrative (I would say "Good morning, Fritz," not "Good morning, Herr Ranschburg"), to interpret the Austrian's more formal behavior ("Good morning, Herr Smith"). Culture strongly influences, and in many cases determines, our interpretations. Both the categories and the meanings we attach to them are based on our cultural background. Sources of cross-cultural misinterpretation include subconscious cultural "blinders," a lack of cultural self-awareness, projected similarity, and parochialism. Subconscious Cultural Blinders. Because most interpretation goes on at a subconscious level, we lack awareness of the assumptions we make and their cultural basis. Our home culture reality never forces us to examine our assumptions or the extent to which they are culturally based, because we share our cultural Communicating across Cultural Barriers Adler 7 assumptions with most other citizens of our country. All we know is that things do not work as smoothly or logically when we work outside our own culture as when we work with people more similar to ourselves. For example: A Canadian conducting business in Kuwait is surprised when his meeting with a high ranking official is not held in a closed office and is constantly interrupted. Using the Canadian-based cultural assumptions that (a) important people have large private offices with secretaries to monitor the flow of people into the office, and (b) important business takes precedence over less important business and is therefore not interrupted, the Canadian interprets the Kuwaiti's open office and constant interruptions to mean that the official is neither as high ranking nor as interested in conducting the business at hand as he had previously thought. The Canadian's interpretation of the office environment leads him to lose interest in working with the Kuwaiti. The problem is that the Canadian's interpretation derives from his own North American norms, not from Middle Eastern cultural norms. The Kuwaiti may well have been a high-ranking official who was very interested in doing business. The Canadian will never know. Cases of subconscious cross-cultural misinterpretation occur frequently. For example a Soviet poet, after lecturing at American universities for two months, said, "Attempts to please an American audience are doomed in advance, because out of twenty listeners five may hold one point of view, seven another, and eight may have none at all" (10). The Soviet poet confused Americans' freedom of thought and speech with his ability to please them. He assumed that one can only please an audience if all members hold the same opinion. Another example of well-meant misinterpretation comes from the United States Office of Education's advice to teachers of newly arrived Vietnamese refugee students (22): Students' participation was discouraged in Vietnamese schools by liberal doses of corporal punishment, and students were conditioned to sit rigidly and speak out only when spoken to. This background ... makes speaking freely in class hard for a Vietnamese student. Therefore, don't mistake shyness for apathy. Perhaps the extent to which this is a culturally based interpretation becomes clearer if we imagine the opposite advice the Vietnamese Ministry of Education might give to Vietnamese teachers receiving American children for the first time. Students' proper respect for teachers was discouraged by a loose order and students were conditioned to chat all the time and to behave in other disorderly ways. This background makes proper and respectful behavior in class hard for an American student. Therefore, do not mistake rudeness for lack of reverence. Lack of Cultural Self-Awareness. Although we think that the major obstacle in international business is in understanding the foreigner, the greater difficulty involves becoming aware of our own cultural conditioning. As anthropologist Edward Hall has explained, "What is known least well, and is therefore in the poorest position to be studied, is what is closest to oneself (8:45)." We are generally least aware of our own cultural characteristics and are quite surprised when we hear foreigners' descriptions of us. For example, many Americans are surprised to discover that they are seen by foreigners as hurried, overly law-abiding, very hard working, extremely explicit, and overly inquisitive (see the example that follows). Many American businesspeople were equally surprised by a Newsweek survey reporting the characteristics most and least frequently associated with Americans (see Table 3-1). Asking a foreign national to describe businesspeople from your country is a powerful way to see yourself as others see you. Cross-Cultural Awareness Americans as Others See Them Communicating across Cultural Barriers Adler 8 People from other countries are often puzzled and intrigued by the intricacies and enigmas of American culture. Below is a selection of actual observations by foreigners visiting the United States. As you read them, ask yourself in each case if the observer is accurate, and how you would explain the trait in question. India "Americans seem to be in a perpetual hurry. Just watch the way they walk down the street. They never allow themselves the leisure to enjoy life; there are too many things to do." Kenya "Americans appear to us rather distant. They are not really as close to other people—even fellow Americans—as Americans overseas tend to portray. It's almost as if an American says, 'I won't let you get too close to me.' It's like building a wall." Turkey "Once we were out in a rural area in the middle of nowhere and saw an American come to a stop sign. Though he could see in both directions for miles and no traffic was coming, he still stopped!" Colombia "The tendency in the United States to think that life is only work hits you in the face. Work seems to be the one type of motivation." Indonesia "In the United States everything has to be talked about and analyzed. Even the littlest thing has to be 'Why, Why, Why?'. I get a headache from such persistent questions." Ethiopia "The American is very explicit; he wants a 'yes' or 'no.' If someone tries to speak figuratively, the American is confused." Iran "The first time ... my [American] professor told me, 'I don't know the answer, I will have to look it up,' I was shocked. I asked myself, 'Why is he teaching me?' In my country a professor would give the wrong answer rather than admit ignorance."1 TABLE 3-1 How Others See Americans ____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Characteristics Most Often Associated with Americans* by the Populations of ____________________________________________________________________________________________________ France Japan West Germany Great Britain Brazil Mexico ____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Industrious Energetic Inventive Decisive Friendly Nationalistic Friendly Decisive Rude Self-indulgent Energetic Inventive Friendly Sophisticated Intelligent Friendly Self-indulgent Energetic Industrious Nationalistic Intelligent Inventive Energetic Industrious Greedy Industrious Intelligent Inventive Decisive Greedy Characteristics Most Often Associated with Americans* by the Same Populations ____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Lazy Rude Honest Sophisticated Industrious Lazy Honest Sexy Lazy Sexy Greedy Rude Communicating across Cultural Barriers Lazy Sophisticated Sexy Decisive Lazy Self-indulgent Sexy Sophisticated Adler Lazy Honest Rude Sexy 9 SOURCE: Newsweek (July 11, 1983), p. 50, copyright  1981 by Newsweek, Inc. All rights reserved, reprinted by permission. *From a list of fourteen characteristics. Another very revealing way to understand the norms and values of a culture involves listening to common sayings and proverbs. What does a society recommend, and what does it avoid? Following is a list of a number of the most common North American proverbs and the values each teaches. North American Values: Proverbs It is evidently much more potent in teaching practicality, for example, to say, "Don't cry over spilt milk" than, "You'd better learn to be practical." North Americans have heard this axiom hundreds of times, and it has made its point. Listed below are North American proverbs on the left and the values they seem to be teaching on the right.2 Proverb Value ________________________________________________________________________________________ Cleanliness is next to godliness. Cleanliness A penny saved is a penny earned. Thriftiness Time is money. Time Thriftiness Don't cry over spilt milk. Practicality Waste not; want not. Frugality Early to bed, early to rise, makes one healthy, Diligence; Work Ethic wealthy and wise. God helps those who help themselves. Initiative It's not whether you win or lose, but how you Good Sportsmanship play the game. A man's home is his castle. Privacy; Value of Personal Property No rest for the wicked. Guilt; Work Ethic You've made your bed, now sleep in it. Responsibility Don't count your chickens before they're hatched. Practicality A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Practicality The squeaky wheel gets the grease. Aggressiveness Might makes right. Superiority of Physical Power There's more than one way to skin a cat. Originality; Determination A stitch in time saves nine. Timeliness of Action All that glitters is not