Joined in 2023 
82 
63 About this deal
The book then proceeds to present the four dimensions of culture that he identified as a result of a massive survey he conducted on IBM employees in 72 countries in 1968 and again in 1972. If you have an interest in international business or politics, you really should take advantage of this field of study. The equivalence between culture and software of the mind clearly explains why people "function" in a different way, and how the balance between different "operative systems" is always a delicate matter. Development aid money often has political strings attached to it: it has to be spent in a way that satisfies the values, if not the interests, of the donor country citizens and politicians, whether or not such values are shared by citizens and politicians at the receiving end.
Regurgitated Weberian sociology but as a text of its descriptors, with this one more ‘facts-adapted-to-suit-theory’, albeit one of an Anglo/Protestant (Calvinist/Lutheran) variety, very imperialist/colonialist mindset (but dislikes ‘Scandinavian culture’), since after all the ‘transition to a market economy’ after formal independence of the ‘developing world’ was a necessity if powerful money rather than outright seizure of assets and plunder were sanctioned rules of habit. So while this was one of the great books I read this year, I still think that the title of book is misleading - for organizational cultures is not the mainstay of the book; national culture is. The frenetic whipsawing text of colonial policy followed by frank admission that isn’t reflected upon policy is (again) here: ''Many development agencies have grown out of the foreign service, the main objective of which is the promotion of the donor country’s interests abroad. 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. e., Asians are collectivistic while Americans are individualistic) and can subsequently congeal into misleading and potentially dangerous stereotypes.
It is very interesting and proposes many views on cultural norms, which somehow feel intuitively correct. Simply because the authors present the information and leave it at that; they don’t mention any grand theory about the nature of the universe; apparently that’s just for the Continental French and the Germans to speculate about, the analytic empiricists content themselves with data. If you have a group of multicultural friends and want some interesting discussion, then poor a few beers and make questions from the tables on uncertainty avoidance, or masculinity/femininity descriptors. POWER DISTANCE: The extent to which the less powerful members of institutions and organisations within a country expect and accept that power is distributed unequally.
I recommend this book to everyone, specially for those who deal often with people from other countries and cultures. He especially seems to enjoy criticizing American management theories :) The second chapter in this part talks about organizational cultures. LONG-TERM/SHORT-TERM ORIENTATION: LTO stands for the fostering of virtues oriented towards future rewards, in particular perseverance and thrift. The key message is that country scores presented in the book shouldn't be used to make judgments on individuals based on their nationality, but rather to become aware, learn about, and embrace cultural differences that exist even in our globalized world based on the environment (rather than a nation) in which we grew up. The revolutionary study of how the place where we grew up constrains the way we think, feel, and act, updated for today's new realities.However the most important stuff to take from the book is the fact that even Western countries differ a lot.
Great Deal 
New Comment