Exploring Culture: Exercises, Stories, and Synthetic Cultures

Exploring Culture: Exercises, Stories, and Synthetic Cultures | Gert Jan Hofstede, Paul B. Pedersen | Moving Cultural Theory into Practice

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Exploring Culture:...

	Exploring Culture: Exercises, Stories, and Synthetic Cultures Gert Jan Hofstede, Paul B. Pedersen Intercultural Press, 2002 - 234 pages average customer review:based on 5 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Exploring cultures

This is a fantastic book which helps you understand a foreign culture in all its facets. It is extremely helpful and fun to read. A must for anybody who is interested in culture and communication.

Moving Cultural Theory into Practice

Exploring Culture is a book of extremes, which is exactly what makes it useful to readers. Anyone who works with the concepts taken from Cultures Consequences (Hofstede, 1980) or Software of the Mind (Hofstede, 1997) will appreciate this book... the authors have taken Geert Hofstede's original five cross-cultural dimensions -- groups of characteristics across which most cultures can be compared and contrasted -- and placed them in a framework that makes them easier to understand and remember.

In the first section of the book, the authors recount stories of cultural confusion and how different cultures may interpret different situations. The stories segue to fuller descriptions of Hofstede's five value dimensions of identity, hierarchy, gender, truth, and virtue (which are also known as, respectively, individualism, power distance, masculinity, uncertainty avoidance, and orientation to time). Each one of these dimensions has its extremes; for example, the characteristics of a very individualistic culture would be in extreme contrast to those of a very collectivist/communitarian one.

In this book, the authors have taken these polar extremes of each of these five dimensions and created what they call "synthetic cultures". By doing so, they have provided us a way in which to more easily compare these characteristics across cultures and, subsequently, allowing us to more easily remember them. For instance, the core value of "power distance" is equality between people. The two synthetic cultures created from the extremes of this value are the Lopow and the Hipow. For each of these synthetic cultures, the authors provide a list of key elements and descriptors that help us to recognize these extremes. However, the most powerful section of the book is where the authors incorporate the synthetic cultures into exercises, "case studies", sample dialogues, group projects, and simulations, all of which allow those of us who are trainers and educators to better explain these cross-cultural dimensions and their ramifications. While one does not necessarily need to read Geert Hofstede's original works to understand the concepts portrayed in Exploring Culture, the two books are complementary: The original works provided a theoretical foundation, whereas Exploring Culture successfully illustrates how to move theory into practice.

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Helpful classroom companion to Hofstede: Cultures and Organizations

This book is a helpful companion book to Gert Hofstede and Geert Hofstede's Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind. It is useful in two ways: it provides descriptions of the extremes for each of the five cultural dimensions he discusses in the basic book; and it suggests ways of conducting culture simulations.

A disappointment was that the book does not lay out every last detail of a cultural simulation; rather, as I said above, it suggests a framework. The teacher is then left to his or her own creativity to flesh out the nuts and bolts of a simulation. If the teacher has not done this previously, that makes for a difficult affective barrier to climb in taking the risk of conducting such a session.

That said, I still recommend this book if you intend to teach the material in Cultures and Organizations. And that material is well worth teaching! See: Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind.

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Exploring Culture: Exercises, Stories, and Synthetic Cultures

Great book for professionals working with multicultural clients. Some good examples to use.

Activities that support insights

The intercultural field has long been aware of the insightful models pioneered by Geert Hofstede. His seminal research is to be found, now updated, in the 2nd edition of the weighty volume, Culture's Consequences (Sage Publications, 2001). Exploring Culture provides the long-awaited, user friendly introduction and extension of this work, which has become the boilerplate of western intercultural education and practice.

Reality-based cultural models plus experience are the key to effective management in a global economy. Now the authors of Exploring Culture provide both professionals and curious readers with a clear menu for cultural analysis along with a varied buffet of easy-to-digest information in the form or stories, examples, exercises and simulations that both nourish understanding and fortify intercultural competence.

These flash insights and tools invite us to both plumb and organize what we learn in our interactions with people different from ourselves. By introducing activities around what are called synthetic cultures, the authors invite us to identify and practice in safe, simulated circumstances, the various dynamics of cultural difference. With this work in our system, we will have embedded the clues that will lead us to be more perceptive and understanding of cultural difference, as well as choose better responses when we hit the playing field of everyday global reality.

No models, however well researched and designed, can replace experience. The sole caution we would give is not about the content or quality of this book. It would rather be about not letting "the tail wag the dog." The user must resist the temptation that the book's lucidity, despite its cautions, might offer to simplistically impose the model on reality, rather than use it to think through the richness and variations of what we lean and experience about those different from ourselves.

Definitely a book for trainers and educators in the diversity and intercultural fields, Exploring Culture allows us to recognize that, as the authors point out, "We all have the capacity to communicate with other people, however unlike ourselves they might be, and to learn to understand them."

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