gold. Wariness Clothes make the man. Concern of Physical Appearance If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Persistence; Work Ethic Take care of today, and tomorrow will Preparation of Future take care of itself. Laugh, and the world laughs with you; weep, and Pleasant Outward Appearance you weep alone. To the extent that we can begin to see ourselves clearly through the eyes of foreigners, we can begin to modify our behavior, emphasizing our most appropriate and effective characteristics and minimizing those least Communicating across Cultural Barriers Adler 10 helpful. To the extent that we are culturally self-aware, we can begin to predict the effect our behavior will have on others. Projected Similarity. Projected similarity refers to the assumption that people are more similar to you than they actually are, or that a situation is more similar to yours when in fact it is not. Projecting similarity reflects both a natural and a common process. American researchers Burger and Bass (6) worked with groups of managers from fourteen different countries. They asked each manager to describe the work and life goals of a colleague from another country. As shown in Figure 3-3, in every case the managers assumed that their foreign colleagues were more like themselves than they actually were. Projected similarity involves assuming, imagining, and actually perceiving similarity when differences exist. Projected similarity particularly handicaps people in cross-cultural situations. As a South African, I assume that my Greek colleague is more South African than he actually is. As an Egyptian, I assume that my Chilean colleague is more similar to me than she actually is. When I act based on this assumed similarity, I often find that I have acted inappropriately and thus ineffectively. PROJECTED SIMILARITY A's description of A B's description of A A's description of B B's description of B PROJECTED SIMILARITY FIGURE 3-3 Projected Similarity At the base of projected similarity is a subconscious parochialism. I assume that there is only one way to be: my way. I assume that there is only one way to see the world: my way. I therefore view other people in reference to me and to my way of viewing the world. People may fall into an illusion of understanding while being unaware of ... [their] misunderstandings. "I understand you perfectly but you don't understand me" is an expression typical of such a situation. Or all communicating parties may fall into a collective illusion of mutual understanding. In such a situation, each party may wonder later why other parties do not live up to the "agreement" they had reached (13:3). Most international managers do not see themselves as parochial. They believe that as world travelers they are able to see the foreigner's point of view. This is not always true. EXAMPLE When a Danish manager works with a Saudi and the Saudi states that the plant will be completed on time, "En shah allah" ("If God is willing"), the Dane rarely believes that God's will is really going to influence the construction progress. He continues to see the world from his parochial Danish perspective and assumes that "En shah allah" is just an excuse for not getting the work done, or is meaningless altogether. Similarly, when Balinese workers' families refuse to use birth control methods, explaining that it will break the cycle of reincarnation, few Western managers really consider that there is a possibility that they too Communicating across Cultural Barriers Adler 11 will be reborn a number of times. Instead, they assume that the Balinese do not understand or are afraid of Western medicine. While it is important to understand and respect the foreigner's point of view, it is not necessary to accept or adopt it. A rigid adherence to our own belief system is a form of parochialism, and parochialism underlies projected similarity. One of the best exercises for developing empathy and reducing parochialism and projected similarity is role reversal. Imagine that you are a foreign businessperson. Imagine the type of family you come from, the number of brothers and sisters you have, the social and economic conditions you grew up with, the type of education you received, the ways in which you chose your profession and position, the ways in which you were introduced to your spouse, your goals in working for your organization, and your life goals. Asking these questions forces you to see the other person as he or she really is, and not as a mere reflection of yourself. It forces you to see both the similarities and the differences, and not to imagine similarities when differences actually exist. More over, role reversal encourages highly task-oriented businesspeople, such as Americans, to see the foreigner as a whole person rather than someone with a position and a set of skills needed to accomplish a particular task. CROSS-CULTURAL MISEVALUATION Even more than perception and interpretation, cultural conditioning strongly affects evaluation. Evaluation involves judging whether someone or something is good or bad. Cross-culturally, we use our own culture as a standard of measurement, judging that which is like our own culture as normal and good and that which is different as abnormal and bad. Our own culture becomes a self-reference criterion: since no other culture is identical to our own, we judge all other cultures as inferior. Evaluation rarely helps in trying to understand or communicate with people from another culture. The consequences of misevaluation are exemplified in the following: A Swiss executive waits more than an hour past the appointed time for his Latin colleague to arrive and sign a supply contract. In his impatience, he concludes that Latins must be lazy and totally unconcerned about business. He has misevaluated his colleague by negatively comparing him to his own cultural standards. Implicitly, he has labeled his own group's behavior as good (Swiss arrive on time and that is good) and the other group's behavior as bad (Latins do not arrive on time and that is bad). COMMUNICATION: GETTING THEIR MEANING, NOT JUST THEIR WORDS Effective cross-cultural communication is possible, but international managers cannot approach it in the same way as do domestic managers. First, effective international managers "know that they don't know." They assume difference until similarity is proven rather than assuming similarity until difference is proven. Second, in attempting to understand their foreign colleagues, effective international managers emphasize description, by observing what is actually said and done, rather than interpreting or evaluating it. Describing a situation is the most accurate way to gather information about it. Interpretation and evaluation, unlike description, are based more on the observer's culture and background than on the observed situation. To that extent, my interpretations and evaluations tell me more about myself than about the situation. Although managers, as decision makers, must evaluate people (e.g., performance appraisals) and situations (e.g., project assessments) in terms of organizational standards and objectives, effective international managers delay judgment until they have had sufficient time to observe and interpret the situation from the perspective of all cultures involved. Third, when attempting to understand or interpret a foreign situation, effective international managers try to see it through the eyes of their foreign colleagues. This role reversal limits the myopia of viewing situations strictly from one's own perspective. Fourth, once effective international managers develop an explanation for a situation, they treat the explanation as a guess (as a hypothesis to be tested) and not as a certainty. They systematically check with other Communicating across Cultural Barriers Adler 12 foreign and home country colleagues to make sure that their guesses—their interpretations—are plausible. This checking process allows them to converge meanings—to delay accepting their interpretations of the situation until they have confirmed them with others. Understanding: Converging Meanings There are many ways to increase the chances for accurately understanding foreigners. The excerpt that follows suggests what to do when business colleagues are not native speakers of your language. Each technique is based on presenting the message through multiple channels (for example, stating your position and showing a graph to summarize the same position), paraphrasing to check if the foreigner has understood your meaning (and not just your words), and converging meanings (always double-checking with a second person that you communicated what you intended). What Do I Do If They Do Not Speak My Language? VERBAL BEHAVIOR • Clear, slow speech. Enunciate each word. Do not use colloquial expressions. • Repetition. Repeat each important idea using different words to explain the same concept. • Simple sentences. Avoid compound, long sentences. • Active verbs. Avoid passive verbs. NON-VERBAL BEHAVIOR • Visual restatements. Use as many visual restatements as possible, such as pictures, graphs, tables, and slides. • Gestures. Use more facial and hand gestures to emphasize the meaning of words. • Demonstration. Act out as many themes as possible. • Pauses. Pause more frequently. • Summaries. Hand out