How long did it take for businesses, practitioners and the academic community to incorporate Hofstede's work on cultural dimensions? It was a pretty nifty idea in the business culture of the 1980s to assert that a spectrum of cultural values should play a role in decisions and workplace dynamics. Because you can have a meeting in London and then a few hours later in Rio or even simultaneously via video conference, connecting with partners and clients, not to mention multi-national workforces assembling from migration, defining cultural elements in our interactions allowed for individuals to become more cognizant of culture.
2 Interesting reads review the prominent role Hofstede's Dimensions have come to play in business communication culture.
Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions 30 Years Later: A Study of Taiwan and the United States
Ming-Yi Wu, Western Illinois University
A Quarter Century of "Culture's Consequences": A Review of Empirical Research Incorporating Hofstede's Cultural Values Framework
Bradley L. Kirkman, Kevin B. Lowe and Cristina B. Gibson
And of course you can go back to the source:
By today's standards, Hofstede sampled a thimble of individuals to represent 'world cultures' which he surveyed from IMB offices. There have been many papers written about the shortcomings in methodology, as well as the vision he showed in developing the concept in the first place. It has certainly endured, but perhaps that is because business loves benchmarks, and no other standard for this difficult concept, culture, has emerged as a viable rival.
The workplace environment has changed. Beyond the face-to-face communication that this measure was conceived to describe, the online interaction, even with webcams approximating face-to-face meetings, plays an enormous role. Isn't it time to develop a measure of cultural context, a way to gauge those inherent qualities of communication which are so easily misunderstood across technologies even between users of the same cultural background?
The demand for this feature has superficially been filled by emoticons whose form and use are culturally derived, so they are not terrific at crossing cultural boundaries. Perhaps compiling attributes worth leveraging as cultural translation guides could be done with crowdsourcing. Or perhaps the algorithms tracking and stacking every digital breath we take could determine an index, something not static but informed by today's data flow, which would enhance translation of text and voice by adding context, background, and connotation. This is a necessity of global communication we should be working towards, something beyond translation.
And of course you can go back to the source:
Culture's Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions and Organizations Across Nations (2001) By Geert Hofstede
The workplace environment has changed. Beyond the face-to-face communication that this measure was conceived to describe, the online interaction, even with webcams approximating face-to-face meetings, plays an enormous role. Isn't it time to develop a measure of cultural context, a way to gauge those inherent qualities of communication which are so easily misunderstood across technologies even between users of the same cultural background?
The demand for this feature has superficially been filled by emoticons whose form and use are culturally derived, so they are not terrific at crossing cultural boundaries. Perhaps compiling attributes worth leveraging as cultural translation guides could be done with crowdsourcing. Or perhaps the algorithms tracking and stacking every digital breath we take could determine an index, something not static but informed by today's data flow, which would enhance translation of text and voice by adding context, background, and connotation. This is a necessity of global communication we should be working towards, something beyond translation.
