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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It should be expected that individualistic countries would be more prone to give as individuals, not as collective societies. I noticed that the author especially focuses on differences in cultures in Europe and between Europe/US, yet rarely had good insight in Asian, Latin American, or African cultures. 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. What is it that continues to drive people apart when cooperation is so clearly in everyone's interest?

Also nonsense such as, primarily of the second portion of ‘‘The Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted in 1948 was based on individualist Western values that were and are not shared by the political leaders nor by the populations of the collectivist majority of the world population’’(415) notwithstanding the insultingly simplistic binary these ‘developing nations’ who were indebted/exploited for their low wages with speculative profits not reinvested because of the paucity of ‘human rights’ would like them and remunerative working conditions if you asked them, which is acknowledged just after but which questions why the former was posited ''Without losing the benefits of the present declaration, which in an imperfect way presents at least a norm used to appeal against gross violations, the international community should revise the declaration to include, for example, the rights of groups and minorities. I enjoyed how the clarifications of how different cultures encounter other cultured (ethnocentrism/xenophilia). But they seem incapable of concluding that good intentions (and even money) is not the most effective way to solve these problems. If you have an interest in international business or politics, you really should take advantage of this field of study.When reading this, he seemed to argue that the management theories from one culture *never* apply to other cultures, where I'd expect a little more caution in the conclusions (similar comment as above). Title may sound dry, but if you, like me, find cultural differences fascinating/annoying you really must read this book, or something similar. S. dollars of public money from the rich countries was spent on the development of the poor ones'' where this ‘development’ was often the privatization of natural resources in conjunction with governmental capture, the wealthy often Western countries happy with bribery/corruption and hollowing out the rights of workers and rendering legal provisions unenforceable.

The first chapter (chapter 7) argues that management theories are always limited to the culture of the creator. For those scientists that previously supported Hofstede's work are unlikely to publicly change their view, which creates a problem for later readers.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. e., Asians are collectivistic while Americans are individualistic) and can subsequently congeal into misleading and potentially dangerous stereotypes. INDULGENCE/RESTRAINT: Indulgence stands for a tendency to allow relatively free gratifications of basic and natural human desires related to enjoying life and having fun, whereas restraint reflects a conviction that such gratification needs to be curbed and regularised by strict social norms. Projects funded by international agencies such as the World Bank in theory do not have this constraint, but they have to satisfy the agency’s objectives, which often also conflict with the receivers’ objectives. The bottom line is that cultural values were set deep in the past, but that they are continually evolving in response to events and experiences.

Hofstede also uses these dimensions of culture to 'classify' organizations to different types according to where they fall on the Power Distance vs. The book gives you an insight of the cultural differences of nations and explains why behaviors/values/heroes/symbols have a certain meaning and how they start to evolve from inside the family. Human nature is that inherited suite of genetic mechanisms which shape all of humanity, regardless of particular context. That ‘institutions’ are invoked with poorly anthropology/ethnology and wide claims unrelated to empirical findings or those that are being presented and which the author has no remit for (‘‘companies are replicators’’(468), ‘‘[polities are replicators at the moral circle level’’), are an attempt at moralizing or ‘explaining away’ the comprehensive inequalities that plague and cut across every society and social strata. In many cases the numbers were so low that it compared unfavourably even to those hair product adverts (83% or 160 people said they prefer our hair product).To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Based on statistical analysis of a large body of data, he suggests that culture may be understood according to six principal components: "power distance", "individualism x collectivism", "masculinity x femininity", "avoidance of uncertainty", "long-term orientation" and "indulgence x restraint". Interestingly enough, Malcolm Gladwell wrote an excellent chapter in his Nov 2008 book Outliers (also highly recommended) based on this, i. It concludes with a discussion of how culture evolves over time, which at times seemed to turn more into a rant against overpopulation of the earth and religious dogmas.