written summaries of your verbal presentation. ATTRIBUTION • Silence. When there is a silence, wait. Do not jump in to fill the silence. The other person is probably just thinking more slowly in the non-native language or translating. • Intelligence. Do not equate poor grammar and mispronunciation with lack of intelligence; it is usually a sign of second language use. • Differences. If unsure, assume difference, not similarity. COMPREHENSION • Understanding. Do not just assume that they understand; assume that they do not understand. • Checking comprehension. Have colleagues repeat their understanding of the material back to you. Do not simply ask if they under stand or not. Let them explain what they understand to you. DESIGN • Breaks. Take more frequent breaks. Second language comprehension is exhausting. Small modules. Divide the material into smaller modules. • Longer time frame. Allocate more time for each module than usual in a monolingual program. Communicating across Cultural Barriers Adler 13 MOTIVATION • Encouragement. Verbally and nonverbally encourage and reinforce speaking by non-native language participants. • Drawing out. Explicitly draw out marginal and passive participants. • Reinforcement. Do not embarrass novice speakers.3 Standing Back from Yourself Perhaps the most difficult skill in cross-cultural communication involves standing back from yourself, or being aware that you do not know everything, that a situation may not make sense, that your guesses may be wrong, and that the ambiguity in the situation may continue. In this sense the ancient Roman dictum "knowledge is power" becomes true. In knowing yourself, you gain power over your perceptions and reactions; you can control your own behavior and your reactions to others' behavior. Cross-cultural awareness complements in-depth self awareness. A lack of self-awareness negates the usefulness of cross cultural awareness. One of the most poignant examples of the powerful interplay between description, interpretation, evaluation, and empathy involves a Scottish businessman's relationship with a Japanese colleague. The following story recounts the Scottish businessman's experience. Cross-Cultural Communication Japanese Pickles and Mattresses, Incorporated It was my first visit to Japan. As a gastronomic adventurer, and because I believe cuisine is one route which is freely available and highly effective as a first step towards a closer understanding of another country, I was disappointed on my first evening when the Japanese offered me a Western meal. As tactfully as possible I suggested that some time during my stay I would like to try a Japanese menu, if that could be arranged without inconvenience. There was some small reluctance evident on the part of my hosts (due of course to their thought that I was being very polite asking for Japanese food which I didn't really like, so to be good hosts they had to politely find a way of not having me eat it!). But eventually, by an elegantly progressive route starting with Western food with a slightly Japanese bias through to genuine Japanese food, my hosts were convinced that I really wanted to eat Japanese style and was not "posing." From then on they became progressively more enthusiastic in suggesting the more exotic Japanese dishes, and I guess I graduated when, after an excellent meal one night (apart from the Japanese pickles) on which I had lavished praise, they said, "Do you like Japanese pickles?" To this, without preamble, I said, "No!," to which reply, with great laughter all round, they responded, "Nor do we!" During this gastronomic getting-together week, I had also been trying to persuade them that I really did wish to stay in traditional Japanese hotels rather than the very Westernized ones my hosts had selected because they thought I would prefer my "normal" lifestyle. (I should add that at this time traditional Japanese hotels were still available and often cheaper than, say, the Osaka Hilton.) Anyway, after the pickles joke it was suddenly announced that Japanese hotels could be arranged. For the remaining two weeks of my stay, as I toured the major cities, on most occasions a traditional Japanese hotel was substituted for the Western one on my original schedule. Many of you will know that a traditional Japanese room has no furniture except a low table and a flower arrangement. The "bed" is a mattress produced just before you retire from a concealed cupboard, accompanied by a cereal-packed pillow. One memorable evening my host and I had finished our meal together in "my" room. I was expecting him to shortly make his "good night" and retire, as he had been doing all week, to his own room. However, he stayed Communicating across Cultural Barriers Adler 14 unusually long and was, to me, obviously in some sort of emotional crisis. Finally, he blurted out, with great embarrassment, "Can I sleep with you?!" As they say in the novels, at this point I went very still! My mind was racing through all the sexual taboos and prejudices my own up bringing had instilled, and I can still very clearly recall how I analyzed: "I'm bigger than he is so I can fight him off, but then he's probably an expert in the martial arts, but on the other hand he's shown no signs of being gay up until now and he is my host and there is a lot of business at risk and there's no such thing as rape, et cetera.... ! It seemed a hundred years, though it was only a few seconds, before I said, feeling as if I was pulling the trigger in Russian roulette, "Yes, sure." Who said that the Orientals are inscrutable? The look of relief that followed my reply was obvious. Then he looked worried and concerned again, and said, "Are you sure?" I reassured him and he called in the maid, who fetched his mattress from his room and laid it on the floor alongside mine. We both went to bed and slept all night without any physical interaction. Later I learned that for the traditional Japanese one of the greatest compliments you can be paid is for the host to ask, "Can I sleep with you?" This goes back to the ancient feudal times, when life was cheap, and what the invitation really said was, "I trust you with my life. I do not think that you will kill me while I sleep. You are my true friend." To have said "No" to the invitation would have been an insult— "I don't trust you not to kill me while I sleep"—or, at the very least, my host would have been acutely embarrassed because he had taken the initiative. If I refused because I had failed to perceive the invitation as a compliment, he would have been out of countenance on two grounds: the insult to him in the traditional context and the embarrassment he would have caused me by "forcing" a negative, uncomprehending response from me. As it turned out, the outcome was superb. He and I were now "blood brothers," as it were. His assessment of me as being "ready for Japanization" had been correct and his obligations under ancient Japanese custom had been fulfilled. I had totally misinterpreted his intentions through my own cultural conditioning. It was sheer luck, or luck plus a gut feeling that I'd gotten it wrong, that caused me to make the correct response to his extremely complimentary and committed invitation.4 SUMMARY Cross-cultural communication confronts us with limits to our perceptions, our interpretations, and our evaluations. Cross-cultural perspectives tend to render everything relative and slightly uncertain. Entering a foreign culture is tantamount to knowing the words without knowing the music, or knowing the music without knowing the beat. Our natural tendencies lead us back to our prior experience: our default option becomes the familiarity of our own culture, thus precluding our ac curate understanding of others' cultures. Strategies to overcome our natural parochial tendencies exist: with care, the default option can be avoided. We can learn to see, understand, and control our own cultural conditioning. In facing foreign cultures, we can emphasize description rather than interpretation or evaluation, and thus minimize self-fulfilling stereotypes and premature closure. We can recognize and use our stereotypes as guides rather than rejecting them as unsophisticated simplifications. Effective cross-cultural communication presupposes the interplay of alternative realities: it rejects the actual or potential domination of one reality over another. QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION 1. 2. The most effective international managers use stereotypes. What are some of the ways that you can use stereotypes to your advantage when working with people from other countries? Today many managers must work with people from other cultures, both at home and when traveling abroad. What are some of the ways that your organization could train people to communicate more effectively with foreigners? Communicating across Cultural Barriers Adler 15 3. 4. 