Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind, Third Edition: Software of the Mind: Intercultural Cooperation and Its Importance for Survival (BUSINESS SKILLS AND DEVELOPMENT)

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The last part of the book talks about the implications of these differences in culture and what it means in terms of business relations and governmental policies towards other countries that have different cultures.

D., is professor emeritus of Organizational Anthropology and International Management at the University of Maastricht, the Netherlands.I've lived in China for a couple years and frequently discussed cultural changes there, I think everyone will say that cultural *values* (not just practices) have changed a lot over the last 20 years. Additional data was later collected from other countries and populations, outside IBM, and used to verify and enhance the original results. There is a large discussion of different elements that distinguish different cultures based on survey data. I decided to look into this a bit further after seeing it referenced in Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers since I found the explanation for Korean Air super interesting, but also because I wanted to make better sense of my mixed experience of growing up as an Asian Australian in a traditional Chinese household within a broader Western society using Hofstede's Cultural Dimensions.

Those dimensions are Power Distance (the psychological distance we feel to superiors - government, boss, teacher, parents), Uncertainty Avoidance (or how much a culture dislikes change and prefers more rules), Masculinity vs Femininity (no misogynism here, this value reflects competitiveness, among others), Individualism (how much we think of ourselves as a person, rather than part of a group - family, work, social network) and Long-Term Relationships (how much we think of the future, how much importance we put in building a social network based on trust and strong, personal ties).Hofstede also uses these dimensions of culture to 'classify' organizations to different types according to where they fall on the Power Distance vs. Although it is not always perceived as such, any study of human behavior, any discipline of the social sciences and humanities, is involved in looking at an aspect of behavioral or symbolic evolution.

Uncertainty-avoiding cultures shun ambiguous situations and tend to look for structure in their organisations, institutions, and relationships which make events clearly interpretable and predictable. This is followed by the statement ''looking back to half a century of development assistance, most observers agree [who? It’s because they serve to delineate the in-group from the out-group, such that conversations about them can easily be high-jacked by violent emotional outbursts.HEROES are persons, alive or dead, real or fictional, who possess characteristics that are highly prized in a culture and thus serve as models for behaviour. Although the authors claim to espouse a "values neutral" position (which I have always argued is an impossible and illogical position), their Dutch/Swedish preferences ring out loudly and clearly (humanistic, environmnetalist, etc. Part three consist of two concluding chapters of which the first discusses intercultural encounters and culture shocks.

We have no choice but to pursue the direction of expansion of the moral circle to all people in the world’’(477), a social darwinist end and arbitrary eschatology, moralizing in a menacing manner where the ‘‘moral circle’’ could mean helping the afflicted and exploited persons affected, while likely ‘overlooked’ in favour for the opposing ‘side’, that of imperial re-entrenchment. I suggest to google some critical assessments of Hofstede so you rank this book where it really belongs. While most other books on the matter either remain hopelessly vague, or loose themselves in academic abstractions, Hofstede really gets down to it. Incidentally, I believe that there are answers to all these questions and they’re found in a little book written by Iain McGilchrist. The authors mention 5 simple facts about evolution, namely that it’s unavoidable, backward-looking, path-dependent, multidimensional (not purely genetic!Hofstede's study demonstrated that there are national and regional cultural groupings that affect the behavior of societies and organizations, and that are very persistent across time. The economic success of certain countries of East Asia owes much to the fact that centuries-old institutional frameworks existed that were adapted to modern times''(417).