Actual for You - Business

Get It Done! Soft Skills not Hard Tools are Required
If your organization has people, then interpersonal skills are needed.I work with companies that are on a path they call the lean journey. Whatever you call it, it’s based on the Toyota Production System. Some manufacturers embraced it and it became known as Lean Manufacturing, expanded into the Lean Office or Lean Enterprise. During this transformation the approach became focused on tools, but Toyota’s approach is about people.The focus of Lean Manufacturing training has been on technical skills such as value stream mapping, 5S, and set-up reduction. People skills; also known as “soft skills” or interpersonal skills haven’t been much of a priority. Difficulty in moving from a traditional to a lean organization is usually blamed on the culture of the organization. If this is true than interpersonal skill training needs to be a higher priority. Communication often determines if the transition succeeds or not. Could the “soft” stuff actually be more important than the “hard” stuff?Somehow, many companies seem to believe that training managers to “create a vision” and engineers to map the value stream, make work instructions visible and dictate how to clean and organize will magically transform the company.However, as we all know, it’s the people who do the work, not maps or set-up calculations. In a Lean organization, it’s the people who do the work that create the standardized work, not managers or engineers. In his book, The Toyota Way, Jeffrey Liker explains, “it’s the people who bring the system to life: working, communicating, resolving issues, and growing together.”Toyota, on its website, states that “Improvements and suggestion

resultant behaviour are modified by the individuals’ personality, upbringing and life-experience to a considerable degree. Cross-cultural analysis aims at harnessing this utilitarian function of culture as a tool for increasing human adaptation and improving communication.

Cross-cultural management is seen as a discipline of international management focusing on cultural encounters, which aims to discover tools to handle cultural differences seen as sources of conflict or miscommunication.

How laypersons see culture

It is a daunting challenge to convey the findings of research and field work and discuss cross-cultural issues in diverse contexts such as corporate culture, workplace culture and intercultural competency as laypeople tend to use the word ‘culture’ to refer to something refined, artistic and exclusive to a certain group of “artists” who function in a separate sphere than ordinary people in the workplace. Some typical allusions to culture:

Culture is the section in the newspaper where they review theatre, dance performances or write book reviews etc.
Culture is what parents teach their kids and grandparents teach their grandchildren.
“You don’t have any culture,” is what people say to you when you put your feet on the table at lunchtime or spit in front of guests.
“They just have a different culture,” people say about those whose behaviour they don’t understand but have to tolerate.

Different model
Intranets: A Powerful Solution for Small Business Owners
As a small business owner who works virtually to collaborate with team members, contractors and clients it is often necessary for me to send very large files or to share documents. While I try to keep up with the proliferation of bells and whistles that are currently available; there are times when I just can't get a file through to someone. Inevitably it is always in what seems to be a "life or no invoice" type of situation when I am extremely crunched for time. There was the occasional moment when I would miss my corporate days...no, actually it was just their intranet that I missed. Why couldn't I have one? How much would it cost?The extremely techie may be tsking, wondering how a business owner could be ignorant of the availability of an intranet for the small virtual business owner. Others may be aware of intranet applications, but fearful of the pricing. Then there are those who were like me - completely in the dark about this wonderful vehicle for our businesses and suffering for it!A fellow business owner that I often collaborate with added me to her intranet to make our work easier. That is when I discovered the beauty of HyperOffice. This is a glorious application that allows you to set up a virtual office with several users and a capacity for storage which you define. The options are endless and the office has a very sleek and professional look which will surely impress your collaboraters. Each user gets a private area and then can have access to a public or Group area. The administrator has the ability to define the permissions of each user. A Shared Calendar, Shared Contacts, Shared Task
Cross-cultural analysis could be a very perplexing field to understand with many different viewpoints, aims and concepts. The origins of cross-cultural analysis in the 19th century world of colonialism was strongly grounded in the concept of cultural evolution, which claimed that all societies progress through an identical series of distinct evolutionary stages.
