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Rana Sinha
Abstract:
A. INTRODUCTION
Culture consists of language, ideas, beliefs, customs, taboos, codes, institutions, tools,
techniques, works of art, rituals, ceremonies and symbols. It has played a crucial role in
human evolution, allowing human beings to adapt the environment to their own purposes
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rather than depend solely on natural selection to achieve adaptive success. Every human
society has its own particular culture, or sociocultural system. (Adapted from source:
Encyclopaedia Britannica)
Values - Values are ideas that tell what in life is considered important.
Norms - Norms consists of expectations of how people should behave in different
situations.
Artefacts - Things or material culture - reflects the culture's values and norms but are
tangible and manufactured by man.
The first cross-cultural analyzes done in the West, were by anthropologists like
Edward Burnett Tylor and Lewis H Morgan in the 19th century. Anthropology and Social
Anthropology have come a long way since the belief in a gradual climb from stages of lower
savagery to civilization, epitomized by Victorian England. Nowadays the concept of "culture"
is in part a reaction against such earlier Western concepts and anthropologists argue that
culture is "human nature," and that all people have a capacity to classify experiences, encode
classifications symbolically and communicate such abstractions to others.
Typically anthropologists and social scientists tend to study people and human
behavior among exotic tribes and cultures living in far off places rather than do field work
among white-collared literate adults in modern cities. Advances in communication and
technology and socio-political changes started transforming the modern workplace yet there
were no guidelines based on research to help people interact with other people from other
cultures.
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B. DISCUSSION
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In this approach, cultural traits are taken out of the context of the whole culture and
are compared with cultural traits in widely diverse cultures to determine patterns of
regularities and differences within the broad base of the study.
Culture has an interpretative function for the members of a group, which share that
particular culture. Although all members of a group or society might share their culture,
expressions of culture-resultant behaviour are modified by the individuals' personality,
upbringing and life-experience to a considerable degree. Cross-cultural analysis aims at
harnessing this utilitarian function of culture as a tool for increasing human adaptation and
improving communication.
It is a daunting challenge to convey the findings of research and field work and
discuss cross-cultural issues in diverse contexts such as corporate culture, workplace culture
and inter cultural competency as laypeople tend to use the word 'culture' to refer to something
refined, artistic and exclusive to a certain group of "artists" who function in a separate sphere
than ordinary people in the workplace. Some typical allusions to culture:
Culture is the section in the newspaper where they review theatre, dance performances or
write book reviews etc.
Culture is what parents teach their kids and grandparents teach their grandchildren.
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"You don't have any culture," is what people say to you when you put your feet on the table
at lunchtime or spit in front of guests.
"They just have a different culture," people say about those whose behaviour they don't
understand but have to tolerate.
There are many models of cross-cultural analysis currently valid. The 'Iceberg' and the
'Onion' models are widely known. The popular 'Iceberg model' of culture developed by
Selfridge and Sokolik, 1975 and W.L. French and C.H. Bell in 1979, identifies a visible area
consisting of behaviour or clothing or symbols and artifacts of some form and a level of
values or an invisible level.
Trying to define as complex a phenomenon as culture with just two layers proved
quite a challenge and the 'Onion' model arose. Geert Hofstede (1991) proposed a set of four
layers, each of which includes the lower level or is a result of the lower level. According to
this view, 'culture' is like an onion that can be peeled, layer-by layer to reveal the content.
Hofstede sees culture as "the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the
members of one group or category of people from another."
The five dimensions Hofstede uses to distinguish between national cultures are:
Power distance, which measures the extent to which members of society accept how
power is distributed unequally in that society.
Individualism tells how people look after themselves and their immediate family only
in contrast with Collectivism, where people belong to in-groups (families, clans or
organizations) who look after them in exchange for loyalty.
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The dominant values of Masculinity, focussing on achievement and material success
are contrasted with those of Femininity, which focus on caring for others and quality of life.
Uncertainty avoidance measures the extent to which people feel threatened by uncertainty
and ambiguity and try to avoid these situations.
Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner use seven dimensions for their model of
culture:
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Criticism of current models
One of the weaknesses of cross-cultural analysis has been the inability to transcend
the tendency to equalize culture with the concept of the nation state. A nation state is a
political unit consisting of an autonomous state inhabited predominantly by a people sharing
a common culture, history, and language or languages. In real life, cultures do not have strict
physical boundaries and borders like nation states. Its expression and even core beliefs can
assume many permutations and combinations as we move across distances.
There is some criticism in the field that this approach is out of phase with global
business today, with transnational companies facing the challenges of the management of
global knowledge networks and multicultural project teams, interacting and collaborating
across boundaries using new communication technologies.
Some writers like Nigel Holden (2001) suggest an alternative approach, which
acknowledges the growing complexity of inter- and intra-organizational connections and
identities, and offers theoretical concepts to think about organizations and multiple cultures in
a globalizing business context.
C. CONCLUSION
In spite of all the shortcomings and criticisms faced by the Hofstede model, it is very
much favoured by trainers and researchers. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, it is a
wonderful and easy to use tool to quantify cultural differences so that they can be discussed.
Discussing and debating differences is after all the main method of training and learning.
Secondly, Hofstede's research at IBM was conducted in the workplace, so Hofstede tools
brings cross-cultural analysis closer to the business side of the workplace, away from
anthropology, which is a matter for universities.
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References
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