5. What stereotypes do you have concerning lawyers? How about South Africans? If you had an appointment with a South African lawyer, what would you expect and how would you prepare for the meeting? In seeking to understand the importance of nonverbal communication, we must start by examining ourselves. List four examples of nonverbal communication that you commonly use and what each means to you. Then indicate how each might be misinterpreted by someone from a foreign culture. List four examples of nonverbal communication that are used by managers in other parts of the world but not in your country. Indicate how each might be misinterpreted by colleagues from your country. Communicating across Cultural Barriers Adler 16 NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. John P. Feig and G. Blair, There Is a Difference, 2d ed. (Washington, D.C.: Meridian House International, 1980). L. Robert Kohls, Survival Kit for Overseas Living (Yarmouth, Me: Intercultural Press, Inc., 1979), pp. 30-31. Based on Nancy J. Adler and Moses N. Kiggundu, "Awareness at the Crossroad: Designing Translator-Based Training Programs," in D. Landis and R. Brislin, Handbook of Intercultural Training: Issues in Training Methodology, vol. II (New York: Pergamon Press, 1983), pp. 124-150. A Scottish executive participating in the 1979 Managerial Skills for International Business Program at INSEAD, in Fontainebleau, France. REFERENCES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. Anti-Defamation League of the B'nai B'rith Rumor Clinic as cited in Robert Bolton, People Skills (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1979), pp. 73-74. Asch, S. "Forming Impressions of Persons," Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, vol. 40 (1946), pp. 258290. Bagby, J. W. "Dominance in Binocular Rivalry in Mexico and the United States," in I. Al-Issa and W. Dennis, eds., Cross-Cultural Studies of Behavior (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), pp. 49-56. Originally in Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, vol. 54 (1957), pp. 331-334. Berry, J.; Kalin, R.; and Taylor, D. "Multiculturalism and Ethnic Attitudes in Canada," in Multiculturalism as State Policy (Ottawa: Government of Canada, 1976). Berry, J.; Kalin, R.; and Taylor, D. Multiculturalism and Ethnic Attitudes in Canada (Ottawa: Minister of Supply and Services, 1977). Burger, P., and Bass, B. M. Assessment of Managers: An International Comparison (New York: Free Press, 1979). Gancel, C., and Ratiu, I. Internal document, Inter Cultural Management Associates, Paris, France, 1984. Hall, E. T. Beyond Culture. (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday and Company, 1976). Also see E. T. Hall's The Silent Language (Doubleday, 1959, and Anchor Books, 1973) and The Hidden Dimension (Doubleday, 1966, and Anchor Books, 1969). Ho, A. "Unlucky Numbers are Locked out of the Chamber," South China Morning Post (Dec. 26, 1988), p. 1. Kanungo, R. N. Biculturalism and Management (Ontario: Butterworth, 1980) . Korotich, V. "Taming of a Desert of the Mind," Atlas (June 1977). Lau, J. B., and Jelinek, M. "Perception and Management," in Behavior in Organizations: An Experiential Approach (Homewood, IL.: Richard D. Irwin, 1984), pp. 213-220. Maruyama, M. "Paradigms and Communication," Technological Forecasting and Social Change, vol. 6 (1974), pp. 3-32. Miles, M. Adaptation to a Foreign Environment (Ottawa: Canadian International Development Agency, to be published). Miller, J. G. "Adjusting to Overloads of Information," in The Association for Research in Nervous and Mental Disease, Disorders of Communication, vol. 42 (Research Publications, A.R.N.M.D., 1964). Prekel, T. "Multi-Cultural Communication: A Challenge to Managers," paper delivered at the International Convention of the American Business Communication Association, New York, November 21, 1983. Ratui, I. "Thinking Internationally: A Comparison of How International Executives Learn," International Studies of Management and Organization, vol. XIII, no. 1-2 (Spring-Summer 1983), pp. 139-150. Reprinted by permission of publisher, M. E. Sharpe, Inc., Armonk, N.Y. Singer, M. "Culture: A Perceptual Approach," in L. A. Samovar and R.E. Porter, eds., Intercultural Communication: A Reader (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1976), pp. 110-119. Snyder, M. "Self-Fulfilling Stereotypes," Psychology Today (July 1982), pp. 60-68. South China Morning Post, "Mystery Man Gives a Fortune for Lucky '7"' (January 22, 1989), p. 3; and "Lucky '7' to Go on Sale" (January 4, 1989), p. 4. Taylor, D. "American Tradition," in R. C. Gardner and R. Kalin, eds., A Canadian Social Psychology of Ethnic Relations (Toronto: Methuen Press, 1980) . U.S. Office of Education. On Teaching the Vietnamese (Washington, D.C.: General Printing Office, 1976). Communicating across Cultural Barriers Adler 17 Unit 2 Theoretical and Methodological Issues Subunit 1 Conceptual Issues in Psychology and Culture Article 8 12-1-2011 Dimensionalizing Cultures: The Hofstede Model in Context Geert Hofstede Universities of Maastricht and Tilburg, The Netherlands, hofstede@bart.nl Recommended Citation Hofstede, G. (2011). Dimensionalizing Cultures: The Hofstede Model in Context. Online Readings in Psychology and Culture, 2(1). https://doi.org/10.9707/2307-0919.1014 This Online Readings in Psychology and Culture Article is brought to you for free and open access (provided uses are educational in nature)by IACCP and ScholarWorks@GVSU. Copyright © 2011 International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology. All Rights Reserved. ISBN 978-0-9845627-0-1 Dimensionalizing Cultures: The Hofstede Model in Context Abstract This article describes briefly the Hofstede model of six dimensions of national cultures: Power Distance, Uncertainty Avoidance, Individualism/Collectivism, Masculinity/Femininity, Long/Short Term Orientation, and Indulgence/Restraint. It shows the conceptual and research efforts that preceded it and led up to it, and once it had become a paradigm for comparing cultures, research efforts that followed and built on it. The article stresses that dimensions depend on the level of aggregation; it describes the six entirely different dimensions found in the Hofstede et al. (2010) research into organizational cultures. It warns against confusion with value differences at the individual level. It concludes with a look ahead in what the study of dimensions of national cultures and the position of countries on them may still bring. Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. This article is available in Online Readings in Psychology and Culture: https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/orpc/vol2/iss1/8 Hofstede: Dimensionalizing Cultures: The Hofstede Model in Context Introduction Culture has been defined in many ways; this author’s shorthand definition is: "Culture is the collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from others". It is always a collective phenomenon, but it can be connected to different collectives. Within each collective there is a variety of individuals. If characteristics of individuals are imagined as varying according to some bell curve; the variation between cultures is the shift of the bell curve when one moves from one society to the other. Most commonly the term culture is used for tribes or ethnic groups (in anthropology), for nations (in political science, sociology and management), and for organizations (in sociology and management). A relatively unexplored field is the culture of occupations (for instance, of engineers versus accountants, or of academics from different disciplines). The term can also be applied to the genders, to generations, or to social classes. However, changing the level of aggregation studied changes the nature of the concept of ‘culture’. Societal, national and gender cultures, which children acquire from their earliest youth onwards, are much deeper rooted in the human mind than occupational cultures acquired at school, or than organizational cultures acquired on the job. The latter are exchangeable when people take a new job. Societal cultures reside in (often unconscious) values, in the sense of broad tendencies to prefer certain states of affairs over others (Hofstede, 2001, p. 5). Organizational cultures reside rather in (visible and conscious) practices: the way people perceive what goes on in their organizational environment. Classifying Cultures: Conceptual Dimensions In an article first published in 1952, U.S. anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn (1962) argued that there should be universal categories of culture: In principle ... there is a generalized framework that underlies the more apparent and striking facts of cultural relativity. All cultures constitute so many somewhat distinct answers to essentially the same questions posed by human biology and by the generalities of the human situation. ... Every society's patterns for living must provide approved and sanctioned ways for dealing with such universal circumstances as 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. (pp. 317-18). Many authors in the second half of the twentieth century have speculated about the nature of the basic problems of societies that would present distinct dimensions of culture (for a review see Hofstede, 2001, pp. 29-31). The most common dimension used for ordering societies is their degree of economic evolution or modernity. A one-dimensional ordering of societies from traditional to modern fitted well with the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Produced by The Berkeley Electronic Press, 2011 3 Online Readings in Psychology and Culture, Unit 2, Subunit 1, Chapter 8 belief in progress. Economic evolution is