The origin of the word culture comes from the Latin verb colere = "tend, guard, cultivate, till". This concept is a human construct rather than a product of nature. The use of the English word in the sense of "cultivation through education" is first recorded in 1510. The use of the word to mean "the intellectual side of civilization" is from 1805; that of "collective customs and achievements of a people" is from 1867. The term Culture shock was first used in 1940. (Quotation adapted from The Online Etymology Dictionary. http://www.etymonline.com)
How do we define culture?
There are literally hundreds of different definitions as writers have attempted to provide the all-encompassing definition.
Culture consists of language, ideas, beliefs, customs, taboos, codes, institutions, tools, techniques, works of art, rituals, ceremonies and symbols. It has played a crucial role in human evolution, allowing human beings to adapt the environment to their own purposes rather than depend solely on natural selection to achieve adaptive success. Every human society has its own particular culture, or sociocultural system. (Adapted from source: Encyclopaedia Britannica)
Generally culture can be seen as consisting of three elements:
Values - Values are ideas that tell what in life is considered important.
Norms - Norms consists of expectations of how people should behave in different situations.
Artefacts — Things or material culture — reflects the culture's values and norms but are tangible and manufactured by man.
Origins and evolution of Cross-cultural analysis
The first cross-cultural analyses done in the West, were by anthropologists like Edward Burnett Tylor and Lewis H Morgan in the 19th century. Anthropology and Social Anthropology have come a long way since the belief in a gradual climb from stages of lower savagery to civilization, epitomized by Victorian England. Nowadays the concept of "culture" is in part a reaction against such earlier Western concepts and anthropologists argue that culture is "human nature," and that all people have a capacity to classify experiences, encode classifications symbolically and communicate such abstractions to others.
Typically anthropologists and social scientists tend to study people and human behaviour among exotic tribes and cultures living in far off places rather than do field work among white-collared literate adults in modern cities. Advances in communication and technology and socio-political changes started transforming the modern workplace yet there were no guidelines based on research to help people interact with other people from other cultures. To address this gap arose the discipline of cross-cultural analysis or cross-cultural communication. The main theories of cross-cultural communication draw from the fields of anthropology, sociology, communication and psychology and are based on value differences among cultures. Edward T. Hall, Geert Hofstede, Fons Trompenaars, Shalom Schwartz and Clifford Geertz are some of the major contributors in this field.
How the social sciences study and analyse culture
Cultural anthropologists focus on symbolic culture whereas archaeologists focus on material and tangible culture. Sociobiologists study instinctive behaviour in trying to explain the similarities, rather than the differences between cultures. They believe that human behaviour cannot be satisfactorily explained entirely by ‘cultural’, ‘environmental’ or ‘ethnic’ factors. Some sociobiologists try to understand the many aspects of culture in the light of the concept of the meme, first introduced by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. Dawkins suggests the existence of units of culture - memes - roughly analogous to genes in evolutionary biology. Although this view has gained some popular currency, other anthropologists generally reject it.
Different types of cross-cultural comparison methods
Nowadays there are many types of Cross-cultural comparisons. One method is comparison of case studies. Controlled comparison among variants of a common derivation is another form of comparison. Typically anthropologists and other social scientists favour the third type called Cross-cultural studies, which uses field data from many societies to examine the scope of human behaviour and to test hypotheses about human behaviour and culture.
Controlled comparison examines similar characteristics of a few societies while cross-cultural studies uses a sufficiently large sample that statistical analysis can be made to show relationships or lack of relationships between certain traits in question. The anthropological method of holocultural analysis or worldwide cross-cultural analysis is designed to test or develop a proposition through the statistical analysis of data on a sample of ten or more nonliterate societies from three or more geographical regions of the world. In this approach, cultural traits are taken out of the context of the whole culture and are compared with cultural traits in widely diverse cultures to determine patterns of regularities and differences within the broad base of the study.
Aims of cross-cultural analysis
Cross-cultural communication or intercultural communication looks at how people from different cultural backgrounds try to communicate. It also tries to produce some guidelines, which help people from different cultures to better communicate with each other.
Culture has an interpretative function for the members of a group, which share that particular culture. Although all members of a group or society might share their culture, expressions of culture-resultant behaviour are modified by the individuals’ personality, upbringing and life-experience to a considerable degree. Cross-cultural analysis aims at harnessing this utilitarian function of culture as a tool for increasing human adaptation and improving communication.
