XXI. Around the world

Values. A value is the belief that a certain part of life is especially important. Every culture places different emphasis on family, work, religion, and love. Some cultures value family loyalty and romantic love. Other cultures emphasize independence from family and hard work. Still others emphasize religion and honor in the community.

Individually, think of four values that are important in your culture and four values you think are important in the United States.

	MY LIST
My Culture		American Culture

Form small groups of students from your country. Share your lists and decide which four values are most important in your culture and in American culture.

	GROUP LIST
Our Culture		American Culture

XXII. Discussion

Share your group's list with the students from the other groups and compare it to the lists made by students from different countries. Answer the following questions as a class.

1. Do groups from different cultures choose different values to describe American culture? What are the differences?

2. What do their descriptions of American culture tell you about their own culture?

3. What influence does your own culture have on the way you see people from other cultures?

4. How can you sec people from other cultures without a bias from your own culture?

Unit 6.3 Stereotypes Across Cultures

Pre-reading tasks

1. Answer the questions

1.What stereotypes do people from different countries have about each other ?

2. What stereotypes are there of people from your country?

3. How do we get stereotypes? Where do they come from?

4. How can we understand each other?

5. What helps mutual understanding?

2. Can you predict what the content of the text is?

Remember, that your increased self-knowledge and improved understanding of other cultural types will lead you to act in ways which will improve your professional results.

Introduction to Cross-Culture

Read the text to fulfil the tasks

In your own culture, you instinctively know if you got your message across successfully. Can you read other cultures as well? Do they think and react the same way you do?

Cultural behaviour is not something willy-nilly, accidental or whimsical. On the contrary, it is the end product of millennia of collected wisdom, filtered and passed down through hundreds of generations and translated into hardened, undiscussable core beliefs, values, notions and persistent action patterns. As such, a culture cannot be depicted satisfactorily at random or evaluated according to impressions or recent observations. It is a largely finite, predictable and enduring phenomenon – the essential key to survival for a nation or cultural group.

The purpose of a model for cultural behaviour is to formalise the study, beginning with an analysis of the genetic and environmental background and writing a blueprint for the subsequent historical development.

In a world of rapidly globalizing business, Internet electronic proximity and politico-economic association (EU, NAFTA, ASEAN, etc.) the ability to interact successfully with foreign partners in the spheres of commercial activity, diplomatic intercourse and scientific interchange is seen as increasingly essential and desirable.

Sample contents:

The growing importance of intercultural factors in world business and politics

Myths, assumptions and facts about influences on human behaviour

Convergence and divergence in world behavioural trends

Human Mental Programming – Values and Attitudes

Cultural categories

Life within horizons – widening one’s world view

Communication patterns: speech styles and listening habits

Audience expectations around the world

Diverse Presentation styles

Leadership styles – motivation

The Language of Management

Concepts of Space and Time

Cross-cultural assistance to improve your business is not just about training. It can be about helping you to understand and analyze unstructured business situations where culture may be playing a part. Understanding can lead to practical business solutions.

This may sound rather so what does it mean in practice? Here is an example of case studies:

Nordic company having problems in Japan

A Nordic company we worked with had recently started a joint venture with the Japanese. Things seemed to have ground to a halt after a promising start, and the Japanese were stalling about the marketing plan. The product was going to be marketed under the name of the Nordic firm. No-one on the Japanese side had objected to this, but questioning our clients identified that something connected to the plan marked the joint venture in relations with the Japanese. Through digging deeper, and using our cultural knowledge of the Japanese, we were able to build a hypothesis together. It was that the Japanese company might be concerned about their reputation and market position, and potentially losing face with their rivals. Further, that they might not feel able to bring up the topic openly with their Nordic counterparts because they assumed they would be equally concerned about their own name, and that they may feel that the Japanese would be making them lose face by suggesting that the product should be marketed with a different name. The Nordics said that their main aim was to get the product distributed and that marketing under the Japanese name was no problem for them. They were then able to go back to their partner and suggest the new plan themselves. The situation was resolved immediately, everyone's face was saved, and the venture was a great success.