bound to be reflected in people’s collective mental programming, but there is no reason why economic and technological evolution should suppress other cultural variety. There exist dimensions of culture unrelated to economic evolution. U.S. anthropologist Edward T. Hall (1976) divided cultures according to their ways of communicating, into high-context (much of the information is implicit) and low-context cultures (nearly everything is explicit). In practice this distinction overlaps largely with the traditional versus modern distinction. U.S. sociologists Talcott Parsons and Edward Shils (1951, p. 77) suggested that all human action is determined by five pattern variables, choices between pairs of alternatives: 1. Affectivity (need gratification) versus affective neutrality (restraint of impulses); 2. Self-orientation versus collectivity-orientation; 3. Universalism (applying general standards) versus particularism (taking particular relationships into account); 4. Ascription (judging others by who they are) versus achievement (judging them by what they do); 5. Specificity (limiting relations to others to specific spheres) versus diffuseness (no prior limitations to nature of relations). Parsons and Shils (1951) claimed that these choices are present at the individual (personality) level, at the social system (group or organization) level, and at the cultural (normative) level. They did not take into account that different variables could operate at different aggregation levels. U.S. anthropologists Florence Kluckhohn and Fred Strodtbeck (1961, p. 12) ran a field study in five geographically close, small communities in the Southwestern United States: Mormons, Spanish Americans, Texans, Navaho Indians, and Zuni Indians. They distinguished these communities on the following value orientations: 1. An evaluation of human nature (evil - mixed - good); 2. The relationship of man to the surrounding natural environment (subjugation harmony - mastery); 3. The orientation in time (toward past - present - future); 4. The orientation toward activity (being - being in becoming - doing); and 5. Relationships among people (linearity, i.e., hierarchically ordered positions – collaterality, i.e., group relationships – individualism). Others have extrapolated Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck’s (1961) classification to all kind of social comparisons, without concern for their geographic limitations without considering the effect of levels of aggregation, and without empirical support. https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/orpc/vol2/iss1/8 4 Hofstede: Dimensionalizing Cultures: The Hofstede Model in Context British anthropologist Mary Douglas (1973) proposed a two-dimensional ordering of ways of looking at the world: 1. ‘Group’ or inclusion - the claim of groups over members, and 2. ‘Grid’ or classification - the degree to which interaction is subject to rules. Douglas saw these categories as relating to a wide variety of beliefs and social actions: Views of nature, traveling, spatial arrangements, gardening, cookery, medicine, the meaning of time, age, history, sickness, and justice. She seemed to imply that these dimensions are applicable to any level of aggregation. The one- or more-dimensional classifications above represent subjective reflective attempts to order a complex reality. Each of them is strongly colored by the subjective choices of its author(s). They show some overlap, but their lack of clarity about and mixing of levels of analysis (individual-group-culture) are severe methodological weaknesses. These weaknesses were avoided in an extensive review article by U.S. sociologist Alex Inkeles and psychologist Daniel Levinson (1969, first published 1954). The authors limited themselves to culture at the level of nations, and they summarized all available sociological and anthropological studies dealing with what was then called national character, which they interpreted as a kind of modal (most common) personality type in a national society. What I have labelled dimensions they called standard analytic issues. From their survey of the literature Inkeles and Levinson (1969) distilled three standard analytic issues that met these criteria: 1. Relation to authority; 2. Conception of self, including the individual's concepts of masculinity and femininity; 3. Primary dilemmas or conflicts, and ways of dealing with them, including the control of aggression and the expression versus inhibition of affect. As will be shown below, Inkeles and Levinson's (1969) standard analytic issues were empirically supported in a study by this author more than 20 years later. Empirical Approaches and the Hofstede Dimensions In 1949 U.S. psychologist Raymond Cattell published an application of the new statistical technique of factor analysis to the comparison of nations. Cattell had earlier used factor analysis for studying aspects of intelligence from test scores of individual students. This time he took a matrix of nation-level variables for a large number of countries, borrowing from geography, demographics, history, politics, economics, sociology, law, religion and medicine. The resulting factors were difficult to interpret, except for the important role of economic development. Replications of his method by others produced trivial results (for a review see Hofstede, 2001, pp. 32-33). More meaningful were applications to restricted facets of societies. U.S. political scientists Phillip Gregg and Arthur Banks (1965) studied aspects of political systems; U.S. economists Irma Adelman and Cynthia Taft Morris Produced by The Berkeley Electronic Press, 2011 5 Online Readings in Psychology and Culture, Unit 2, Subunit 1, Chapter 8 (1967) studied factors influencing the development of poor countries, and Irish psychologist Richard Lynn (1971; Lynn & Hampson, 1975) studied aspects of mental health. In the 1970s this author – more or less by accident – got access to a large survey database about values and related sentiments of people in over 50 countries around the world (Hofstede, 1980). These people worked in the local subsidiaries of one large multinational corporation: IBM. Most parts of the organization had been surveyed twice over a four-year interval, and the database contained more than 100,000 questionnaires. Initial analyses of the database at the level of individual respondents proved confusing, but a breakthrough occurred when the focus was directed at correlations between mean scores of survey items at the level of countries. Patterns of correlation at the country level could be strikingly different from what was found at the individual level, and needed an entirely different interpretation. One of the weaknesses of much cross-cultural research is not recognizing the difference between analysis at the societal level and at the individual level; this amounts to confusing anthropology and psychology. From 180 studies using my work reviewed by Kirkman, Lowe, and Gibson (2006), more than half failed to distinguish between societal culture level and individual level differences, which led to numerous errors of interpretation and application. My hunch that the IBM data might have implications beyond this particular corporation was supported when I got the opportunity to administer a number of the same questions to nearly 400 management trainees from some 30 countries in an international program unrelated to IBM. Their mean scores by country correlated significantly with the country scores obtained from the IBM database. So it seemed that employees of this multinational enterprises – a very special kind of people – could serve for identifying differences in national value systems. The reason is that from one country to another they represented almost perfectly matched samples: they were similar in all respects except nationality, which made the effect of national differences in their answers stand out unusually clearly. Encouraged by the results of the country-level correlation analysis I then tried country-level factor analysis. The latter was similar to the approach used earlier by Cattell and others, except that now the variables in the matrix were not indices for the country as a whole, but mean scores and sometimes percentages of survey answers collected from individuals in those countries. Analyses of data at higher levels of aggregation are called ecological. Ecological factor analysis differs from the factor analysis of individual scores in that a usual caution no longer applies: the number of cases does not need to be (much) larger than the number of variables. The stability of the results of an ecological factor analysis does not depend on the number of cases, but on the number of individuals whose scores were aggregated into these cases. Ecological factor analysis may even be performed on matrices with fewer cases than variables. Factor analyzing a matrix of 32 values questions for initially 40 countries, I found these values to cluster very differently from what was found at the individual level. The new factors revealed common problems with which IBM employees in all these societies https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/orpc/vol2/iss1/8 6 Hofstede: Dimensionalizing Cultures: The Hofstede Model in Context had to cope, but for which their upbringing in their country presented its own profile of solutions. These problems were: 1. 