Cross-cultural management is seen as a discipline of international management focusing on cultural encounters, which aims to discover tools to handle cultural differences seen as sources of conflict or miscommunication.
How laypersons see culture
It is a daunting challenge to convey the findings of research and field work and discuss cross-cultural issues in diverse contexts such as corporate culture, workplace culture and intercultural competency as laypeople tend to use the word ‘culture’ to refer to something refined, artistic and exclusive to a certain group of “artists” who function in a separate sphere than ordinary people in the workplace. Some typical allusions to culture:
Culture is the section in the newspaper where they review theatre, dance performances or write book reviews etc.
Culture is what parents teach their kids and grandparents teach their grandchildren.
“You don’t have any culture,” is what people say to you when you put your feet on the table at lunchtime or spit in front of guests.
“They just have a different culture,” people say about those whose behaviour they don’t understand but have to tolerate.
Different models
Developing World Class Enterprise Agility: How to Manage Radical Transformation
Most of the strength of the U.S. economy has been built on capital, technology, natural resources, and information, while markets were relatively captive. It's no longer this way. Foreign competition has challenging companies more so than ever before. New ways to compete are being be devised. In response to competitive pressures, many companies are working on improvements with process, quality, automation, and information systems. Each of these improvements is on the path to becoming a high performance company. One other element can make a substantial difference: the strategic development of the corporate infrastructure around agility.Substantial market share has been lost over the years to foreign competitors. No industry is immune. New markets and partnerships on a global scale are forming. The pressure is on to be nothing but the best. The key to the future lies in reengineering the entire business-- both physically and logically- -for agility.Taking dramatic steps to become agile is necessary to be a manufacturing contender in this highly competitive global market. Organizations must focus on moving information and products quickly through the entire service chain: distribution, assembly, manufacture, and supply. All physical and logical events within the supply chain must be enacted swiftly, accurately, and effectively. The faster parts, information, and decisions flow through an organization, the faster it can respond to customer needs.The next ten years will emphasize radical development of the corporate infrastructure, inducing major changes to the organization. The focus will be on quickly introducing new high quality products and deliver
opaedia Britannica)
Generally culture can be seen as consisting of three elements:
Values - Values are ideas that tell what in life is considered important.
Norms - Norms consists of expectations of how people should behave in different situations.
Artefacts — Things or material culture — reflects the culture's values and norms but are tangible and manufactured by man.
Origins and evolution of Cross-cultural analysis
The first cross-cultural analyses done in the West, were by anthropologists like Edward Burnett Tylor and Lewis H Morgan in the 19th century. Anthropology and Social Anthropology have come a long way since the belief in a gradual climb from stages of lower savagery to civilization, epitomized by Victorian England. Nowadays the concept of "culture" is in part a reaction against such earlier Western concepts and anthropologists argue that culture is "human nature," and that all people have a capacity to classify experiences, encode classifications symbolically and communicate such abstractions to others.
Typically anthropologists and social scientists tend to study people and human behaviour among exotic tribes and cultures living in far off places rather than do field work among white-collared literate adults in modern cities. Advances in communication and technology and socio-political changes started transforming the modern workplace yet there were no guidelines based on research to help people interact with other people from other cultures. To address this gap arose the discipline of cross-cultural analysis or cross-cultural communication. The main theories of cross-cultural communication draw from the fields of anthropology, sociology, communication and psychology and are based on value differences among cultures. Edward T. Hall, Geert Hofstede, Fons Trompenaars, Shalom Schwartz and Clifford Geertz are some of the major contributors in this field.
How the social sciences study and analyse culture
Cultural anthropologists focus on symbolic culture whereas archaeologists focus on material and tangible culture. Sociobiologists study instinctive behaviour in trying to explain the similarities, rather than the differences between cultures. They believe that human behaviour cannot be satisfactorily explained entirely by ‘cultural’, ‘environmental’ or ‘ethnic’ factors. Some sociobiologists try to understand the many aspects of culture in the light of the concept of the meme, first introduced by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. Dawkins suggests the existence of units of culture - memes - roughly analogous to genes in evolutionary biology. Although this view has gained some popular currency, other anthropologists generally reject it.
