Culture’s causes: the next challenge

Abstract

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to argue that in cross-cultural and strategic management, we must pay attention to the processes creating and maintaining culture. How can everyday interactions give rise to national, “deep” cultures, recognizable across centuries, or organizational cultures, recognizable across decades? Design/methodology/approach – This is a conceptual paper using the evidence provided by research about cultural patterns, and using sociological status-power theory to explain the causation of these patterns. Emergence, also called self-organization, is introduced as mechanism connecting individual-level causation with resulting system-level patterns. Cases are used to illustrate points. Findings – Simulation gaming and computational social simulation are introduced. These methods allow “growing” a system, thus allowing to experiment with potential interventions and their unanticipated effects. Research limitations/implications – This essay could have major implications for research, adding new methods to survey-based and case-based studies, and achieving a new synthesis. Strategic management today almost invariably involves cross-cultural elements. As a result, cross-cultural understanding is now strategically important. Practical implications – The suggestions in this essay could lead to new collaborations in the study of culture and organizational processes. Examples include team formation, negotiation, mergers and acquisitions, trans-national collaboration, incentive systems and job interviews. Social implications – The suggestions in this essay could contribute to our ability of proactively steering processes in organizations. In particular, they can provide a check to the notion that a control measure necessarily results in its intended effect. Originality/value – The synthesis of biological, sociological and cross-cultural psychological viewpoints with design-oriented method, using games or social simulations as research instruments, is original in the field.

El estilo explicativo pesimista y la autoeficacia ocupacional: Un análisis cuantitativo bicultural

“…para Hofstede, Hofstede y minkov (2010) la cultura de los países difiere en seis dimensiones: masculinidad (la competitividad y la asertividad son prevalentes en la sociedad), evasión de la incertidumbre (la gente prefiere lo conocido, las reglas y la estructura), distancia de poder (las diferencias sociales en estatus y privilegios se esperan y se aceptan), colectivismo (la gente se concibe a sí misma como parte de un grupo social y las metas de éste tienen primacía sobre las individuales), orientación al corto plazo (la gente pone énfasis en el aquí y ahora) e indulgencia (tendencia social a la gratificación y al hedonismo). Estas dimensiones caracterizan a las culturas y sirven para hacer predicciones sobre las posibles variaciones en la relación entre constructos psicológicos en diversas sociedades (Hofstede, 2015). méxico y Estados unidos son dos países en los que la relación entre constructos psicológicos podría variar en fuerza.…”

Are the users of social networking sites homogeneous? A cross-cultural study

“… Differences between Spain and The Netherlands . Source: Hofstede ( 2015 ). http://www.geert-hofstede.com .…”

Cultural Changes and Food Production

“…According to Tang and Koveos (2008), economic development, measured by GDP per capita, was the primary driver of cultural changes over time. Nonetheless, as pointed out by Hofstede (2015), limited research has been done to explain the processes that create and maintain culture over time. We still know very little about how values and norms at individual or group level turn into societal patterns at national level.…”