2. 3. 4. Dependence on superiors; Need for rules and predictability, also associated with nervous stress; The balance between individual goals and dependence on the company; The balance between ego values (like the need for money and careers) and social values (like cooperation and a good living environment); the former were more frequently chosen by men, the latter by women, but there were also country differences. These empirical results were strikingly similar to the standard analytical issues described in Inkeles and Levinson’s 1969 article. Dependence on superiors relates to the first, need for predictability to the third, the balance between the individual and the company to the conception of self, and the balance between ego and social values to concepts of masculinity and femininity, which were also classified under the second standard analytic issue. The four basic problem areas defined by Inkeles and Levinson (1969) and empirically supported in the IBM data represent dimensions of national cultures. A dimension is an aspect of a culture that can be measured relative to other cultures. The four dimensions formed the basis for my book Culture’s Consequences (Hofstede, 1980). The main message of the 1980 book was that scores on the dimensions correlated significantly with conceptually related external data. Thus Power Distance scores correlated with a dimension from Gregg and Banks’ (1965) analysis of political systems and also with a dimension from Adelman and Morris’ (1967) study of economic development; Uncertainty Avoidance correlated with a dimension from Lynn and Hampson’s (1975) study of mental health; Individualism correlated strongly with national wealth (Gross National Product per capita) and Femininity with the percentage of national income spent on development aid. The number of external validations kept expanding, and the second edition of Culture’s Consequences (Hofstede, 2001, Appendix 6, pp. 503-520) lists more than 400 significant correlations between the IBM-based scores and results of other studies. Recent validations show no loss of validity, indicating that the country differences these dimensions describe are, indeed, basic and enduring. In the 1980s, on the basis of research by Canadian psychologist Michael Harris Bond centered in the Far East, a fifth dimension ‘Long-Term versus Short-Term Orientation’ was added (Hofstede & Bond, 1988; see also Hofstede, 1991; Hofstede, 2001). In the 2000s, research by Bulgarian scholar Michael Minkov using data from the World Values Survey (Minkov, 2007) allowed a new calculation of the fifth, and the addition of a sixth dimension (Hofstede, Hofstede & Minkov, 2010). The six dimensions are labelled: Produced by The Berkeley Electronic Press, 2011 7 Online Readings in Psychology and Culture, Unit 2, Subunit 1, Chapter 8 1. Power Distance, related to the different solutions to the basic problem of human inequality; 2. Uncertainty Avoidance, related to the level of stress in a society in the face of an unknown future; 3. Individualism versus Collectivism, related to the integration of individuals into primary groups; 4. Masculinity versus Femininity, related to the division of emotional roles between women and men; 5. Long Term versus Short Term Orientation, related to the choice of focus for people's efforts: the future or the present and past. 6. Indulgence versus Restraint, related to the gratification versus control of basic human desires related to enjoying life. Each country has been positioned relative to other countries through a score on each dimension. The dimensions are statistically distinct and do occur in all possible combinations, although some combinations are more frequent than others. After the initial confirmation of the country differences in IBM in data from management trainees elsewhere, the Hofstede dimensions and country scores were validated through replications by others, using the same or similar questions with other cross-national populations. Between 1990 and 2002 six major replications (14 or more countries) used populations of country elites, employees and managers of other corporations and organizations, airline pilots, consumers and civil servants (see Hofstede et al., 2010, p. 35). In correlating the dimensions with other data, the influence of national wealth (Gross National Product per capita) should always be taken into account. Two of the dimensions, Individualism and small Power Distance, are significantly correlated with wealth. This means that all wealth-related phenomena tend to correlate with both these dimensions. Differences in national wealth can be considered a more parsimonious explanation of these other phenomena than differences in culture. In correlating with the culture dimensions, it is therefore advisable to always include the wealth variable. After controlling for national wealth correlations with culture usually disappear. Of particular interest is a link that was found between culture according to the Hofstede dimensions and personality dimensions according to the empirically based Big Five personality test (Costa & McCrae, 1992). After this test had been used in over 30 countries, significant correlations were found between country norms on the five personality dimensions (Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness to experience, Agreeableness and Conscientiousness) and national culture dimension scores. For example, 55% of country differences on Neuroticism can be explained by a combination of Uncertainty Avoidance and Masculinity, and 39% of country differences on Extraversion by Individualism alone (Hofstede & McCrae, 2004). So culture and personality are linked but the link is statistical; there is a wide variety of individual personalities within each national culture, and national culture scores should not be used for stereotyping individuals. https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/orpc/vol2/iss1/8 8 Hofstede: Dimensionalizing Cultures: The Hofstede Model in Context Validating the dimensions is of course not only and not even mainly a quantitative issue. Equally important is the qualitative interpretation of what differences on the dimensions mean for each of the societies studied, which calls for an emic approach to each society, supporting the etic of the dimensional data. The Hofstede Dimensions in a nutshell In this section I will summarize the content of each dimension opposing cultures with low and high scores. These oppositions are based on correlations with studies by others, and because the relationship is statistical, not every line applies equally strongly to every country. Power Distance Power Distance has been defined as the extent to which the less powerful members of organizations and institutions (like the family) accept and expect that power is distributed unequally. This represents inequality (more versus less), but defined from below, not from above. It suggests that a society's level of inequality is endorsed by the followers as much as by the leaders. Power and inequality, of course, are extremely fundamental facts of any society. All societies are unequal, but some are more unequal than others. Table 1 Ten Differences Between Small- and Large- Power Distance Societies Small Power Distance Large Power Distance Use of power should be legitimate and is subject to criteria of good and evil Power is a basic fact of society antedating good or evil: its legitimacy is irrelevant Parents treat children as equals Parents teach children obedience Older people are neither respected nor feared Older people are both respected and feared Student-centered education Teacher-centered education Hierarchy means inequality of roles, established for convenience Hierarchy means existential inequality Subordinates expect to be consulted Subordinates expect to be told what to do Pluralist governments based on majority vote and changed peacefully Autocratic governments based on co-optation and changed by revolution Corruption rare; scandals end political careers Corruption frequent; scandals are covered up Income distribution in society rather even Income distribution in society very uneven Religions stressing equality of believers Religions with a hierarchy of priests Produced by The Berkeley Electronic Press, 2011 9 Online Readings in Psychology and Culture, Unit 2, Subunit 1, Chapter 8 Table 1 lists a selection of differences between national societies that validation research showed to be associated with the Power Distance dimension. For a more complete review the reader is referred to Hofstede (2001) and Hofstede et al. (2010). The statements refer to extremes; actual situations may be found anywhere in between the extremes, and the association of a statement with a dimension is always statistical, never absolute. In Hofstede et al. (2010) Power Distance Index scores are listed for 76 countries; they tend to be higher for East European, Latin, Asian and African countries and lower for Germanic and English-speaking Western countries. Uncertainty Avoidance Uncertainty Avoidance is not the same as risk avoidance; it deals with a society's tolerance for ambiguity. It indicates to what extent a culture programs its members to feel either uncomfortable or comfortable in unstructured