Hi, guys. Welcome back to Global Business Environment. We're still in module four. And this will be part one of module four in which we're trying to understand the role of culture and its impact on globalization and global business environment. We talked last time about a simple definition of culture and what we mean by that. And what we want to move on to now is trying to understand different categorizations of cultures. And before we do that let me just remind you that stereotypes are can be dangerous things and prejudices based on stereotypes can also be very dangerous. And so any attempt to categorize peoples or places around the world can be difficult because we're generalizing and we're making assumptions about groups of people and that can be a delicate thing. So I, I just want to recognize that and recognize that individuals very important in any society. And, wha, wha, the only reason to talk about culture is just to try to understand better the rules of the game in any society, and in business context. How to, to accomplish uh,business goals, and so here's a map of the world that catagor categorizes cultures in one way. And this is a very rough categorization. You see in the blue here, for example cultures that some people would label Western. And so you hear talk of Western culture, and Western values. The Western World. And we see that Australia and ba, parts of New Zealand are included in that for example because of their historical, linguistic, and even ethnic background. And their original countries of, of, of birth going back many centuries. We see countries that are labeled according to religion. For example this shaded area is the cultural label that this particular categorization uses is Islamic, which is partially based in religion. Western categorization might be more based in philosophy or political systems. There's a label that's put on Latin culture and you know, they call this purple Latin. Some, some reasons the world have very very unique cultures. For example, Japan is considered to have its own cultural identity which is separate from other perhaps, similar but not completely not similar enough cultural backgrounds. And so you can see from this map that, that culture stems from linguistic, historical, religious even ethnic ties, that go back long periods of time. And again we recognize that in a place for example like Latin America this purple. That these are all individual nations. And you can go to any part of any one of these countries and find a distinct cultural aspect from another part of that country. I live in New Mexico, which is in the Southwestern part of the United States. And New Mexico has its own culture, its own history, its own background related to immigration from Spain. It has its own food traditions. For example, we eat a food here called green chili which is a spicy food that we add to most or many food items, many meals. And so, each region of the world each sub-region might be considered to have its own distinct culture. So these are simple labels to try to increase our understanding. But they're not ultimately definitive, by any means. Here's another set of categorizations. This is from Inglehart, and this is a kind of on an axis, a dual axis, here. And the world is organized according to sets of values, which Ingelhart labels as secular rational values they refer to traditional values, survival values and societies that are focused on self-expression. And these categorizations again are not the ultimate ways of looking at the world but it does categorize the world into an English speaking set of countries, similar to our other map. Latin American nations again our Latin cultures. There's no distinct Japan here. They lump several Eastern countries in the world into a category they call Confucian. There's Protestant Europe, there's Ex-Communist, there's Catholic Europe there's South Asia, and then there's Africa. And so you can look at this, and the argument is that the English speaking parts of the world in Protestant Europe are very focused on self-expression. And they have because of economic development less of a focus on survival and so the, this particular categorization focuses a little bit more the relationship between economic development and culture. It also has this religious aspect on this axis. And for example it notes that Protestant Europe is considered to be a, a more secular set of values in those societies. And the English speaking world is considered to be slightly less so slightly less secular. And so this is just another way of looking at cultures and trying to understand them. Finally, I'll show you perhaps the most famous and if you take an international business class or international management class or open a textbook. You'll see reference to a gentleman named Hofstede. He's a Dutch gentleman who is, he's been very influential in the world understanding culture and how culture effects a business. And so I'm going to go back up, there is lot of information you can look at here and Hofstede's work really focuses on trying understand different dimensions of culture and how they impact society? And how they're reflected in behaviors and norms and values in society? So for example Hofstede's work has an aspect of culture he calls power distance. Another one he calls individualism as opposed to collectivism, as a cultural categorization. Uncertainty avoidance, which is the degree to which a society values uncertainty or is willing to embrace risk. The, the, the role of gender or masculinity versus femininity in any culture. The long term orientation of a culture. And then there's this new newly added aspect or dimension that he's added recently called indulgence versus restraint. You probably can't intuitively understand what each of these might mean but what he has done is he has scored countries around the world. Using a scale based on each of these dimensions and you can look further and see where different parts of the world come out on this scale. But this is based on Hofstede's research. 10,000 employees that worked for IBM in the 1970s, and so there's some criticism of his of his work in that it's somewhat based in one company and it's perhaps outdated. Others say, well, cultures take a long time to change, and so therefore it's pretty stable and therefore we can probably use this data with pretty good confidence. But when you look at something like individualism versus collectivism your understanding the role that society puts on individual success, individual choice and individual freedom versus collectivism, which are societies that have higher put higher emphases on group values and group outcomes. And so, this scale looks at hun over 100 countries around the world and categorizes them or has a range of countries. And you find countries that are more individualistic and or more collectivistic. And so this is just another way of trying to categorize cultures and Doctor Hofstede has a site where you can see more information about each of these dimensions, and trying to understand and compare these countries. So I encourage you to look at that. But each of these dimensions can be very important. And we'll look at them a little bit more using our case examples as we go throughout this module. Thank you very much. This ends part one of module four of Global Business Environment