Different types of cross-cultural comparison methods
Nowadays there are many types of Cross-cultural comparisons. One method is comparison of case studies. Controlled comparison among variants of a common derivation is another form of comparison. Typically anthropologists and other social scientists favour the third type called Cross-cultural studies, which uses field data from many societies to examine the scope of human behaviour and to test hypotheses about human behaviour and culture.
Controlled comparison examines similar characteristics of a few societies while cross-cultural studies uses a sufficiently large sample that statistical analysis can be made to show relationships or lack of relationships between certain traits in question. The anthropological method of holocultural analysis or worldwide cross-cultural analysis is designed to test or develop a proposition through the statistical analysis of data on a sample of ten or more nonliterate societies from three or more geographical regions of the world. In this approach, cultural traits are taken out of the context of the whole culture and are compared with cultural traits in widely diverse cultures to determine patterns of regularities and differences within the broad base of the study.
Aims of cross-cultural analysis
Cross-cultural communication or intercultural communication looks at how people from different cultural backgrounds try to communicate. It also tries to produce some guidelines, which help people from different cultures to better communicate with each other.
Culture has an interpretative function for the members of a group, which share that particular culture. Although all members of a group or society might share their culture, expressions of culture-resultant behaviour are modified by the individuals’ personality, upbringing and life-experience to a considerable degree. Cross-cultural analysis aims at harnessing this utilitarian function of culture as a tool for increasing human adaptation and improving communication.
Cross-cultural management is seen as a discipline of international management focusing on cultural encounters, which aims to discover tools to handle cultural differences seen as sources of conflict or miscommunication.
How laypersons see culture
It is a daunting challenge to convey the findings of research and field work and discuss cross-cultural issues in diverse contexts such as corporate culture, workplace culture and intercultural competency as laypeople tend to use the word ‘culture’ to refer to something refined, artistic and exclusive to a certain group of “artists” who function in a separate sphere than ordinary people in the workplace. Some typical allusions to culture:
Culture is the section in the newspaper where they review theatre, dance performances or write book reviews etc.
Culture is what parents teach their kids and grandparents teach their grandchildren.
“You don’t have any culture,” is what people say to you when you put your feet on the table at lunchtime or spit in front of guests.
“They just have a different culture,” people say about those whose behaviour they don’t understand but have to tolerate.
Different model
Million Dollar Text Link Sites: A Word Is Worth A Thousand Pictures
Million dollar text link sites are getting ready to explode all over the internet in the next few months and it really doesn’t take much imagination to realise that this could be the start of something big following in the footsteps of the milliondollarpixel sites that were the recent rage. Can you remember just about 10 months ago when a young student from the United Kingdom, named Alex Tew started the first million dollar pixel site. The idea was basically very simple yet had a devastating affect on his income and turned this young man from a basic website owner to a millionaire over the course of a few months.His idea was to divide the million pixels that were contained within his website into advertising blocks containing 100 pixels each and then sell the blocks at one dollar per pixel equalling one hundred dollars per block. A pixel being the small pinhead sized spec of light that form together to produce the content that you see on your pc monitor.With shrewd advertising and marketing Alex quickly got his milliondollarpixel website idea noticed by the local media and this in turn began to bring the attention of the international media and the thousands of Internet users worldwide.Advertisers soon began to flock to place adverts on the pixel site and a hugh traffic flow was created.Well from this idea the birth of the million dollar text link sites was created and website owners are already starting to publish text link sites on various niches.Basically the text link sites are a website containing a number of strategic words and each word can be bought by a prospective advertiser and this word will become a text word link to t
teract with other people from other cultures. To address this gap arose the discipline of cross-cultural analysis or cross-cultural communication. The main theories of cross-cultural communication draw from the fields of anthropology, sociology, communication and psychology and are based on value differences among cultures. Edward T. Hall, Geert Hofstede, Fons Trompenaars, Shalom Schwartz and Clifford Geertz are some of the major contributors in this field.