situations. Unstructured situations are novel, unknown, surprising, and different from usual. Uncertainty avoiding cultures try to minimize the possibility of such situations by strict behavioral codes, laws and rules, disapproval of deviant opinions, and a belief in absolute Truth; 'there can only be one Truth and we have it'. Table 2 Ten Differences Between Weak- and Strong- Uncertainty Avoidance Societies Weak Uncertainty Avoidance Strong Uncertainty Avoidance The uncertainty inherent in life is accepted and each day is taken as it comes The uncertainty inherent in life is felt as a continuous threat that must be fought Ease, lower stress, self-control, low anxiety Higher stress, emotionality, anxiety, neuroticism Higher scores on subjective health and wellbeing Lower scores on subjective health and well-being Tolerance of deviant persons and ideas: what is Intolerance of deviant persons and ideas: what is different is curious different is dangerous Comfortable with ambiguity and chaos Need for clarity and structure Teachers may say ‘I don’t know’ Teachers supposed to have all the answers Changing jobs no problem Staying in jobs even if disliked Dislike of rules - written or unwritten Emotional need for rules – even if not obeyed In politics, citizens feel and are seen as competent towards authorities In politics, citizens feel and are seen as incompetent towards authorities In religion, philosophy and science: relativism and empiricism In religion, philosophy and science: belief in ultimate truths and grand theories https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/orpc/vol2/iss1/8 10 Hofstede: Dimensionalizing Cultures: The Hofstede Model in Context Research has shown that people in uncertainty avoiding countries are also more emotional, and motivated by inner nervous energy. The opposite type, uncertainty accepting cultures, are more tolerant of opinions different from what they are used to; they try to have fewer rules, and on the philosophical and religious level they are empiricist, relativist and allow different currents to flow side by side. People within these cultures are more phlegmatic and contemplative, and not expected by their environment to express emotions. Table 2 lists a selection of differences between societies that validation research showed to be associated with the Uncertainty Avoidance dimension. In Hofstede et al. (2010) Uncertainty Avoidance Index scores are listed for 76 countries; they tend to be higher in East and Central European countries, in Latin countries, in Japan and in German speaking countries, lower in English speaking, Nordic and Chinese culture countries. Individualism Individualism on the one side versus its opposite, Collectivism, as a societal, not an individual characteristic, is the degree to which people in a society are integrated into groups. On the individualist side we find cultures in which the ties between individuals are loose: everyone is expected to look after him/herself and his/her immediate family. On the collectivist side we find cultures in which people from birth onwards are integrated into strong, cohesive in-groups, often extended families (with uncles, aunts and grandparents) that continue protecting them in exchange for unquestioning loyalty, and oppose other ingroups. Again, the issue addressed by this dimension is an extremely fundamental one, regarding all societies in the world. Table 3 lists a selection of differences between societies that validation research showed to be associated with this dimension. Table 3 Ten Differences Between Collectivist and Individualist Societies Individualism Collectivism Everyone is supposed to take care of him- or herself and his or her immediate family only People are born into extended families or clans which protect them in exchange for loyalty "I" – consciousness "We" –consciousness Right of privacy Stress on belonging Speaking one's mind is healthy Harmony should always be maintained Others classified as individuals Others classified as in-group or out-group Personal opinion expected: one person one vote Opinions and votes predetermined by in-group Transgression of norms leads to guilt feelings Transgression of norms leads to shame feelings Languages in which the word "I" is indispensable Languages in which the word "I" is avoided Purpose of education is learning how to learn Purpose of education is learning how to do Task prevails over relationship Relationship prevails over task Produced by The Berkeley Electronic Press, 2011 11 Online Readings in Psychology and Culture, Unit 2, Subunit 1, Chapter 8 In Hofstede et al. (2010) Individualism Index scores are listed for 76 countries; Individualism tends to prevail in developed and Western countries, while collectivism prevails in less developed and Eastern countries; Japan takes a middle position on this dimension. Masculinity – Femininity Masculinity versus its opposite, Femininity, again as a societal, not as an individual characteristic, refers to the distribution of values between the genders which is another fundamental issue for any society, to which a range of solutions can be found. The IBM studies revealed that (a) women's values differ less among societies than men's values; (b) men's values from one country to another contain a dimension from very assertive and competitive and maximally different from women's values on the one side, to modest and caring and similar to women's values on the other. The assertive pole has been called 'masculine' and the modest, caring pole 'feminine'. The women in feminine countries have the same modest, caring values as the men; in the masculine countries they are somewhat assertive and competitive, but not as much as the men, so that these countries show a gap between men's values and women's values. In masculine cultures there is often a taboo around this dimension (Hofstede et al., 1998). Table 4 Ten Differences Between Feminine and Masculine Societies Femininity Masculinity Minimum emotional and social role differentiation Maximum emotional and social role differentiation between the genders between the genders Men and women should be modest and caring Men should be and women may be assertive and ambitious Balance between family and work Work prevails over family Sympathy for the weak Admiration for the strong Both fathers and mothers deal with facts and feelings Fathers deal with facts, mothers with feelings Both boys and girls may cry but neither should fight Girls cry, boys don’t; boys should fight back, girls shouldn’t fight Mothers decide on number of children Fathers decide on family size Many women in elected political positions Few women in elected political positions Religion focuses on fellow human beings Religion focuses on God or gods Matter-of-fact attitudes about sexuality; sex is a way of relating Moralistic attitudes about sexuality; sex is a way of performing https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/orpc/vol2/iss1/8 12 Hofstede: Dimensionalizing Cultures: The Hofstede Model in Context Taboos are based on deeply rooted values; this taboo shows that the Masculinity/Femininity dimension in some societies touches basic and often unconscious values, too painful to be explicitly discussed. In fact the taboo validates the importance of the dimension. Table 4 lists a selection of differences between societies that validation research showed to be associated with this dimension. In Hofstede et al. (2010) Masculinity versus Femininity Index scores are presented for 76 countries; Masculinity is high in Japan, in German speaking countries, and in some Latin countries like Italy and Mexico; it is moderately high in English speaking Western countries; it is low in Nordic countries and in the Netherlands and moderately low in some Latin and Asian countries like France, Spain, Portugal, Chile, Korea and Thailand. Long-Term vs. Short-Term Orientation This dimension was first identified in a survey among students in 23 countries around the world, using a questionnaire designed by Chinese scholars (Chinese Culture Connection, 1987). As all countries with a history of Confucianism scored near one pole which could be associated with hard work, the study’s first author Michael Harris Bond labeled the dimension Confucian Work Dynamism. The dimension turned out to be strongly correlated with recent economic growth. As none of the four IBM dimensions was linked to economic growth, I obtained Bond’s permission to add his dimension as a fifth to my four (Hofstede & Bond, 1988). Because it had been identified in a study comparing students from 23 countries, most of whom had never heard of Confucius, I re-named it Long- Term versus Short-Term Orientation; the long-term pole corresponds to Bond’s Confucian Work Dynamism. Values found at this pole were perseverance, thrift, ordering relationships by status, and having a sense of shame; values at the opposite, short term pole were reciprocating social obligations, respect for tradition, protecting one's 'face', and personal steadiness and stability. The positively rated values of this dimension were already present in the teachings of Confucius from around 500 BC. There was much more in Confucius’ teachings so Long-Term Orientation is not Confucianism per se, but it is still present in countries with a Confucian heritage. In my book for a student