Culture and business

• Culture is about the belief, values, mind-sets, and practices of a group of people.
• Culture includes the behavior pattern and norms of that group- the rules, the assumptions, the perceptions, and the logic and reasoning that are specific to a group.
• Culture is the collective programming of our minds from birth
• Culture awareness most commonly refers to having an understanding of another culture's values and perspective
• Cross-cultural understanding requires that we reorient our mind-set and expectations, in order to interpret the gestures, attitudes, and statements of the people we encounter. We reorient our mind-set, but we don't necessarily change it.
• Political, economic, and social philosophies all impact the way people's value are shaped.
• All cultures are constantly evolving
• Culture within one border can turn up within other geographic boundaries looking different or the same
• A national culture is defined by its geographic and political boundaries and include even regional cultures within a nation as well as among several neighboring countries
• Subcultures are defined by ethnicity, gender, generation, religion, or other characteristics with cultures that are unique to them
• Every organization has its own workplace culture, referred to as the organizational culture
• Geert Hofstede identified 5 dimensions of culture: power distance, individualism vs. collectivism, masculinity vs. femininity, unanimity vs. diversity, and long-term vs. short-term orientation.
• Geert Hofstede, sometimes called as Father of Modern Cross-Cultural Science and Thinking
• Geert Hofstede is a social psychologist
• He developed a framework for understanding the systematic differenced between nations in these two databas
• Five Key Value Dimensions that analyze and interpret the behaviors, value, and attitudes of a national culture
• Power distance is how openly a society or culture accepts or does not accept differences between people, an in hierarchies in the workplace, in politics, and so on
• Individualism refers to people's tendency to take care of themselves and their immediate circle of family and friends, perhaps at the expense of the overall society
• Masculinity refers to how a culture ranks on traditionally perceived "masculine" values; assertiveness, materialism, and less concern for other
• Uncertainty Avoidance (UA) refers to how much uncertainty a society or culture is willing to accept.
• People who have high uncertainty avoidance generally prefer to steer clear of conflict and competition.
• Long-Term Orientation refers to whether a culture has a long-term or short-term orientation. This helps to understand the difference in thinking between the East and the West. Values persistence, perseverance, thriftiness, and having a sense of shame
• The Short-Term Orientation values tradition only to the extent of fulfilling social obligations or providing gifts or favor. More likely to be focused on the immediate or short-term impact of an issue.
• Edward T. Hall was a respected anthropologist who applied his field to the understanding of cultures and intercultural communications.
• Context refers to how a message is communicated.
• High-Context Culture body language can be more important than the actual words spoken.
• Low-Context Cultures they tend to be explicit and direct in their communications, and aspires to get straight to the point.
• Low context culture tend to listen only to the words spoken than body language.
• Space refer to the study of physical space and people. Hall called this as Study of Proxemics, which focused on space and distance between people as they interact
• In polychronic cultures- polychronic literally means "many time"- people can do several things at the same time.
• In monochronic cultures, or "one-time" cultures, people tend to do one task at a time.
• Communication is determines as culture, and the single most important one.
• The pace of business is one of the culture impacts in business