Hi, guys. Welcome back to Global Business Environment. This is module four, part three. In which we're asking a question, what is the impact of culture on globalization and the global business environment? We've been looking at different categorizations, or, scales that try to get a handle on what culture is and what it means in different places. What I want to do now is go through a, a set of questions or to look at a particular situation in two different parts of the world. And try to understand how culture is developed and how it's reflected in all types of settings in society and in business. And so what I've got here is a picture of some houses that are, sitting, in what we call in English, a neighborhood. And what you might notice when you look at this, I don't, I don't know what you're noticing as you look at this. But is that most of the houses are relatively similar. There's separate houses and there's a little bit of space in between each house. You might notice that each house has a yard. You might notice that most houses have, garages and cars in front of them. And you might notice what's missing from this is, there aren't very many businesses, or, if any. It's just rows and rows of houses. This is a typical looking picture of a neighborhood in a place like the United States of America, where I live. This is what many people would call a picture of the suburbs. Suburb meaning sub-urban and it's not in an urban area, it's periphery to an urban center, a city. Such as Dallas, Texas or Denver, Colorado or Atlanta, Georgia in the United States. And you will see millions of people in the United States of America live in neighborhoods like this. There are lots of things that you might, you take away from a picture like this. But you might ask yourself, why is that in the United States of America and other parts of the world, there are neighborhoods like this and why is it that in other parts of the world you see fewer neighborhoods like this? Why do you see in other places high rise buildings with multiple floors? Why do you see places where people use public transportation to a much larger degree than the you see here with the cars parked here. Why do you see in other parts of the world people living in settings where they have shared recreational spaces rather than individual yards? What you might take away from that is that the United States of America, using Hofstede's dimensions is a relatively individualistic society. And individuals in the United States of America have preferred and shown with their, their purchases that they value living in a place where they have their own space where they have their own vehicle and they can go, come and go wherever they want. The United States in this types of neighborhoods has also shown preference for living outside of an urban environment and these individuals likely commute or drive quite a distance each day to work. And then they return from their workplace and live in a neighborhood like this, where there aren't very many commercial establishments, or places to work, and so its a separation of work, and home life. This, brings to mind lots of things. One thing that you should know, to try to understand this, is that, one of the reasons that citizens or people in United States of America live like this is because in the 1950s a set of interstat, interstate highways or freeways was built allowing individuals to travel back and forth on those interstates and live a distance from their perhaps workplace in an urban center. And so the development of this suburban life really is, has its roots in the development of, the interstate system in the United States, the interstate freeway system. In addition to that you probably should understand that going beyond culture or reflecting culture, there are zoning laws that govern where you can build commercial establishments and where you can build residential homes. And those zoning laws are a reflection of culture, rather than just saying, oh, we can't put a business here and that's just the law, when you try to understand culture, you try to understand where those laws come from. It's a reflection of people's general preference to have residential living versus versus living surrounded by lots of traffic and lots of commercial establishments. Another factor with that is that when you want to go shopping, you need to get into your car and drive. And so therefore shopping establishments, large malls or other stores. What we call sometimes big box stores such as Home Depot or Walmart, they have large parking lots reflecting how we purchase. Most of these individuals living in a suburban lifestyle go to the store to buy their groceries once per week. Maybe once every two weeks, and so they make large purchases, they have larger homes with larger appliances, compared to other parts of the world, which we'll look at in the next part, that can store the food that they purchase over, that weekly or, or maybe every two weeks period. And so the size of the home reflects a particular set of values with respect to time and preferences for work versus shopping. And so this is a this is a particular type of lifestyle that reflects lots of elements of culture, which we'll, we'll look at, at how that impacts business as we continue with this case. So this is, been an introduction in part three to our understanding of culture as reflected by how people live. In part four, we'll look at another part of the world, or other parts of the world, and how living is reflected differently by by all types of zoning laws and structures and organisation of communities. So this ends part three of module four. We'll see you back next time. Thank you.
