Culture Flashcards
A set of beliefs, attitudes, values, and perspectives on how the world works.
Culture
These include a culture’s obvious features, such as its food, dress, architecture, humor, and music.
Artifacts and products
Less immediately obvious are a culture’s shared and stated sense of acceptable behaviors-what is right and wrong. These may be a country’s rules and regulations or a company’s mission statement and code of conduct.
Norms and values
These are the culture’s core beliefs about how the world is and ought to be. They may be unspoken, and members may not even be consciously aware of them.
Basic assumptions
Require a great deal of background. They are characterized by complex, usually long-standing networks of relationships, which are as important as work and often blue the line between business and social lives. Since members of the culture share a rich history of common experience, the way they interact and interpret events is often not apparent to outsiders. There are rules - sometimes exceedingly complex rules - but they are implicit, and the rules are often applied flexibility.
High-context cultures
Packages necessary background in the communication itself. Relationships tend to have less history. Because individuals know each other less well and don’t share a common database of experience, communication must be very explicit.
Low-context cultures
Describes the way in which power is distributed in a culture and how an unequal distribution is perceived by the culture’s less powerful members. In a high power distance culture, class may be inherited at birth and will closely define an individual’s rights and opportunities. Low power distance cultures minimize the importance of class differentiation.
Power distance
Describes contrasting visions of how members of a society relate to each other. In individual cultures, clans and family are less important than individual achievement. In a collectivist culture, one’s membership in a group is more important than one’s individual identity.
Individualism/collectivism
Describes how members of a culture feel about uncertainty and lack of clarity.
Uncertainty avoidance
Describe the extend to which a culture embodies specific traditional gender images: A masculine culture will be oriented toward competition and achievement, while a feminine culture is empathetic, nurturing, and collaborative.
Masculine/feminine
Also referred to as normative/pragmatic. The dimensions refers to the way the culture sees the effect of the past on the future. Long-term/normative tends to use traditions as a guide and values loyalty to those values and ideas. Short-term/pragmatic believes that its actions today can shape its future.
Long-term/Short-term
Refers to how the gratification of desires is viewed.
Indulgence/restraint
In a universal culture, a defined set of rules is applied to each case. This results in consistency and a sense of impartiality. In a particular culture, the context of each case is considered.
Universal/particular
In an individualist culture, members are free to consider their own needs and opportunities when taking action. Members of collectivist cultures must consider how their actions will affect the entire group.
Individual/communitarian (collectivist)
Neutral cultures control outward expression, while affective cultures are more likely to display emotions in public.
Neutral/affective
This dilemma, like neutral/affective, refers to the boundary between private and public lives and restrict public contracts from entering into one’s personal life. In diffuse cultures, a public contact may be allowed access into one’s private life once certain conditions have been fulfilled.
Specific/diffuse
In an achieved culture, individuals are judged according to their own merits - what they have achieved. In an ascribed culture, individuals may be judged by class, wealth, gender or family connections.
Achieved/ascribed
Sequential cultures see time as linear. Plans, productivity, and the future are important. Synchronic cultures view time as more flexible and forgiving. Schedules can be changed to accommodate the demands of traditions or relationships.
Sequential/synchronic
In an internal culture, an individual charts his or her own path, while in an external culture the individual plays a part in a story directed by fate.
Internal/external
Adler characterizes ethnocentrism as “our way is the best way and we are really not interested in other ways of reaching a goal.” Parochialism goes even further, asserting that “there is only one way to solve a problem or reach a goal.”
Ethnocentrism and parochialism
While certain words are used to describe cultural value dimensions and characteristics, these words should not be judgmental or contain negative connocations.
Cultural stereotypes
“The culture made me do it.” This perspective basically absolves individuals of any responsibility for their actions.
Cultural determinism
Holds that because cultures vary so widely and greatly, everything is relative. There are no absolutes; everything varies based on the situation and the cultural perspective.
Cultural relativism
The capacity to recognize, interpret, and behaviorally adapt to multicultural situations and contexts.
Cultural intelligence
Including thinking, learning, and strategizing. This involves developing a knowledge of cultural differences and similarities and being able to use that knowledge to determine how best to handle a cross-cultural situation.
Cognitive
Including effectiveness, confidence, persistence, value congruence, and the level of attraction toward a new culture. This quality enables one to genuinely enjoy cultural differences rather than feeling threatened or intimidated by them.
Motivational
Including and individual’s range of possible actions and responses to intercultural encounters. This quality enables one to be flexible and adapt in multicultural contexts.
Behavioral
