Riassunto esame Inglese monografico 3, Prof. Rossi Enrica, libro consigliato Riding the waves of culture, Fons Trompenaars

Individualism and Communitarianism

It is seen that the individualists are more Protestant and Catholic are more communitarianism. Individualism has been used also in different political factions. Individuals are either self- or community-oriented.

It is important to consider the responsibility of a person or of the group when something goes wrong. (North America and North-west Europeans are individualism).

We can reconcile these two parts and one values increases the quality of the opposite one.

To take a decision communitarianism takes a lot longer because they try to have everybody consensus.

The most famous example of communitarian decision is the Japanese method "RINGI" process where proposals circulate and are initialled by agreeing participants.

The individualistic process of making decision is usually very short. In individualistic societies there is a disparity between decision and implementation.

The relationship between people motivates them.

For individualistic culture organisations are instruments in order.

To serve individual and it is a means to what its actors want for themselves.

Chapter 6: Feelings and relationships

It talks about the way cultures and people show their emotions. Members of neutral culture keep their feelings very controlled and carefully. Members of affective culture show their emotions without being afraid.

Neutral cultures don't mean that they are cold culture or unfeeling but it just the amount of emotions they show because this is a convention. (Ethiopia and Japan are very neutral).

When the approach is emotional/affective we are searching for a direct emotional response. When the approach is neutral, we seek an indirect response. The indirect path gives support upon the success of an effort of intellect. The direct path allows our feelings about a factual proposition to show feelings with thoughts in a different way.

Americans tend to be affective and to express their feelings. This is because with so many immigrants and such a huge country they had to tear down the

barriers again and again. At the same time, they separate them from “objective” and “rational” (because they think that emotions should be separated from reasoning process because they can corrupt them). Italians and southern Europeans show their emotions, and they don’t separate them. Dutch and Swedes don’t show the emotions and don’t separate.

Cultures use sense of humour, but it depends when and how.

Intercultural communication: workshop have been asked to describe intercultural communication. They list instruments and more general definitions like the exchange of information. Communication is essentially the exchange of information, be it words, ideas, and emotions. It is the carrier of mending. Communication it is only possible to people who share a system of meaning. Western society has a predominantly verbal culture. We have a different style to discuss. For Anglo-Saxon is polite to not interrupt the speaker so person A waits person B to stop talking.

In Latin culture when we interrupt, we show that we are interested in the object. The silent communication of oriental language scares the western because silence is seen as a failure in communication.

Tone of voice: some problems can come up when we don't use a tone of voice in a correct way. For examples for Latin culture raising your voice means that you are interested in the matter. Oriental culture will not take seriously people who raise their voice. For them the higher position a person holds, the lower and flatter their voice. In Nigeria raising the voice is important but in Malaysia shouting is not seen good.

Non-verbal communication: the 75% of all communication is not verbal. This means that we need to be very careful about the eye-contact, personal space, touching each other etc. Eye-contact in USA between strangers is something the last very little but in Western culture it is crucial to let the speaker know that we are interested in what he is saying.

Chapter 7: How far we get

involvedKurt Lewin has represented the personality as a series of circles with "life space" and "personality levels" between. The most personal and private spaces are near the centre.He represented 2 circles: U-type (referring to Americans) and G-type (referring to German). The U-type shows that Americans have more public space than private and so one reason why Americans seem to be friendly is that they allow everyone to enter their private space. In the G-type the access of life spaces is guarded by a thick line, and it is much more difficult to enter. The public space is smaller and once a person 5 has become friend this lets him or her into all your private sphere. For these reasons German tends to think that Americans are cheerful, garrulous, and superficial.On the other hand, Americans think that Germans as cold person that are hard to get to know.Specific culture with small area of privacy operated from public life have freedom and direct speech. They use

expression like “do not take this personally”. For example, American and Dutch find particularly easy to insult their diffuse partner, but they don’t consider that for diffuse culture is very important to not lose the face. The importance of avoiding losing the face is why diffuse cultures is very important this point.