readership Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind (Hofstede, 1991) the fifth dimension was first integrated into my model. It was more extensively analyzed in the second edition of Culture’s Consequences (Hofstede, 2001) and in the new edition of Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind, for which my eldest son Gert Jan Hofstede joined me as a co-author (Hofstede & Hofstede, 2005). My initial cross-cultural data collected around 1970 by the IBM corporation among its employees in more than 50 countries worldwide represented probably the largest matched-sample cross-national database available anywhere at that time. Bond’s Chinese Value Survey showed the power of adding results from other surveys; unfortunately, it covered only 23 countries, and attempts to extend it to other populations were small-scale and hardly reliable. In the past quarter century the volume of available cross-cultural data on self-scored values and related issues has increased enormously. If I had to start my research now, I Produced by The Berkeley Electronic Press, 2011 13 Online Readings in Psychology and Culture, Unit 2, Subunit 1, Chapter 8 would select the best elements from all these new databases. My prime choice would be the World Values Survey. In the early 1980s departments of Divinity at six European Universities, concerned with a loss of Christian faith, jointly surveyed the values of their countries’ populations through public opinion survey methods. In the following years their European Values Survey expanded and changed focus: in the hands of U.S. sociologist Ronald Inglehart it grew into a periodic World Values Survey (WVS). Subsequent data collection rounds took place with 10-year intervals; as this is written, a fourth round is in process. The survey now covers more than 100 countries worldwide with a questionnaire including more than 360 forced-choice items. Areas covered are ecology, economy, education, emotions, family, gender and sexuality, government and politics, health, happiness, leisure and friends, morality, religion, society and nation, and work. The entire WVS data bank, including previous rounds and down to individual respondent scores, is freely accessible on the Web (www.worldvaluessurvey.org). So far it has remained underused; potential users tend to drown in its huge volume of information. Michael Minkov, a Bulgarian linguist and sociologist whom I had met on the e-mail at the turn of the millennium, took up the challenge of exploring the riches of the WVS. In 2007 he published a book with a Bulgarian publisher, in which he described three new cross-national value dimensions extracted from recent WVS data, which he labeled Exclusionism versus Universalism, Indulgence versus Restraint and Monumentalism versus Flexumility (the latter a combination of flexibility and humility). Exclusionism versus Universalism was strongly correlated with Collectivism/Individualism and could be considered an elaboration of aspects of it. The other two dimensions were new, although Monumentalism versus Flexumility was moderately but significantly correlated with Short Term/Long Term Orientation. Minkov’s findings initially inspired the issuing of a new, 2008 version of the Values Survey Module, a set of questions available to researchers who wish to replicate my research into national culture differences. Earlier versions were issued in 1982 (VSM82) and 1994 (VSM94). Next to the established five Hofstede dimensions, the VSM08 included on an experimental basis Minkov’s dimensions Indulgence versus Restraint and Monumentalism versus Flexumility (which I re-baptized Self-Effacement). The Values Survey Module (VSM) can be downloaded from www.geerthofstede.nl. Aspiring users should carefully study the accompanying Manual before they decide to collect their own data. In most cases, the use of available results of already existing quality research is to be preferred above amateur replications. The next step in our cooperation with Minkov was that Gert Jan Hofstede and I invited him to become a co-author for the third edition of Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind (Hofstede et al., 2010). Minkov’s Exclusionism versus Universalism was integrated into the Individualism/Collectivism chapter. By combining elements from his Monumentalism versus Flexumility dimension with additional WVS items, Minkov succeeded in converting into a new version of Long- versus Short-Term Orientation, now available for 93 countries and regions. Indulgence versus Restraint became an entirely new dimension that will be described below. https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/orpc/vol2/iss1/8 14 Hofstede: Dimensionalizing Cultures: The Hofstede Model in Context Table 5 lists a selection of differences between societies that validation research showed to be associated with the old and new version of the Long- versus Short-Term Orientation dimension. In our 2010 book, dimension scores have been re-calculated including Minkov’s analysis of recent World Values Survey data. Long-term oriented are East Asian countries, followed by Eastern- and Central Europe. A medium term orientation is found in South- and North-European and South Asian countries. Short-term oriented are U.S.A. and Australia, Latin American, African and Muslim countries. Table 5 Ten Differences Between Short- and Long-Term-Oriented Societies Short-Term Orientation Long-Term Orientation Most important events in life occurred in the past or Most important events in life will occur in the take place now future Personal steadiness and stability: a good person is A good person adapts to the circumstances always the same There are universal guidelines about what is good and evil What is good and evil depends upon the circumstances Traditions are sacrosanct Traditions are adaptable to changed circumstances Family life guided by imperatives Family life guided by shared tasks Supposed to be proud of one’s country Trying to learn from other countries Service to others is an important goal Thrift and perseverance are important goals Social spending and consumption Large savings quote, funds available for investment Students attribute success and failure to luck Students attribute success to effort and failure to lack of effort Slow or no economic growth of poor countries Fast economic growth of countries up till a level of prosperity Indulgence versus Restraint The sixth and new dimension, added in our 2010 book, uses Minkov’s label Indulgence versus Restraint. It was also based on recent World Values Survey items and is more or less complementary to Long-versus Short-Term Orientation; in fact it is weakly negatively correlated with it. It focuses on aspects not covered by the other five dimensions, but known from literature on “happiness research”. Indulgence stands for a society that allows relatively free gratification of basic and natural human desires related to enjoying life and having fun. Restraint stands for a society that controls gratification of needs and regulates it by means of strict social norms. Scores on this dimension are also available for 93 Produced by The Berkeley Electronic Press, 2011 15 Online Readings in Psychology and Culture, Unit 2, Subunit 1, Chapter 8 countries and regions. Table 6 lists a selection of differences between societies that validation research showed to be associated with this dimension. Indulgence tends to prevail in South and North America, in Western Europe and in parts of Sub-Sahara Africa. Restraint prevails in Eastern Europe, in Asia and in the Muslim world. Mediterranean Europe takes a middle position on this dimension. Table 6 Ten Differences between Indulgent and Restrained Societies Indulgence Restrained Higher percentage of people declaring themselves very happy Fewer very happy people A perception of personal life control A perception of helplessness: what happens to me is not my own doing Freedom of speech seen as important Freedom of speech is not a primary concern Higher importance of leisure Lower importance of leisure More likely to remember positive emotions Less likely to remember positive emotions In countries with educated populations, higher birthrates In countries with educated populations, lower birthrates More people actively involved in sports Fewer people actively involved in sports In countries with enough food, highe...
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Running head: INTERNATIONAL CASE STUDY

International Case Study
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INTERNATIONAL CASE STUDY

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International Case Study
Case Study 1

Cultural Considerations
The meetings’ general approach would be a sign that they take the business meetings
informally in their culture. His approach could be a manner to identify a potential client. Their
mode of communication might be flexible even in the business sense. For fruitful conversations,
it would be considerate to approach him at a similar level. In their culture, getting to know each
other first could be beneficial as the negotiations progress. It is also crucial to understand the
perceptions Brazilians may have of American people. They perceive Americans as Greedy and
Self Indulgent (Adler,20...

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