Collectivism

Collectivism

This is the book I used for the following information: Adler, N. J. (2002). From Boston to Beijing : managing with a world view Cincinnati, Ohio : South-Western/Thomson Learning.

Hofstede, G., and Hofstede, G. J. (2005). Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind. McGraw-Hill: New York

Collectivists live, work, and play among relatives, from birth to death, 24/7.  We dress up together for baptisms, marriages, and funerals (Hofstede and Hofstede, on page 88), even for birthday parties.  Unlike individualists who communicate in order to bond, collectivists are relatively silent. High Context Communication means that a lot goes without saying.

Adler (2002) said that the relationship between individuals and their relatives is circular: an individual is helped by relatives, who are in turn helped by that individual. Individualist cultures focus on how the individual is improved, while collective cultures think about how individuals help the group. 

 Hofstede and Hofstede (his son) help us understand how we got to be individualist and/or collectivist. They ask us (on p. 9) to answer some questions to see how we learned the cultural values of collectivism (or individualism).

1. Alone or in a group: When you were tiny, how much did your mom carry you? Did you sleep with your parents or siblings? Who all held you? Was it noisy with people around you, or quiet? A child in an extended family is rarely alone. Given the frequency of social contact, social harmony is the key virtue.

(L to R: Ruby Connor and children Mary, Bill, Jody, Betty, and Genny)

My mom, the littlest child in the picture, shared a bed with one or two of her sisters, including Pat and Ruth, who came later. My mom interacted frequently with her sisters, so in an important sense I grew up in a collective culture.

We don’t always copy what we grew up with, so culture can vary across generations. 

(Rita Durant)

Although my mom shared a bed with siblings when she was tiny, I slept in a crib by myself. 

(Rita Durant holding newborn Micah Durant)

And our babies often slept in our bed, which was different from how I was reared. Sharing sleeping space is more a sign of collectivism than individualism.

Most of us probably have some degree of cultural impulses toward collectivism and individualism. Hofstede’s dimensions measure the average amount of each in a given nation, or country.

(My grandpa George H. O’Laughlin and his wife Mary Marcella McGraw O’Laughlin are holding me on my baptism.

My dad was raised around fewer people, so even though Catholics tend to be more collective, and they were Catholic, having only one sister meant that Dad learned more individualism values.

2. Role models: As you grew a little older, who did you follow around and try to copy? How did you learn what was good to do and what was dirty or evil or gross?

(Here my dad is taking us for a boat ride. I am learning to steer.)

As the oldest child, I looked to my parents and teachers for models. Now I am a parent and a teacher. Collectivists tend to follow in their parents’ footsteps when they choose their career paths.

3. Gender expectations: What did you learn about what being a boy or girl meant?  How were you supposed to act, speak, dress, etc. ?

(Here I am, the oldest, playing on the tire swing with, by age and height, Martin, Brian, and Susan.)

I wore a dress to church and school, and I didn’t play team sports (1950s USA), though I did play in the backyard with my siblings and neighbors. Our Catholic school separated boys from girls starting in 7th grade. I went to an all-girls’ high school.

4. Ambition. How much initiative are you supposed to take? How bad was it to break rules? When were you told to be proud? When were you told to feel guilty (individualist) or ashamed (collectivist)? A good child does not overtly disagree with others. A child who repeatedly voices opinions different from that of the group is considered to have a bad character.

(Here I am in middle school, reading.)

In school and at home, I mostly tried to stay out of trouble by keeping quiet. I read a lot. I won’t even start in about the guilt and shame I was taught to feel when I got in the way.

5. Friends/Allies: Were you born with people around you, or did you seek out friends? Because collectivists already have built-in bonds of loyalty, they don’t need to seek it in friendship, like Westerners do. 

(These are my best friends from high school and me at a friendship group reunion. L to R: Rita Durant, Sheila Yepsen, Mary Robinson, Susie Bower, Patty Campbell, Susan Klein, and Susan Schilling.)

Lacking cousins or sisters my age, I was happy to be part of a friendship group: a strongly bonded “in-group” of a high school clique. I am friends to this day with those women. Here we are at Camelback Mountain Spa in Phoenix, where two of “us” live now.

Now that we have considered 5 ways we were socialized into collectivism versus individualism, we can see how this learning collectivism from an early age shows up later in life in school and in the workplace. The page numbers tell where in Hofstede andHofstede these lists can be found.

p. 96-97

Collectivists at school …

1.      only speak up with approval from their whole group.

2.      don’t value being better than their relatives.

3.      stick with their own amidst classmates.

4.      expect preferential treatment from related teachers or administrators.

