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Cultural Conflict In Gung Ho

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“Gung Ho” produced by Ron Howard in 1986 is a comedy drama involved in American and Japanese culture. Its story is about Hunt Stevenson-an American former foreman working for a local car manufacture closed for nine months-making an effort to persuade a Japanese company to take over the plant for reopening, he successful ultimately. Then, a Japanese executive named Takahara Kazuhiro is sent to be in charge of the plant; however, culture clashes become inevitable between Japanese manager, Kazuhiro and American workers representative by Hunt because of business cultural differences.
Overall, I will analyze some distinct cultural aspects, which cause cultural conflicts via two main characters Hunt and Kazuhiro through a series of events and scenes. …show more content…

In high power-distance culture, people accept disproportionately allocated power (Hofstede, 1991) and tolerate inequality with natural assumption (Sagie & Aycan, 2003) while those in the low-power distance find “important to minimize or even eliminate social class differences” (Hofstede, 1991); there is uneasy acceptance of the privileges connected with the position (Mead, 2003). Particularly in business, people have a fear of punishment in the event of disagreement with the management’s decision in high-power distance cultures, but less strong in the low-power distance ones. (Mead, 2003). Kazuhiro is an example of people living in the high power-distance culture since he accepts more power along with higher status of his boss though his boss orders him to sing and chant in a ridiculous way as “Ribbon of shame” for his previous poor performance. However, as an American, whose country is considered low-power distance (Hofstede, 1991), Hunt takes it easy when his workers call him just last name in a host of scenes. In addition, his communication manner in conversations with his Japanese manager, Kazuhiro is relatively open and informal despite his lower status in the plant. He even fights against Kazuhiro when having conceptual contrast with Kazuhiro in worker evaluation with no fear of punishment. All of his above features depict a Western person belonging to a low- power distance

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