The readings primarily deal with organizing different countries/cultures in categories based on the traits the authors/researchers consider most informative.
Figuring Foreigners Out
This reading has chosen to categorize based on five habits/characteristics; Namely, level of individualism, verbal communication, sense of time, relationship with control, and level of directness in communication.
These categorizations are useful in my opinion for the following two reasons:
1) They point out aspects about cultures that many people may not have payed attention to prior to reading this article, not realizing that these are things that actually make a difference.
2) It puts into words ideas that other people may have intuited but had not consolidated.
By doing this, these categorizations and their explanations help us understand more about other cultures, our own culture, and our selves.
However, as with any information, in contact with these categories lies the danger of sciolism. When reading this article, people who have no previous exposure to thinking about these topics can fall in the trap of not being able to distinguish other categories, in addition to these, or opposing to these, because in their mind these were the first ones to be established, therefore they must be correct.
Geert Hofstede and the 6D Model
Hofstede's Model uses a different set of traits than F.F.O. Namely individualism, power distance, masculinity, uncertainty avoidance, and indulgence. The same applies here as above, with the exception that the 6D model rates countries on these attributes on a 1-100 scale. Here lies my major disagreement with this model. Although I am a research as well and I understand the limitations to getting answers to certain questions these days, I also understand the importance of uncertainty, subjectivity, and generalizability. There is a limit to how correct these ratings are and how indicative they are of each country's culture. I have used this model in my research, so I am not trying to discredit it; I think however that the results should be taken with a grain of salt.
Comments
I like the way you think, Smaragda. Never be afraid to question the presented validity of published studies. It is essential that you critically analyze underlying research questions, methodologies, assumptions, results, and conclusions of a given text. We'll talk more about the Hofstede scale in class on Tuesday. Although Hofstede developed these dimensions in the context of social scientific fields such as sociology and cultural anthropology, his work seems to have largely found popular reception in international business, as these categories help investors to place informed, albeit approximate quantitative ascriptions of cultures to facilitate the recognition of risks, costs, and prospective benefits in dynamic and interconnected societies and markets.