Analysis Of Geert Hofstede 's Cultural Theory

Take a moment to think about the following question: what is culture? Culture is everything a person does, believes in, creates, came from, and has done. It is also so much more than this simple list, but this is a good idea of what it generally is. Culture affects a lot of things as well. It can affect what you do, how you do certain things, and how you see things comparison to others. Culture is a major factor in how people perceive the world and those around them. Everybody sees the world differently through their cultural glasses. Some people see things as foreign and confusing, while others see the same things as daily life. The idea of different cultural viewpoints is shown in many articles throughout the years. Each of these stories

Culture incorporates many different aspects of life such as religion, food, language, ethnicity, and many more. All of these aspects influence the way a person lives and acts. Although culture provides a positive influence by bestowing self worth, it could also negatively affect someone’s life. Culture affects a person in many ways by creating internal and external conflict, which influences the way others view them and therefore affects their actions and how they feel about themselves.

Have you thought of someone’s culture as weird? Have you thought that you are completely different from them? If so, what prompts us to make that assumption. Culture is a very good reason for this. So, to what extent does one’s culture inform the way one views others and the world? Culture informs a person on the way others are and the world.

Culture is a large part of every person’s life, it is what makes each person unique. Within culture there are many aspects such as food, music, clothing, tradition, and many more. Since culture makes up such a large part of our day to day lives, it is almost always responsible shaping and informing our view on the world.

Culture is the most basic cause of a person’s wants and behaviour. Growing up, children learn basic values, perception and wants from the family and other important groups.

The culture in which we were raised in has a big impact on who we are and how we behave. Our culture effects things such as how we dress, the way we interact with others, and our manners such as what we may or may not find funny or what we may find offensive or weird. In the Ethan Watters Article “Being WEIRD: How Culture Shapes the Mind” we see examples of how being raised in different cultures affects our decisions and the way we perceive things. For example, in the ultimatum game (which is played by giving the first player $100 dollars, he can then offer player 2 any amount of the $100 but if the second player rejects the money they both end up with nothing) we can see how differently Machiguengans and Americans were likely to play. We

“Culture is sometimes described as a lens through which we view the world, meaning that one’s culture influences their perceptions and interactions in everyday life” (Davis, 2006). Every culture has different beliefs and customs

Most people would agree that culture can have a large effect on our daily lives, influencing what we may wear, say or even find funny. In culture there is a consequence within us known as ethnocentrism, a tendency to use our own group’s ways of doing things as a tool to judge others. When an individual grows up around a certain group of people they begin to grow into the same habits as them. The way one acts and what they eat, as well as how they dress and so much more, all have to do with the people they are spending their time in life with. People never really seem to notice how much culture may shape them into the person they have become until it is pointed out or they really pay attention to it. Many events have occurred that, up until

Question 1. How might the troubles with the tourism company be explained by Hofstede’s dimension of culture. Make sure to look at both Japanese and American cultures.

Culture is the totality of learned, socially transmitted customs, knowledge, material objects, and behavior. It includes ideas, values, and artifacts of groups of people (Schaefer, 2006). Understanding culture can be tricky, ever ask “why do people act the way they do?”, “what made me do that”, “what was I thinking?” Physical abilities, educational background, and social background of how I was raised are important aspects of my life. The environment in which I was raised is very important aspect of my life.

Everybody in the world is born into a culture. We, as humans, adapt to this culture, and change it into our own. Even though we refine our culture to match our personalities, we still hold the values that we’ve learned originally from our culture and heritage. These values that we hold affects us in ways that some people don’t even realize. A person’s culture affects the way a person views the world and others to a great extent because culture shapes perspective. Perspective gained from culture affects the viewpoint of a person’s world and the people in it.

In today’s society, an individual who is a member of the dominant privileged societal assembly is not always discussed because the personal identity is taken as a guarantee due to the dominant culture. Nevertheless, culture affects the members of society because of the association with the dominant culture we become a different category consequently which leads to being treated and viewed differently (Tatum, 2000.) “Culture creates a person” (Vognar, 2012). In my opinion, culture influences how we represent ourselves; starting with how we communicate, behave, body gestures and postures. This can affect us psychologically. “Culture shapes us, but many events mold culture and we shape these just as much”. By virtue of unconsciously of us behaving in a way that we feel is culturally appropriate according to how we were raised from our early childhood years to our teenage

Geert Hofstede is an influential Dutch researcher in the fields of organizational studies and more concretely organizational culture, also cultural economics and management. He is a well-known pioneer in his research of cross-cultural groups and organizations and played a major role in developing a systematic framework for assessing and differentiating national cultures and organizational cultures. His studies demonstrated that there are national and regional cultural groups that influence behavior of societies and organizations.

When a business decides to venture internationally into different countries with its products, services, and operations, it is very important that the company gains an understanding of how the culture of the different societies affects the values found in those societies. Geert Hofstede conducted one of the most famous and most used studies on how culture relates to values. Hofstede study enabled him to compare dimensions of culture across 40 countries. He originally isolated four dimensions of what he claimed summarized different cultures — power distance, uncertainty avoidance, individualism versus collectivism, and masculinity versus femininity (Hill, 2013, p.110). To cover aspects of values not discussed in the original paradigm Hofstede has since added two more dimensions — Confucianism or long-term orientation and indulgence versus self-restraint (Hofstede, n.d.). Because of the way Hofstede’s cultural dimensions are given an index score from 0-100, it is easy for a company to get a general comparison between the cultures they are expanding into and the culture they are already in.

Hofstede defines culture as 'the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one human group from another '”. (Kirkman, Lowe &Gibson, 2006, p. 286). He started his research in the 1960’s, by examining the concept of culture within one of the largest multinational companies in the world – IBM. Thousands of interviews were held across 66 countries, although results were only used from only 40. As a result of his investigation, four dimensions of culture were identified: individualism-collectivism, power distance, uncertainty avoidance and masculinity-femininity. Years later Hofstede and Bond added another dimension, long-term orientation. (Hofstede and Bond 1988). First dimension, power distance is defined as the extent of willingness that societies accept the hierarchical power structure (Morrison 2006). Cultures, which are considered low power distance, tend to have preferences towards equality and decentralization of terms of power and