How the social sciences study and analyse culture
Cultural anthropologists focus on symbolic culture whereas archaeologists focus on material and tangible culture. Sociobiologists study instinctive behaviour in trying to explain the similarities, rather than the differences between cultures. They believe that human behaviour cannot be satisfactorily explained entirely by ‘cultural’, ‘environmental’ or ‘ethnic’ factors. Some sociobiologists try to understand the many aspects of culture in the light of the concept of the meme, first introduced by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. Dawkins suggests the existence of units of culture - memes - roughly analogous to genes in evolutionary biology. Although this view has gained some popular currency, other anthropologists generally reject it.
Different types of cross-cultural comparison methods
Nowadays there are many types of Cross-cultural comparisons. One method is comparison of case studies. Controlled comparison among variants of a common derivation is another form of comparison. Typically anthropologists and other social scientists favour the third type called Cross-cultural studies, which uses field data from many societies to examine the scope of human behaviour and to test hypotheses about human behaviour and culture.
Controlled comparison examines similar characteristics of a few societies while cross-cultural studies uses a sufficiently large sample that statistical analysis can be made to show relationships or lack of relationships between certain traits in question. The anthropological method of holocultural analysis or worldwide cross-cultural analysis is designed to test or develop a proposition through the statistical analysis of data on a sample of ten or more nonliterate societies from three or more geographical regions of the world. In this approach, cultural traits are taken out of the context of the whole culture and are compared with cultural traits in widely diverse cultures to determine patterns of regularities and differences within the broad base of the study.
Aims of cross-cultural analysis
Cross-cultural communication or intercultural communication looks at how people from different cultural backgrounds try to communicate. It also tries to produce some guidelines, which help people from different cultures to better communicate with each other.
Culture has an interpretative function for the members of a group, which share that particular culture. Although all members of a group or society might share their culture, expressions of culture-resultant behaviour are modified by the individuals’ personality, upbringing and life-experience to a considerable degree. Cross-cultural analysis aims at harnessing this utilitarian function of culture as a tool for increasing human adaptation and improving communication.
Cross-cultural management is seen as a discipline of international management focusing on cultural encounters, which aims to discover tools to handle cultural differences seen as sources of conflict or miscommunication.
How laypersons see culture
It is a daunting challenge to convey the findings of research and field work and discuss cross-cultural issues in diverse contexts such as corporate culture, workplace culture and intercultural competency as laypeople tend to use the word ‘culture’ to refer to something refined, artistic and exclusive to a certain group of “artists” who function in a separate sphere than ordinary people in the workplace. Some typical allusions to culture:
Culture is the section in the newspaper where they review theatre, dance performances or write book reviews etc.
Culture is what parents teach their kids and grandparents teach their grandchildren.
“You don’t have any culture,” is what people say to you when you put your feet on the table at lunchtime or spit in front of guests.
“They just have a different culture,” people say about those whose behaviour they don’t understand but have to tolerate.
Different model
Power Inspires Your Audience
Power is intricately connected to persuasion in that it increases your ability to persuade, influence, and stir action in others. Power enhances all aspects of persuasion and influence. Power will magnify your ability to hit the persuasion target. Power opens the window for you to have greater persuasive capabilities and influence over your audience. Consequently, when your audience perceives that you hold great power over them, you will be very persuasive in moving them to action. Power exists only because your audience allows it. They grant you the ability to persuade them based upon your real or perceived power. Your audience has the discretion to follow, remain indifferent, or rebel against your power. Even if your boss has made threats, or the thief has a gun, you have the choice of choosing your behavior in response to his power play.You only have power over a person to the extent that you control something they want, need, or desire. This could be safety, information, rewards, freedom, or avoidance of punishment. Power does not have to be exerted to be effective. A bank robber holds power as he stands menacingly with a gun, yet he doesn’t have to actually shoot anyone to exert this power. A police office has power sitting in his car, even if he’s not following you with his siren and lights on. Knowing your boss can fire you, even if he hasn’t made any threats, still gives him/her a position of power over you.There are five points of power that move an audience to respond. These are called the Five Power Structures. They are: Authority, Coercion, Legitimate, Reward, and Psychological. These structures will be
tion is another form of comparison. Typically anthropologists and other social scientists favour the third type called Cross-cultural studies, which uses field data from many societies to examine the scope of human behaviour and to test hypotheses about human behaviour and culture.