Doing business with a culture more diffuse than us can seem as a “waste of time”. This is because diffuse people before doing business like to know each other and so your business partner would like to know who your friends are, what do you like to do and so on.

Swedes invest a week in organising business trip to get to know better. Only after a private space relationship has been established at this point Argentinian will do business with you.

USA and Netherland in business are more specific (ex. Argentinian and Americans). Specific and diffuse culture are sometimes called low and high context. Context has to do with how much you have to know before

Effective communication. Cultures with high context like Japan and France believe that strangers must be filled in before doing business in a proper way. These cultures are rich and subtle but carry a lot of baggage and they will not be very comfortable with foreign who are not fully assimilated.

Low context like USA and Netherland believes that each other should follow the rule-making and the structures. They tend to be flexible and adaptable.

Specific cultures tend to look at objects, specifics and things before considering how this are related.

Diffuse cultures look at the relationships and connections before considering all the separate pieces. This is a circle configuration.

Pay for performance is not very popular in diffuse cultures.

Chapter 8: How we accord status

Achieved status: society who see the status of a person compared to what he/she has achieved and so it refers to doing.

Ascribed status: it is based on the age, class, gender, education of a person and it refers to being.

Sometimes the ascribed status has been considered dangerous for the economic health. The USA are very achieved status and there is a correlation between Protestantism - achievement orientation and Catholic, Buddhist and Hindu - ascribed orientation. Achieved and ascribed status can be very connected with each other. UE is an important example of an ascribed self-fulfilling prophecy, and its power has been proclaimed before it has achieved anything. Your achieving can drive your ascribing. For an achieved manager doing business with an ascribed person can be very annoying. Achievement cultures will say for example "why a 30-year-old is doing business with a 50-year-old even if he hasn't the experience required?" But achievement culture needs to know that ascriptive cultures spend very hardly on training and in-house education to ensure that older people actually are wiser for the years they have spent in the corporation. Older people are so important for ascribed status.

In an achieved culture, the translator is seen as someone who must stay neutral and just help with the language comprehension and they don't have to take someone's party.

In an ascribed culture, the translator is doing something else because for example a Japanese translator is not only translating the words, but he is also interpreting the gesture, the context and meaning and his role is to support his team.

In a diffuse culture, it is important to tie in your status with your organisation.

An ascriptive culture must be assured that your organisation has great respect for you and that you are at or near the top.

Pay-for-performance and bonus can't really work for ascriptive cultures. In ascriptive cultures, you are your status and it is natural like your birth or education. It requires no rational justification.

Achievement-oriented organisations justify their hierarchies by claiming that a person has done more, has achieved more. Ascription-oriented organisations justify their hierarchies by "power-to-get-things-done".

Chapter 7: Achievement and Status

In achieving countries, the actor is evaluated thanks to the things he/she does and achieve and that means that for example success is defined as increased sales. In ascribing cultures status is attributed to those who naturally evoke admiration from others. For these reason achievement-oriented corporations send more young, promising managers to challenge themselves.

Chapter 9: How we manage time

We have 2 contrasting concepts of time:

• Time as a line of discrete events, minutes, hours etc
• Time as a circle, revolving so that minutes, hours repeat.

Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck identify 3 categories of culture based on the time:

• Present-oriented: it is timeless, traditionless and ignores the future
• Past-oriented: it is concerned about keeping the traditions in the present
• Future-oriented: want a more desirable future and setting out to realise it.

The experience of time means that we can consider a past event now or envisage a future event in the past, present and future are all compressed.

This means that we can consider what competitive move to make today based on past experience and with expectations of the future.

Time has a meaning not only for individuals but also for the groups or cultures. Durkheim sees time as a social construct enabling members of a culture to coordinate their activities.

We think about the past and the future in the present and so we think that the present is the only real thing.

The time can be considered as a line of sequential events but also as a cyclical and repetitive compressing past, present and future.

There are people who think time as a line (SEQUENTIALISM- Monochromic) and every change that can be made makes a sequential person uncertain.

On the other hand, there are SYNCHRONIC people (POLYCHROMIC) that can do different things at a time. They can be considered as people who do various activities in parallel.

People who do more things at a time