BBC learning english.com presents talk about English, a series of radio features that support
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Callum: Hello.
Recently in our Talk about English series, Who on Earth are we?
Marc Beeby's looked at the differences between cultures that value the individual, and those
that value the group, or the collective.
Here's Marc to tell us about the work of someone who studied these differences.
Marc: One of the first people to recognise the importance of this distinction between
individualist and collectivist cultures was the Dutch researcher Geert Hofstede - the
man responsible for one of the largest intercultural surveys that's ever been conducted.
And it's Hofstede's work and its results that we'll be hearing about today.
We begin with some background to Hofstede's research, from Rebecca Fong, a teacher of
intercultural communication from the University of the West of England.
Rebecca Fong: Hofstede used 116,000 employees in over 40 different countries from the IBM
company which is an international business company.
And he conducted a survey on the differences in values and social behaviour amongst the
employees, He was assuming that human behaviour isn't random but to some extent predictable
and so that in conducting this survey he'd be able to identify sets of responses which
might reveal patterns or value dimensions within and across cultures.
Marc: Rebecca Fong.
The topic of our last two programmes is one of Hofstede's value dimensions - the individualism/collectivism
dimension.
As we said, cultures tend to fit somewhere along a scale between extreme individualism
and extreme collectivism.
No culture would be exactly at one end of the scale but would tend to fall somewhere
between these two 'poles'.
All Hofstede's value dimensions measure cultural tendencies in this way - and we're
going to be looking briefly at three more of these value dimensions now.
First, with the help of Ana Baltazar from Brazil, and David Banks from Canada, Rebecca
Fong outlines Geert Hofstede's 'power distance dimension'.
Rebecca Fong: What the power distance dimension measures is the equality or inequality in
a culture.
Hofstede's research involved questioning employers and employees on decision making behaviours.
He was interested in the style of decision making within a culture and the degree of
fear amongst the employees.
And what he thought he'd be able to tell by looking at these aspects was how authoritarian
a culture was or how tolerant and he'd be able to see whether the existence of hierarchy
perpetuated inequalities within that culture.
It seemed that high power distance cultures - or cultures where there was a greater distance
between the people at the top and the people at the bottom would be ones in which consultation
between bosses and workers was less likely to operate and also on a purely practical
level - where the head of a company would experience greater status in such things a
luxurious office or having a chauffeur or privileges.
Ana Baltazar: I believe in Brazil this power relation is very strong.
If you are the boss, probably you are going to get ten times more well paid than your
first assistant or something like that.
But in Brazil this power relation reflects into the politics and the culture in general
and this is a problem in a way.
Rebecca Fong: Hofstede discovered from his statistical analysis that the level of education
in a culture was a dominant factor in deciding the power distance - so in higher power distance
cultures a higher value was put on obedience and conformity as opposed to independence
and some of this could be seen to be because the workforce was perhaps less well-educated
and more afraid of disagreeing with their bosses.
The opposite of this kind of high power culture is the low power distance culture and in those
kind of cultures he expected to see more democratic systems of management and more freedom on
the part of the workers to have a say in the way that decisions were made or the business
was run.
David Banks: I think that Canada generally is quite an egalitarian country.
If you have someone who's a new immigrant who perhaps doesn't have a great command of
English they will probably want to respond to their boss using the more formal family
name.
They would just be used to doing that.
Now it depends on the context but generally in the Canadian workplace people are more
comfortable using a first name so the boss might say 'no, it's okay - just call me by
my first name'.
Marc: The second of Geert Hofstede's cultural value dimensions is less complicated than
it sounds - 'the uncertainty avoidance dimension'.
Rebecca Fong explains, with comments from Dr George Zhang from China and Emma Kambangula
from Namibia.
Rebecca Fong: Countries which try to avoid uncertainty are ones in which people dislike
situations in which they feel that things are unstructured or they feel that the situations
are unpredictable or the outcomes might be unclear.
These types of cultures tend to worry about the future for instance.
Cultures which worry about uncertainty tend to adapt themselves to this by instigating
measures to prevent uncertainty.
Now how do they do this?
They form rules so they insist on rules of social behaviour - things like punctuality
for example - and they're very precise and hard working in order to guard against uncertainty.
These kinds of people believe in experts and very often they'll call experts in their culture
by their title to reinforce the fact that these are people who know and represent certainty.