Controlled comparison examines similar characteristics of a few societies while cross-cultural studies uses a sufficiently large sample that statistical analysis can be made to show relationships or lack of relationships between certain traits in question. The anthropological method of holocultural analysis or worldwide cross-cultural analysis is designed to test or develop a proposition through the statistical analysis of data on a sample of ten or more nonliterate societies from three or more geographical regions of the world. In this approach, cultural traits are taken out of the context of the whole culture and are compared with cultural traits in widely diverse cultures to determine patterns of regularities and differences within the broad base of the study.
Aims of cross-cultural analysis
Cross-cultural communication or intercultural communication looks at how people from different cultural backgrounds try to communicate. It also tries to produce some guidelines, which help people from different cultures to better communicate with each other.
Culture has an interpretative function for the members of a group, which share that particular culture. Although all members of a group or society might share their culture, expressions of culture-resultant behaviour are modified by the individuals’ personality, upbringing and life-experience to a considerable degree. Cross-cultural analysis aims at harnessing this utilitarian function of culture as a tool for increasing human adaptation and improving communication.
Cross-cultural management is seen as a discipline of international management focusing on cultural encounters, which aims to discover tools to handle cultural differences seen as sources of conflict or miscommunication.
How laypersons see culture
It is a daunting challenge to convey the findings of research and field work and discuss cross-cultural issues in diverse contexts such as corporate culture, workplace culture and intercultural competency as laypeople tend to use the word ‘culture’ to refer to something refined, artistic and exclusive to a certain group of “artists” who function in a separate sphere than ordinary people in the workplace. Some typical allusions to culture:
Culture is the section in the newspaper where they review theatre, dance performances or write book reviews etc.
Culture is what parents teach their kids and grandparents teach their grandchildren.
“You don’t have any culture,” is what people say to you when you put your feet on the table at lunchtime or spit in front of guests.
“They just have a different culture,” people say about those whose behaviour they don’t understand but have to tolerate.
Different model
L-A-U-G-H
Learning is awkward, uncomfortable, frightening. At least that’s what many adults think. Learning means admitting knowledge gaps, in a strange room, in front of strangers, to an instructor just met. Factor in prior school experiences, mandatory attendance and the dizzying pace of life and it’s a wonder adults learn at all.Fortunately, humor tackles these fears and overpowers them. When people laugh, they relax. They also share a moment of togetherness. Humor should, for these reasons, be a companion to any learning program.But what’s an unfunny trainer to do: become a comedian? Hardly. It’s not necessary. Everyone is already funny. Your funniness is simply undiscovered. And trainees, for their part, are so desperate for humor that they will laugh at almost anything. Almost funny is good enough.But even almost funny requires planning. That’s where the acronym L-A-U-G-H can help. If you learn how to “laugh,” your learners will too. To be funny, do the following.Lighten Up The first step in discovering your natural humor is to Lighten Up. Although funny is a result of natural tension, tense presenters stifle humor. When you tense, your learners tense. The few laughs that occur will likely be at your expense. Strive to present a carefree but focused approach. Relax and let the learners feel your relaxation. You’re not the warden. Learning shouldn’t feel like prison. Life is too short for dramatics anyway. Relax and your learners will too.Amuse Yourself Having adopted a lighter attitude, amuse yourself. Laugh at the absurdities of life. There is plenty to be found in corporate life,
resultant behaviour are modified by the individuals’ personality, upbringing and life-experience to a considerable degree. Cross-cultural analysis aims at harnessing this utilitarian function of culture as a tool for increasing human adaptation and improving communication.
Cross-cultural management is seen as a discipline of international management focusing on cultural encounters, which aims to discover tools to handle cultural differences seen as sources of conflict or miscommunication.
How laypersons see culture
It is a daunting challenge to convey the findings of research and field work and discuss cross-cultural issues in diverse contexts such as corporate culture, workplace culture and intercultural competency as laypeople tend to use the word ‘culture’ to refer to something refined, artistic and exclusive to a certain group of “artists” who function in a separate sphere than ordinary people in the workplace. Some typical allusions to culture:
Culture is the section in the newspaper where they review theatre, dance performances or write book reviews etc.
