...Business Communications Culture, The Business World, and Me Reflection Paper The way that you communicate is profoundly influenced by the culture that you were raised in. This cultural influence gives you the understanding of the meaning of words, gestures, time and space issues as well as rules of human relationships in your culture. Intercultural communication is not just translating a message from one language to another but rather understanding how people from other cultures, communicate and comprehend the world around them. Culture plays a significant role when it comes to communicating in the business world. All over the world different countries conduct business in a way that reflects their national norms. For instance, a gesture from your culture may be considered respectful, but for another culture it may be considered a sign of disrespect. Recognizing cultures that are different than your own when communicating in business is very important, the lack of knowledge and understanding of a culture can inhibit you from developing relationships. To become more efficient in business communication you have to accept multiple culture and adapt to their terms. Countries that have deep rooted beliefs will reject sudden changes in values when pressured from foreigners. I define culture as a logical shared system of attitudes, beliefs, values, and behavioral norms. When adapting to any business culture, never assume that the people in the culture will act the same way...
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...Culture, Groups and Social Behaviors 1. Concept and characteristics of culture Culture is that complex whole which consists of knowledge, beliefs, ideas, habits, attitudes, skills, abilities, values, norms, art, law, morals, customs, traditions, feelings, and other capabilities of man which are acquired, learned and socially transmitted by man from one generation to another through language and living together as members of the society. * Culture is learned. * Culture is socially transmitted through language. * Culture is a social product. * Culture is a source of gratification. * Culture is adoptive. * Culture is the distinctive way of life of a group of people. * Culture is material and non-material. * Culture has sanctions and control. * Culture is stable yet dynamic. * Culture is an established pattern of behavior. 2. Components of culture * Norms- a rule or standard of behavior expected of each member of a social group. * Folkways the ways of living, thinking, and acting in a human group, built up without conscious design but serving as compelling guides of conduct. * Mores - the essential or characteristic customs and treaties of a community. * Positive mores or duty or the “Thou shall behavior” * Negative mores or taboo or the “Thou shall not behavior” * Laws – formalized norms enacted by people vested with legitimate authority. * Ideas, Beliefs, Values *...
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...There are many cultures that differ from one another, each characterized by their language, values, ideas, material objects, and behaviors. Two types of cultures are subcultures and countercultures. A subculture is a smaller group based off the same culture with different religions and beliefs. Culture is one of the most basic concepts of life. Beliefs and behaviors are passed from one generation to the next. You’re raised to believe what your culture does is the “right” way of doing things. To distinguish other groups you look at the type of clothing they wear, jewelry and their art, known as material culture. Non-material culture is the way a group thinks; for example their beliefs and assumptions about the world. Culture shapes the society you live in, it gives you a language to speak, religions to believe in, and the things we value in life. We evaluate every thought process according to the criteria we were born in. when cultures clash together, you experience something called culture shock. You’re no longer able to depend on what you think is “normal”, instead you adjust yourself and follow what the other culture believes to be “normal”. We believe the way we do things is the proper way and when we see other groups with opposing viewpoints, we judge them, this is known as ethnocentrism. Subculture is a smaller group from a larger group, made up of people who went thru experiences that changed their outlook on life. People in these groups have distinctive styles of dressing...
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...Introduction to Company 4 Organization Culture 5 IBMers – Values and Ethics 9 Value 9 Ethics & Business conduct 9 Culture @ IBM 10 About IBM Culture Traits 10 Diversity 10 People orientation and Team Orientation - Freedom & Responsibility 11 Outcome Orientation - Context, not Control 12 Knowledge sharing - High Collaboration using technology 12 Risk Averse to Risk Taking 12 Innovation - Learn from mistakes (or near Mistakes) 13 Aggressiveness for duties, goals, and assignments 14 Culture & Climate Survey 15 Culture impact Business Performance 16 IBM Leadership Framework 16 Online References 17 Executive Summary Our charter is to determine culture at IBM & how it impacts business performance. Corporate culture is significant in that it “influences the behavior of everyone within an organization and, if carefully crafted, can have a significant positive effect on organizational success”. Louis Gerstner (2002) comments “I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn’t just one aspect of the game-it is the game. In the end, an organization is nothing more than collective capacity of its people to create value. Vision, strategy, marketing, financial management- any management system, in fact- can set you on right path and carry you for a while. But no enterprise- whether business, government, health care or any area of human endeavor – will succeed over the long haul if those element aren’t part of its DNA.” The culture of the company can determine its...
