Discussion Post #2

[Matthew Robinson]

This week's reading from Figuring Foreigners Out provided insight into the various ways in which cultures can differ. These included to what degree a culture is individualist or collectivist, how a culture communicates non-verbally, whether they view time as monochronic or polychronic, to what extent they feel they have control over their world, and whether they communicate in a direct or indirect manner. Many of these characteristics seem interrelated in some fashion. For example, a collectivist culture which views the individual only in its relation to a group usually communicates more indirectly in order to promote harmony in the group. While these characteristics of cultures are easily understandable, I find the ways in measuring the difference in cultures (shown by the Geert Hofstede Analysis) to be more problematic. Many of ways in measuring cultural differences (such as Masculinity or Uncertainty Avoidance) seem to be symptoms of multiple cultural characteristics rather than a single one and thus seem to create some inconsistency in describing a culture (i.e. China being one of the most masculine cultures on the scaled map could be attributed to a collectivist society or it could be attributed to strong traditional values or even to the one child policy it promoted in the past).