Culture is what parents teach their kids and grandparents teach their grandchildren.
“You don’t have any culture,” is what people say to you when you put your feet on the table at lunchtime or spit in front of guests.
“They just have a different culture,” people say about those whose behaviour they don’t understand but have to tolerate.
Different models of cross-cultural analysis
There are many models of cross-cultural analysis currently valid. The ‘Iceberg’ and the ‘Onion’ models are widely known. The popular ‘Iceberg model’ of culture developed by Selfridge and Sokolik, 1975 and W.L. French and C.H. Bell in 1979, identifies a visible area consisting of behaviour or clothing or symbols and artefacts of some form and a level of values or an invisible level.
Trying to define as complex a phenomenon as culture with just two layers proved quite a challenge and the ‘Onion’ model arose. Geert Hofstede (1991) proposed a set of four layers, each of which includes the lower level or is a result of the lower level. According to this view, ‘culture’ is like an onion that can be peeled, layer-by layer to reveal the content. Hofstede sees culture as “the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another.”
Cross-cultural analysis often plots ‘dimensions’ such as orientation to time, space, communication, competitiveness, power etc., as complimentary pairs of attributes and different cultures are positioned in a continuum between these.
Hofstede dimensions to distinguish between cultures
The five dimensions Hofstede uses to distinguish between national cultures are:
Power distance, which measures the extent to which members of society accept how power is distributed unequally in that society.
Individualism tells how people look after themselves and their immediate family only in contrast with Collectivism, where people belong to in-groups (families, clans or organizations) who look after them in exchange for loyalty.
The dominant values of Masculinity, focussing on achievement and material success are contrasted with those of Femininity, which focus on caring for others and quality of life.
Uncertainty avoidance measures the extent to which people feel threatened by uncertainty and ambiguity and try to avoid these situations.
Confucian dynamism. This Long-term versus Short-term Orientation measured the fostering of virtues related to the past, i.e., respect for tradition, importance of keeping face and thrift.
Trompenaars dimensions to distinguish between cultures
Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner (1997) adopt a similar onion-like model of culture. However, their model expands the core level of the very basic two-layered model, rather than the outer level. In their view, culture is made up of basic assumptions at the core level. These ‘basic assumptions’ are somewhat similar to ‘values’ in the Hofstede model.
Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner use seven dimensions for their model of culture:
Universalism vs Particularism (what is more important - rules or relationships?)
Individualism vs Communitarianism (do we function in a group or as an individual?)
Neutral vs Emotional (do we display our emotions or keep them in check?)
Specific vs Diffuse (how far do we get involved?)
Achievement vs Ascription (do we have to prove ourselves to gain status or is it given to us just because we are a part of a structure?)
Attitude to Time
Past- / present- / future-orientatedness
Sequential time vs Synchronic time (do we do things one at a time or several things at once?)
Internal vs External Orientation (do we aim to control our environment or cooperate with it?)
Criticism of current models
One of the weaknesses of cross-cultural analysis has been the inability to transcend the tendency to equalize culture with the concept of the nation state. A nation state is a political unit consisting of an autonomous state inhabited predominantly by a people sharing a common culture, history, and language or languages. In real life, cultures do not have strict physical boundaries and borders like nation states. Its expression and even core beliefs can assume many permutations and combinations as we move across distances.
There is some criticism in the field that this approach is out of phase with global business today, with transnational companies facing the challenges of the management of global knowledge networks and multicultural project teams, interacting and collaborating across boundaries using new communication technologies.
Some writers like Nigel Holden (2001) suggest an alternative approach, which acknowledges the growing complexity of inter- and intra-organizational connections and identities, and offers theoretical concepts to think about organizations and multiple cultures in a globalizing business context.
Bibliography and suggested reading:
Dawkins, Richard (1976). The Selfish Gene. Oxford University Press
French, W.L. and C.H. Bell (1979). Organization development. New Jersey: Prentice Hall.
Hofstede, Geert "Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind", 1997
Holden, Nigel 2001, Cross-Cultural Management: A Knowledge Management Perspective, Financial Times Management

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