George Zhang: In the Chinese culture you are taught to listen to the parents when you are
young and going to school, listen to the teacher and obviously when you become a member of
society and you have to listen to your local officials who are considered the parent figure
they'd learn to understand individual bit doesn't make a lot of sense unless you are
member of a community.
So a person or an object in his place - in his or her place - is absolutely important
in a way that reflects the kind of Confucian doctrine in the Chinese culture which places
emphasis on - people should be functioning where they are supposed to be.
Rebecca Fong: At the other end of the scale from the high uncertainty avoidance people
are the low uncertainty avoidance people and these are people who tolerate a lot of different
types of ideas or they tolerate racial mixes or they tend to be more relaxed and laid back
and unemotional in a wide variety of different situations.
Emma Kambangula: One thing I respect about the Namibian culture is when it comes to relationships.
I found myself being friends with everyone I want to be friends with.
But my friends from other African countries, one of them was very much shocked to find
that I was very close to a friend who was white because in Namibia I don't need to
look at your tribe or the colour of your skin.
I have to follow my heart.
My family's called the United Nations because you'll find people from all walks of life.
I find that quite positive and it makes me proud to be Namibian.
Marc: Emma Kambangula.
The last of Geert Hofstede's value dimensions we'll be hearing about today is the masculinity/femininity
dimension.
Now you might think that this would be a way of looking at how 'equal' men and women
are in different cultures, but that's not the case.
You might say it's more interesting than that.
Here's Rebecca again, with assistance from Ilse Meyer from Germany and Mahmoud Jamal
from Pakistan.
Rebecca Fong: The masculinity femininity dimension measures the value which a society puts on
masculine or feminine characteristics.
Amongst male characteristics there is a tendency for a desire to advance to earn a lot, to
do training to remain up to date, to be competitive - whereas for women it's more important that
there's a friendly atmosphere, that people have good relationships with each other, that
there's security within the home, within work and so on.
So does a culture tend to be more feminine - meaning does it value relationships more
does it value security more, or does it tend to be more masculine, on the other hand, and
value more things like advancement, competition, aggression and so on . In his findings Hofstede
discovered that Japan and the German speaking cultures came out high on the masculinity
index.
Ilse Meyer: It is interesting to note that in Russia they talk of 'Mother Russia' whereas
I grew up with the idea of Germany as the Fatherland.
I remember a song from Imperial times which was almost like a national anthem - which
ends with the words 'to be the ruler of the Fatherland - Hail Kaiser to thee'.
Rebecca Fong: Asian countries tended to come out in the middle or on the lower side of
the masculinity index Mahmoud Jamal: Indian culture is feminine
in many aspects.
It also of course has a masculinity about it because you'd be very wrong to stereotype
it as a feminine culture - but if you look at the early poetry and early devotional songs
they are written from a woman's point of view which is unusual because normally in Islamic
culture the lover is seen as a man - here the devotee or the lover is seen as a woman.
And that is uniquely I feel Indian - I don't think there is any other culture where there's
been so much love poetry written from the feminine to the masculine.
Rebecca Fong: Lowest of all on this masculinity index were the Nordic countries; Finland,
Denmark, Norway, Sweden and also the Netherlands and this reflects the importance that these
countries have on social equality, on men and women achieving the same types of roles,
on men and women sharing housework , sharing work, and so on.
Marc: Rebecca Fong, bringing to an end our brief survey of Geert Hofstede's cultural
value dimensions.
Now, understandably, you may be asking yourself 'what's all this academic research got
to do with me?'
We'll end the programme with Rebecca's answer to that.
Next time, we'll be looking at some of the things that can make communication between
people from different cultures so very difficult.
Join us then.
Rebecca Fong: Obviously all of this research is quite technical and academic and to most
of us, we're going to be saying to ourselves 'Well, what's this for?
How's this going to affect my life?'
Well it probably won't affect it very directly but we could learn something from it in terms
of where we feel our culture lies along some of these dimensions so we might be able to
use Hofstede's research to discover that our culture is fairly masculine or our culture
is fairly high power distance.
And what knowing these things might do for us is that when we meet people from other
cultures we could be aware of how their cultures works differently from ours and we might be
able to take this into consideration in our relationships with them.
It's also very interesting to us as individuals - it will increase our self-awareness and
it will help us to interact better with people from all sorts of different cultures.
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