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...Culture Culture is the most important and basic concepts of sociology. Culture is a blueprint to how each group will live their lives. In sociology culture has a specific meaning. Sociologist believe every human being is cultured, every human being participates in a culture. According to Tischler (2014) Culture is defined as all that human beings learn to do, to use, to produce, to know, and to believe as they grow to maturity and live out their lives in the social groups to which they belong, (p. 50). Culture is a product of society and it is shared by the members of society. There are so many topics culture hits on, some are: Culture and Biology, Culture Shock, Ethnocentrism, Material Culture, Nonmaterial culture, Language and Culture, Symbols of Culture. Culture is an individual choice. Culture determines and guides us through life. Culture is transmitted from one generation to another is a learned behavior and not inherited biologically. We are raised the way our parent’s culture would raise their children for example; Catholics when the child is new born they get baptized, live their communion, confirmation, get marry and so on. We are programmed from young to this way of living. Other religions or cultures way of living is different. (Culture and Biology). From young we grow accustom to our way of living our culture. So when we travel to other countries we expect to continue our normal daily activities. But we experience culture shock when we aren’t able to...
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...Methodological Issues Subunit 1 Conceptual Issues in Psychology and Culture 12-1-2011 Article 8 Dimensionalizing Cultures: The Hofstede Model in Context Geert Hofstede Universities of Maastricht and Tilburg, The Netherlands, hofstede@bart.nl Recommended Citation Hofstede, G. (2011). Dimensionalizing Cultures: The Hofstede Model in Context. Online Readings in Psychology and Culture, Unit 2. Retrieved from http://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/orpc/vol2/iss1/8 This Online Readings in Psychology and Culture Article is brought to you for free and open access (provided uses are educational in nature)by IACCP and ScholarWorks@GVSU. Copyright © 2011 International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology. All Rights Reserved. ISBN 978-0-9845627-0-1 Dimensionalizing Cultures: The Hofstede Model in Context Abstract This article describes briefly the Hofstede model of six dimensions of national cultures: Power Distance, Uncertainty Avoidance, Individualism/Collectivism, Masculinity/Femininity, Long/ Short Term Orientation, and Indulgence/Restraint. It shows the conceptual and research efforts that preceded it and led up to it, and once it had become a paradigm for comparing cultures, research efforts that followed and built on it. The article stresses that dimensions depend on the level of aggregation; it describes the six entirely different dimensions found in the Hofstede et al. (2010) research into organizational cultures. It warns against confusion with value differences at the individual...
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...omission. In other words, this elitist definition of culture has enormous social, economic, and political implications. It is because cultural artifacts, practices, or traditions that are not legitimized by museums, the media, or cultural elites tend not to have much exposure and can then be forgotten easily. In addition, this traditional notion of culture has tended to be static, that is, it assumes that "culture" can be put into distinct categories or within set boundaries. A good illustration of this notion is the fact that there are still many people in society insisting on preserving certain traditional "cultures" passed down through the generations as if such "cultures" do not change over or "with" time. Now we come to our second important conception of culture which is quite different from what has been discussed above. The second and what can be regarded as the "sociological perspective on culture" came into being in such fields of study as sociology and cultural anthropology. For example, Raymond Williams defined culture in his 1965 book, The Long Revolution, as "a particular way of life which expresses certain meanings and values not only in art and learning, but also in institutions and ordinary behavior. The analysis of culture, from such a definition, is the clarification of the meanings and values implicit and explicit in a particular way of life, a particular culture." According to this conception, culture refers to people's everyday sense-making or meaning-making...
