Both Figuring Foreigners Out and the Hofstede Dimensions of Culture attempt to place international cultures into certain ‘categories’ on a spectrum of two ends. Figuring Foreigners Out made a lot of interesting points, some commonly heard before and some commonly not. These include concepts of the individualist vs collectivist societies, monochronic vs polychronic societies, internal vs external societies, and societies depending on direct vs indirect communication. The monochronic vs polychronic society was a completely new concept I had never even thought of before. I hear so much in the U.S. that “time is money,” but I wonder if those sentiments exist in Turkey. However, I could not help but feel as if some points were just too general. For instance, that behavior does not have an inherit meaning and that meaning is only given when assigned by people. There are cases where this is not true, and these cases are huge in how we communicate. The biggest example is of facial expressions. Several studies have found that facial expressions, such as those of happiness and fear, are virtually the same across all cultures and countries, even remote native tribes with barely any contact from the Western world. This is a very huge pillar of nonverbal communication, yet this text makes it seem as if nonverbal communications are just too different across cultures and a foreigner will be doomed to not have any form of nonverbal communication right off the bat when entering another country.
The Hofstede Dimensions of Culture continued with the trend of shoe horning the vast amount of cultures into the world into a dichotomous spectrum. This is not entirely a bad thing, but it may impede in our ability to truly connect with something if we simply feel it is too ‘foreign’ rather than simply another way of being human. Another culture may simply just be seen as far too ‘different’ and impenetrable, and a foreigner too stuck in their ways to change. The piece of text that greatest gave me this impression is the quote of Hofstede himself provided in the second link: "Culture is more often a source of conflict than of synergy. Cultural differences are a nuisance at best and often a disaster." This is not someone open to accepting another culture or learning about them, but rather one who just wants to see another culture as some sort of set difference that he would rather just avoid altogether. The ‘dimensions’ he mentions on his website seem very short-sighted. There is a lot of variation in the underpinnings of each culture on a lot of these topics, such as with the ‘femininity-masculinity’ scale. A lot of the scales were just a bit bizarre, to be honest. Though I can understand that some of these scales have some truth to them, it just does not seem the scales were constructed on the right type of premise and that they generalize a bit too much. The U.S. and Turkey both fell in categories I expected, such as the U.S. being very individualist and Turkey being moderately collectivist and individualist (I expected Turkey to lean a little more on collectivism actually), and the U.S. not having a large power distance while Turkey had a moderate amount. All in all, I appreciate what truths the Hofstede scales have to offer, I simply do not think they should be the only reference to understanding a culture as they are very limited.
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