Some of the main ideas behind Figuring Foreigners out are that there are several pairs of extremes that can be used to represent any given culture and pretty much every culture lies somewhere on each property’s spectrum but is unlikely to fall into an extreme. Everything may differ from situation to situation. This difference in culture may lead to some misunderstandings since things can be interpreted differently from person to person. Some examples of these properties and dualities are individualism and collectivism, non-verbal communication, monochronic and polychronic, internal and external, and direct and indirect. The author attempts to contrast each property against its polar opposite and does so by providing some situations in which the reader can determine where the situation lies. I generally agree with this assessment of culture because as I was reading through the article, I felt myself creating associations in cultures that I was familiar with and the properties of the writing. Although I do see some comparisons that make sense, I feel as though the author could have given clear examples of cultures that had these misunderstandings and how they played out. In other words, were there any languages that had an easier time resolving these misunderstandings and is the process quantifiable? These generalizations could have been given more substance with these types of comparisons rather than some high-level scenarios. In my native culture, East Asians generally fall into the collectivist, non-verbal communication, monochronic, internal, and indirect mappings. Though I do agree with the author that these are debatable. A conclusive response to the paper would be that if everything is dependent on the situation, a final classification of culture in these parameters is impossible.
In the case of Hofstede’s six dimensions of culture, the amount of input data is substantial so the mapping of countries on his parameters looks to have some significance. The quantifiable nature of the index pleases me greatly and provides a level of complexity that the Figuring Foreigners Out article did not have. Additionally, properties like gender and wealth were also taken into account. These properties are essential to understanding the circumstances of any culture and are major parameters that were ignored in the previous article. One problem that I did notice is that if there were 40 countries being surveyed and only 100,000 individuals then the average for each country would be only 2500. And if there was a major difference in clusters (of data points), then some countries would not be as well represented as the mappings suggest. This is a possible area that could be expanded upon to really dive into the properties that can quantify a culture. The mappings did however agree with the mappings that I had in my mind of cultures that I was familiar with. This demonstrates that there is some substance if the reader can relate to the data with their own experiences. Though if presented with a contrary data set, personal biases may play a role in the opinion of the mappings’ accuracy because of selective memory.
Comments