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...Journal of Business Research 60 (2007) 277 – 284 Hofstede's dimensions of culture in international marketing studies Ana Maria Soares a,⁎, Minoo Farhangmehr a,1 , Aviv Shoham b,2 a School of Economics and Management, University of Minho, 4710-057, Braga, Portugal b Graduate School of Management, University of Haifa, Haifa, 31905, Israel Received 1 March 2006; received in revised form 1 August 2006; accepted 1 October 2006 Abstract Growth of research addressing the relationship between culture and consumption is exponential [Ogden D., Ogden J. and Schau HJ. Exploring the impact of culture and acculturation on consumer purchase decisions: toward a microcultural perspective. Academy Marketing Science Review 2004;3.]. However culture is an elusive concept posing considerable difficulties for cross-cultural research [Clark T. International Marketing and national character: A review and proposal for an integrative theory. Journal of Marketing 1990; Oct.: 66–79.; Dawar N., Parker P. and Price L. A cross-cultural study of interpersonal information exchange. Journal of International Business Studies 1996; 27(3): 497–516.; Manrai L. and Manrai A. Current issues in the cross-cultural and cross-national consumer research. Journal of International Consumer Marketing 1996; 8 (3/4): 9–22.; McCort D. and Malhotra NK. Culture and consumer behavior: Toward an understanding of cross-cultural consumer behavior in International Marketing. Journal of International Consumer Marketing 1993;...
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...Culture Culture is the common denominator that makes the actions of the individuals understandable to a particular group. That is, the system of shared values, beliefs, behaviours, and artefacts making up a society’s way of life. Culture can either be represented fin form of material or non material culture. The definitions and specific traits of each of them are discussed below. Material culture is a term representative of the physical creations made, used, or shared by the members of a certain society; it is the society’s buffer against the environment. The components of material culture are all the creations (objects) of the human kind and mind, for example, cars, faucets, computers, trees, minerals just to mention but a few. The transformation of raw material into useable forms through the employment of knowledge is paramount in the achievement of material culture. For example, we make living abodes to shelter ourselves from the adversities of weather and for our own privacy at the basic level, beyond this we make, use, and share sophisticated, interesting and essential items relaying our cultural orientation. For instance, the types of clothes one wears reflect so much into the culture we subscribe to like school, religion, or where the last vacation was spent. Non-material culture on the other hand is the abstract or un-seen human creations by the society fashioned towards the behavioural influence of the said society. The components for the non-material culture...
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...When Culture (Latin: cultura, lit. "cultivation") first began to take its current usage by Europeans in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century (having had earlier antecedents elsewhere), it connoted a process of cultivation or improvement, as in agriculture or horticulture. In the nineteenth century, it came to refer first to the betterment or refinement of the individual, especially through education, and then to the fulfillment of national aspirations or ideals. In the mid-nineteenth century, some scientists used the term "culture" to refer to a universal human capacity. For the German nonpositivist sociologist Georg Simmel, culture referred to "the cultivation of individuals through the agency of external forms which have been objectified in the course of history". In the twentieth century, "culture" emerged as a concept central to anthropology, encompassing all human phenomena that are not purely results of human genetics. Specifically, the term "culture" in American anthropology had two meanings: (1) the evolved human capacity to classify and represent experiences with symbols, and to act imaginatively and creatively; and (2) the distinct ways that people living in different parts of the world classified and represented their experiences, and acted creatively. A distinction is current between the physical artifacts created by a society, its so-called material culture and everything else, the intangibles such as language, customs, etc. that are the main referent of the...
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...been argued that barriers between different cultures have diminished (Nordström, 199 1, p. 28ff). Cultural integration has thus been in focus and several researchers have argued that the world, especially within the business community, has become more and more homogeneous (see e.g. Vernon, 1979, Porter, 1980, 1986; Levin, 1983, Ohmae, 1985). A recent trend, however, is to stress heterogeneity rather than homogene@. Not least the animated discussions during the last few years about the future of the European Union shows that cultural differentes still exist. Such differentes are of special interest in MNCs, whose most characteristic feature is that they tonsist of units located in many countries. A number of researchers (see e.g. Bartlett, 1986, Ghoshal and Bartlett, 1990, Hedlund, 1986, Ghoshal and Nohria, 1989, Gupta and Govindarajan, 199 1, Nohria and Ghoshal, 1994, Prahalad and Doz, 1987, Rosenzweig and Nohria, 1994) have pointed to the fatt that units within multinational firms are not identical. According to Ghoshal and Nohria (1989, p. 323) the MNC is the quintessential case of the dispersed firm with different national subsidiaries often embedded in very heterogeneous environmental conditions (Robock, Simmons and Zwick, 1977). Thus, MNC urrits are located in different cultural milieus (Hofstede, 1980) and people with different nationalities, belonging to the same tirm. have to cape with each other. When people from different cultures work together, misunderstandings are likely...
