Culture and Frameworks
Years ago, dealing with another country for a product might have been unusual. In today’s world, businesses are becoming more global in enterprise so in order to be successful it’s important to understand how to “talk” to a business or employee from another country. There are different social and psychological frameworks that can be used to help an organization understand different cultures and to better communicate.
Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck developed a sociological framework which is made up of six dimensions: time orientation, space orientation, activity orientation, relationships among people, relations to nature, and basic human nature (Ahlstrom & Bruton, 2010, pp. 44-45). Different cultures will have different emphasis in the six dimensions. For example, the time orientation for people from South America may be vastly different than for people from North America. North Americans are more rigid and South Americans are more flexible when it comes to timing. So if you are given a time for something in North America, you’d better be on time if you don’t want to be rude. In South America, being late is the in thing to be. China and Japan are also very time conscious and the Chinese Business Etiquette Instructional Video shows how the two Americans show up early for their meeting with the Chinese section chief thus exhibiting a positive time orientation example (Liu, 2007). When looking at the Outsourced movie, Mr. Todd appears to be totally oblivious about the Indian culture and the sacred cow (PBS, 2007). The Indian people’s relationship to nature and religion holds the cow as sacred and therefore protected. So when talking about branding calves and eating beef, many of the Indian students are outright horrified from the gruesome picture he paints with his words. Obviously, someone should have edited the guidebook the Indians