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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He does mention them every now and then, but still, almost all detailed examples and explanation are from Europe. This should be required reading for anyone planning to live overseas or anyone who deals with internationals. 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. Diplomats lack both the skills and the organizational culture to act as successful entrepreneurs for development consulting activities.

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). There was even mention of pandemics being an equilibrium mechanism when over-population and drastic environmental changes reach some critical point, which was a timely point given the COVID-19 pandemic. I enjoyed how the clarifications of how different cultures encounter other cultured (ethnocentrism/xenophilia). A must read for managers, counselors, coaches and those who either work or want to facilitate international business and deals.

A feminine society is where emotional gender roles over lap, where both men and women are supposed to be modest, tender, and concerned with the quality of life. To understand what it means to be human I think it is good to look at how our cultures provide for our basic needs, and how varied these cultures are. It ends with ‘‘in recent millennia, evolution has pressed toward enlargement of the moral circle, but we are not done yet. I was truly amazed by the accuracy of these predictions, at least for the few countries I have lived and worked in.

nation-building, it bears remembering that even something as Perfect and Flawless as American democracy can be difficult, if not downright impossible, to export to a nation or region that has a completely different set of values. When I repeated some of these assumptions made by Hofstede to some of my colleagues from other parts of the world, they were very surprised, and all of them (yes, all of them) disagreed with the generalisations of themselves, and how they perceived others. Add to this the corporate culture, and the fact that the vast majority of people in any one nation do not actually work for that company and you have to question the validity of the findings. Cultural programming starts in the environment in which a young child grows up, usually a family of some kind. Besides relying a little too heavily on dated gender stereotypes (which is always sure to raise my ire), the author seemed to use such descriptions inconsistently.

D., is a biologist and professor of Information Systems at Wageningen University, the Netherlands, and the son of Geert Hofstede. This book did not provide the answer, its very theoretical and like all textbooks very difficult to keep interested in reading on. The book itself does not use any mathematical approach; those who want to check the numbers should refer to another of Dr. Hofstede also uses these dimensions of culture to 'classify' organizations to different types according to where they fall on the Power Distance vs. 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 authors mention 5 simple facts about evolution, namely that it’s unavoidable, backward-looking, path-dependent, multidimensional (not purely genetic! But I understand studies like this were made to moralize the late-last centuries wealth extraction of poorer ‘developing’ countries (one could list the infamous activities that the sponsor and ‘exemplar’ IBM has been involved in); really some of the least ‘objective’ ‘uncertainty-avoidant’ feel-good schemes for a (dumb or cynical section) of the managerial/landlord (of both houses and land tracts) class. In small-power-distance countries there is a preference for consultation between bosses and subordinates and the emotional distance is small, so the latter can easily contradict the former. Hofstede's Culture and Organizations is a classic in cultural literature and is definitively worth reading. 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.But amazing Hofstede, he got it right to be the most cited European sociologist in today's sociology. 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.

The father and son team of Geert and Geert Jan Hofstede have done a remarkable job breaking down the (measurable) elements of the world's cultures, usingt the somewhat antiquated IBM studies combined with more recent (less comprehensive) studies. This book is interesting, but the author tends to essentialize and naturalize cultural and national identity, ignoring the fact that there are usually more differences within groups than there are between them.They then say those countries which did improve did so because of their cultural values, not foreign aid.