5.      study in order to contribute something to the whole.

6.      the diploma is a ticket for membership rather than an individual honor

p. 99

Collectivists at work

1.      relatives works together

2.      share earnings with relatives

3.      follow relative’s wishes

4.      hire and promote relatives

5.      don’t fire family

6.      prefer a group goal

7.      prefer anonymity

8.      organizational culture makes a difference

9.      discussing performance openly risks loss of face

10.  trusting relationship is needed before business can be done

Hofstede and Learning Goal 1: 1. Understand how differences in cultural values can be used to describe national culture

According to Luthans and Doh (2012, p. 116), "Dutch researcher Geert Hofstede identified four dimensions, and later a fifth dimension, of culture that help explain how and why people from various cultures behave as they do."

In the late 1970s, Hofstede sent questionnaires to tens of thousands of IBM employees in dozens of countries. Because the jobs were similar across the world, Hofstede claimed that differences between the answers of the employees were likely due to the culture of the country they lived and worked in.

His "onion" is similar to Luthans and Doh's (2012) concentric circles seen in the previous post. As Hofstede (2005, p. 8) put it in his book Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind, "The core of culture [as seen in the figure] is formed by values. Values are broad tendencies to prefer certain states of affairs over others": good over evil; clean over dirty; beautiful over ugly; rational over emotional... and so forth.

And these circles go on at many levels of analysis: from as large as the entire nation all the way trhough many social settings and down to the family. As Hofstede describes it, any person or group's values, rituals, heros, and symbols, and practices involve different levels: national, regional/ethic, gender, generation, social class, and organizational, including family. Therefore, the way I dressed as a child reflected how I was a citizen of USA, an Irish-Catholic, a female, born in 1953, to a first-generation college graduate (law school was two years of college at the time my dad got his degree), and to my particular parents.

Here I am in second grade in my first communion dress. For us, white symbolizes purity. This is not true for all cultures. In some Asian cultures, white symbolizes death.

So, admitting there are MANY levels of influence on persons, Hofstede directed his focus to how the national level has similar values among citizens. Further, he sought to establish that countries can be compared and contrasted in terms of only a few values. These values he calls his dimensions. Here is one of the dimensions, Power Distance, and how the countries compare in terms of how much it is considered valuable for some people to have a lot more authority than others.

http://gbr.pepperdine.edu/2010/08/to-tell-or-not-to-tell/

According to your book (Luthans and Doh, 2012, pp. 116-118), the four main dimensions that Hofstede found to be consistently important to different degrees between different countries are the following: Power Distance high versus low (PDI), Uncertainty Avoidance high versus low, Individualism versus Collectivism, and Masculinity versus Femininity.  Another dimension he looked at was short-term versus long-term time orientation.

Here is a chart comparing different countries: (https://blogs.commons.georgetown.edu/isdyahoofellow/using-geert-hofstede-cultural-dimensions-to-study-social-media-usage-in-bric-countries/)

Please take a minute and consider that the World (blue bar line) is an average. So, too, is each of the country's scores. Individual respondents varied; however, the average has been relatively consistent for several researchers over several decades.

Please look, too, at the IDV dimension--the second from the right along the x axis--for the USA. See how very tall its bar is compared to the other countries? That is how extreme the USA values are in terms of assuming that power comes from individual effort rather than from collective support. Therefore, the next post tries to explore the relatively underdeveloped USA value around collectivism: "The tendency of people to belong to groups or collectives and to look after each other in exchange for loyalty" (Luthans and Doh, 2012, p. 117).

This is a photo of my high school social friendship group welcoming me back from fall 1971 semester abroad in Spain. My sister Sue is dressed in her Catholic grade school uniform and holding the sign (She was the one in tears in the family Easter photo).

Culture

Culture

As we are growing up, we learn what the right ways to think, feel, and act from the people close to us. For me, that usually meant that I did or said something that got me in trouble. For example, my brother and I were throwing our little sister into a pile of leaves. All of us were laughing. My dad came out and saw us and started to holler. I was so shocked I started to cry until my shoulders heaved and I could hardly catch my breath. Note to self: Don't throw siblings into the leaves.

I wondered why they didn't just tell me all the rules up front and be done with it. Why did I have to be surprised, even shocked, that something I was enjoying was against the rules?

That's the thing about culture: It goes without saying. Mostly what anthropologists look at, then, are called the artifacts--the clothes, language, art, objects, tools, and so forth.

For example, in my family Easter photo, the girls' hats,  the boys' ties, my corsage, and the fact that our picture was taken at all, are all visible symbols that this was a special day. In terms of Luthans and Doh's Model of Culture (see below), our clothes and the other ways we celebrated Easter are "the explicit artifacts and products of the society" in which I grew up.

