Agreed Mark. Prior to becoming a full-time academic I worked 35 years in industry, primarily in IT marketing operations. I don't believe any competent practitioner would use only "national culture" to understand a, market, an organisation, and its ecology. Here's the intro to my lecture on this topic.
R.D. Laing, author of "The Politics of Experience", noted 35 years ago that "We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing." And that was 35 years ago. Laing also pointed out that �facts� become fictions when we fail to understand and appreciate the thought and experiences that lead to academic theories. Neither �rational� processes that we so often find in work by academics and others of the chattering class who cannot comprehend the complexity of the experimental method, nor the experimental method itself are adequate tools of analysis of reality. Theories must be sufficiently grounded in reality.
The tendency of academic researchers attempting to employ the Scientific Method is to isolate a variable to study, carry out some observation of manipulation of that single variable, and then attempt to draw general conclusions. Hopefully with enough isolated investigations of isolated variables someone might see a relationship or two and progress to a theory. This theory, of course, will be based upon an agglomeration of isolated events. This reductive solution leads to higher-order entities as nothing but agglomerations of lower-order entities and the laws governing the higher order entities are expected to be deduced from the laws governing the lower. This general program of inter-theoretic reduction has raised barriers that many philosophers find insurmountable, such as case of attempting to reduce biology to chemistry. Given the experimental and analytical tools available in the past, isolation and experimentation might have been appropriate. However, we still see this reductionist practice carrying on today. One might have hoped to see advances in the 1960s with the use of computers making multivariate statistical analyses more accessible to researchers, but I still see mostly reductionist practices reported in the literature. Even the latest fad of structured equations is an analytical scheme based upon correlation, and correlation, as we had drilled into or heads in our basic statistics class, does not demonstrate causality. Quite a number of the studies I read using structured equations end up with charts where the arrows create ovals, but then, a circular relationship is not surprising when we study a small number of related variables. Validating a causal model through purely statistical means is impossible. We use statistics as a measurement of �error� to see if rejecting our model can be justified; interestingly, prediction is not an end in itself.
As I've noted before on this list, we spend vast amouts of money on hardward, software, and theoretical development to predict the weather, which is a complex process, but I have one laptop that I use to collect and analyse data and to study marketing, management, and leadership across cultures. Analysis of the latter seem at least as complex as predicting weather.
"M.P.Fenton-OCreevy" <M.P.Fenton-Ocreevy@OPEN.AC.UK> wrote:
Perhaps I can suggest another avenue for this discussion.
I know that (especially in the USA) culture is often used as a principle means for capturing cross national differences. I am uncertain that the tool is sufficient to the task. I tend to feel that the notion of institutional differences is often more illuminating.
Let me give an example. I have a PhD student who is studying the transfer of working practices from a British parent company to a series of Malaysian subsidiaries. Within the subsidiaries the senior team tend to be ethnic Chinese and the supervisors and frontline workers tend to be Bumiputra (indigenous Malay). A cultural perspective can shed some light as we note differences between British, Chinese (in Malasia) and Bumiputra cultures. However it misses a lot as well. For example, the relations between these ethnic groups in the subsidiaries reproduce the social relations of wider Malaysian society, which is ethnically stratified (ethnic Chinese dominate business), there is a legal backdrop (eg restrictions on Chinese ownership in Malaysia and emerging patterns of commercial law and law enforcement. and an economic backdrop (especially the current stage of economic development in Malaysia). Finally, some of the patterns of management in these companies have roots in a period of of British colonial rule.
All of this turns out to be relevant to the process of translating British management practices into a Malaysian context. Culture gets us started but misses much of the important national context.
best regards
Mark
Jacob, in our business and culture paper/course I start with understanding ethnocentrism and then culture shock (fortunately in New Zealand I have classes with majorities of foreign students from up to 10 cultures who can personally relate to culture shock), then go to dimensions of culture from GLOBE, Hofstede, Inglehart, Schwartz, and E.T. Hall, all except Hall's reprsented by national mean scores, and then relate these dimensions to oral communication and then to negotiation behaviour. More if it's a 39-contact-hour paper, such as leadership, gender, expatriation issues, etc.
Romie
Jacob <Jacob.Eisenberg@UCD.IE> wrote: Rusty and colleagues,
Obviously, we all (or 99% of us) can identify with Einstein�s (or whoever was the one who really said it) statement. I also think that you will find very few people who will endorse �reducing a culture to a number all neat and tidy�; I definitely would not and neither, I believe, would Romie. So, let us depart from erecting feeble straw-men and let�s discuss these matters on a more serious, scholarly-based level.
My personal dilemma, as a researcher and educator is this: if I have 10-30 contact hours with students, who know little of cross cultural issues, and given that this may be the only course they will take (say, during their undergraduate years) that deals with such matters and given that I wish to have them gain more understanding of the meaning of cross cultural differences at the end of this one-semester course, which approach do I take? Obviously, if we had unlimited resources of time and energy, we could go into depth into dozens of cultures and explore the intricacies of each such rich culture. But what can be done to optimize the cultural learning process given our limited resources? This is posed not as a rhetorical, but rather as an open question.
Ciao,
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Jacob Eisenberg, Ph.D.
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All -- I believe that it was Einstein who said and I am paraphrasing here: Sometimes what counts most can't be counted. I am not sure that you can reduce a culture to a number all neat and tidy.
WHAT ABOUT YOUR DYSFUNCTIONAL STEREOTYPES THAT ARE ABUSED BY THE MASSES? IT IS BETTER TO UNDERSTAND THE REAL CULTURE THAN DEPEND ON SOUNDBITES OF BIGOTS I BELIEVE. OF COURSE, YOU MAY BELIEVE THE OPPOSITE
Hello George, statistical analysis processes provide numbers to which we assign cognitive meaning. Using means to describe cultures is stereotyping them, to me at least. That's why whomever invented medians, modes, standard deviations, skewness, and kurtosis measures and bar charts, radar diagrams, smallest space analysis diagrams, and distribution curves invented them. We're still developing depictions of data and printing journal articles as if we're in the 19th century. (Me too; I promise I'll do better.)
Regards,
Romie
"Who dare to teach must never cease to learn."-John Cotton Dana
Romie F. Littrell, BA, MBA,PhD, FIAIR, An f�na� fi�in
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"Who dare to teach must never cease to learn."-John Cotton Dana
Romie F. Littrell, BA, MBA,PhD, FIAIR, An f�na� fi�in
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