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...Be aware of the ways your own culture influences your expectations of children. Consider the cultural backgrounds of the children in your setting and their community. Learn about the cultures from which the children in your program or school may come. Use your basic knowledge of the culture to talk with each family about its values and practices. Build on what you have learned from each family. Infuse the curriculum and classroom environment with a rich variety of materials from the cultures of your children as well as other cultures. Culture is illustrated daily when the doors of the school are opened. The youth enter into the environment with all the happenings going on at home to a safe environment of school excepted to detach and focus on school. The culture of the school varies from year to year depending on the population. For example, a teacher could have a classroom of 25 students. 15 of them can be females and 10 can be males. 5 could be White, 6 Hispanic, 3 Black, and 11 White. But the next year her entire cultured could be altered because her population has changed. As a teacher I have to be flexible and get to know my students. By doing this I will be able to become aware of the students needs and be able to service them better through the curriculum. Learning the culture of the school and the neighborhood in which I work helps the school to develop better programs and issue better support to their students. When you know the culture your students feel the buy...
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...The Effects of Clashing Cultures Our world today is populated with distinctive cultures and their unique languages, communication, beliefs, etc. that make our universe exquisitely diverse. As human beings, we tend to adapt to our own culture quite fast and we become used to perceiving our group of people as the only thing that is "good." We fear wanting to assimilate or broaden our knowledge to other cultures, for it is our natural instinct to shut out anything unfamiliar to us. In her essay, "Arts of the Contact Zone," Mary Louise Pratt argues for importance of understanding the point where two cultures clash, the contact zone, and that it can be powerful to engage in one's culture by expanding our grasp of knowledge and wisdom in the diversity we live in today. Pratt introduces three major concepts in her argument that exemplify the objective of her essay: the contact zone, autoethnographic texts, and transculturation. Upon viewing two other pieces by Richard Rodriguez, “The Achievement of Desire” and Gloria Anzaldua’s “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” Rodriguez and Anzaldua demonstrate Pratt's argument by supporting her concepts about the influence of contact zones between two juxtaposing cultures. In her argument, "Arts of the Contact Zone," Pratt introduces the theme of her argument, the contact zones: the point where cultures clash and come together in unison. Where one culture has a lot more power than the other. A contact zone is the root of how...
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...which is a Swedish based company, gave me an opportunity to humble myself to many of their different cultures. IKEA prides their self on focusing on nine points of business that shapes our culture as coworkers. The nine points are as follows: 1. The product range: our identity "We shall offer a wide range of well-designed, functional home furnishing products at prices so low that as many people as possible will be able to afford them." 2. The IKEA spirit – a strong and living reality "... the art of managing on small means, of making the best of what we had; cost-consciousness to the point of being stingy; humbleness, undying enthusiasm and the wonderful sense of community through thick and thin." 3. Profit gives us resources "…The aim of our effort to build up financial resources is to reach a good result in the long term (IKEA Culture, 2011).” 4. Reaching good results with small means “Before you choose a solution, set it in relation to the cost. Only then can you fully determine its worth (IKEA Culture, 2011).” 5. Simplicity is a virtue "Simplicity and humbleness characterize us in our relations with each other, with our suppliers and with our customers (IKEA Culture, 2011).” 6. Doing it a different way ...
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...An Investigation of How Culture Shapes Curriculum in Early Care and Education Programs on a Native American Indian Reservation ‘‘The drum is considered the heartbeat of the community’’ Jennifer L. Gilliard1,3 and Rita A. Moore2 This article investigates how culture shapes instruction in three early care and education programs on the Flathead Indian Reservation. Interviews with eight early childhood teachers as well as classroom observations were conducted. The investigation is framed by the following research question: How does the culture of the family and community shape curriculum? Data analysis suggested that ongoing communication with parents and community about teaching within a culturally relevant context, building a sense of belongingness and community through ritual, and respecting children, families, and community were essential to defining the Native American Indian culture within these early learning programs. KEY WORDS: culture; in; tribal; early; education; programs. INTRODUCTION Instruction informed by children’s home and community culture is critical to supporting a sense of belongingness that ultimately impacts academic achievement (Banks, 2002; Osterman, 2000). American school populations are increasingly diversified with immigrants and English language learners; but American teachers are over 90% European American (Nieto, 2000). Educators who are from different cultural perspectives than those present in the families and communities of the children they...
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