The norms and values occupy the middle circle. In my 1963 Easter story, it was the norm for girls to wear dresses to church, for men to dress in ties and slacks and a jacket. For Catholics, it was the norm to attend church on Easter. For our family, it was the norm for Dad to buy his wife and daughters flowers on Mother's Day and Easter.

Image from Luthans and Doh (2012, p. 110)

The inner-most circle represents the implicit, basic assumptions that guide people's behavior. While many of our basic assumptions that guided our behavior came from our religion, others came from being of Irish heritage, from growing up in the USA at the time, and so forth. For example, as a young child, I liked my cowgirl outfit.

Culture, therefore, is a hidden influence on motivation. And sometimes the land, the shape of the Earth where we find ourselves, influences culture. For example, and speaking of cowboys, the idea that there is more land beyond the frontier has been said to influence how we Americans ARE.

"The presence and predominance of numerous cultural traits -- "that coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and acquisitiveness; that practical inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things... that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism" -- could all be attributed to the influence of the frontier." (http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/people/s_z/turner.htm)

This last photo was taken outside of Taos New Mexico, whose desert land provides stunning vistas of the horizon and nearby mountains.


Speaking of Easter, and of culture, I laughed out loud upon hearing a book on tape called Me Talk Pretty Some Day by David Sedaris. The first link is to a summary of Sedaris' work created for CI 403 Section E for Dr. Arlette Ingram Willis' class at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.. http://students.ed.uiuc.edu/dashton2/autobiographywebpage/storysummaries.html. The essay about Easter is entitled Jesus Shaves, and is the story about David and his international classmates in a French language class in Paris trying to use their very limited French to explain Easter to their Moroccan classmate:

Despite her having grown up in a Muslim country, it seemed she might have heard it mentioned once or twice, but no. "I mean it," she said. "I have no idea what you people are talking about."

The teacher then called upon the rest of us to explain.

The Poles led the charge to the best of their ability. "It is," said one, "a party for the little boy of God who call his self Jesus and . . . oh, s---."

She faltered, and her fellow countryman came to her aid. "He call his self Jesus, and then he be die one day on two . . . morsels of . . . lumber."The rest of the class jumped in, offering bits of information that would have given the pope an aneurysm.

"He die one day, and then he go above of my head to live with your father."

"He weared the long hair, and after he died, the first day he come back here for to say hello to the peoples."

"He nice, the Jesus."

"He make the good things, and on the Easter we be sad because somebody makes him dead today."

Part of the problem had to do with grammar. Simple nouns such as cross and resurrection were beyond our grasp, let alone such complicated reflexive phrases as "To give of yourself your only begotten son." Faced with the challenge of explaining the cornerstone of Christianity, we did what any self-respecting group of people might do. We talked about food instead.

"Easter is a party for to eat of the lamb," the Italian nanny explained. "One, too, may eat of the chocolate."

"And who brings the chocolate?" the teacher asked.

I knew the word, and so I raised my hand, saying, "The Rabbit of Easter. He bring of the chocolate."

My classmates reacted as though I'd attributed the delivery to the Antichrist. They were mortified.

"A rabbit?" The teacher, assuming I'd used the wrong word, positioned her index fingers on top of her head, wiggling them as though they were ears. "You mean one of these? A rabbit rabbit?"

"Well, sure," I said. "He come in the night when one sleep on a bed. With a hand he have the basket and foods."

The teacher sadly shook her head, as if this explained everything that was wrong with my country. "No, no," she said. "Here in France the chocolate is brought by the big bell that flies in from Rome."

Ideas for International Projects

Hi class!

Some thoughts about what kind of information could be useful to us classmates for your Feb 7 question about what aspect of international management is relevant for you:

1. Someone wrote and asked whether the international version of the textbook would work. I didn't know. Maybe you could look into the international aspects of textbook publishing and distribution, including copyright laws.

2. My colleague says that tax treaties with different countries could be relevant to those of you interested in tax.

3. For our accountants, international standards is a big question now. What aspect of this would be interesting and relevant to you, maybe?

4. Do international currency exchange rates affect you and/or your business?

5. Are you trying to get a job overseas?

6. Are you, or one of your loved ones, working to get a visa, or residency, or citizenship for the US or another country?

7. Is language learning a challenge in your life?

8. Are you planing to study abroad? Can you research things that will be important to know about that adventure?

9. Do you have an upcoming international expansion you need to undertake?

10. Are you having trouble understanding one or more people due to cultural differences?

11. Other?