Last big push!

Ok I have had exams the past 3 weeks, which is why I haven't written here since the 15th of May. I now have finished all my exams and am ready to tackle the final stage of my project. Basically the revising everything and finishing all unfinished parts and validating my hypothesis. My hypothesis is that cultural competence is relevant to engineers. I want to make an intercultural training guide that I can give to the attendees at the seminar and also a presentation for that same event. I also need to come to more concrete conclusions for my comparison between Australia and Japan. So I have 3 weeks left the plan is:
Week 1: Revise sections 1-4
Week 2: Revise sections 5 and 6
Week 3: Revise whole report and write introduction and conclusions.
Ok so now to get started again.

A bit stuck

At the moment I am a bit stuck on where to go from here. I am up to the last chapter I have looked at Japan in terms of Hofstede's dimensions not yet in terms on Trompenaars. I am also meant to look at Australia in the same way but am finding it difficult where to start, I guess with multiculturalism. I am a bit worried that I am not really adding any value... I feel with the Intercultural Communications section that could be relevant to engineers. Then with this last chapter I am not sure whether to really research into the cognitive differences between Japanese and Australian engineers as a result of culture and education differences. Or to look more at the superficial layer and provide tips of Australian engineers working in Japan and vice versa. Maybe I can also look into bilateral agreements between the two countries... I will investigate this further.

Japanese culture compared to Australian culture

I have continued my research into Japanese culture, this has actually included reading about their respective historical contexts. Japan really has been quite isolated historically and even today 99% of the population are Japanese, with the other 1% mainly comprised of Koreans and some Chinese. This historical context has actually made Japan quite culturally homogenous. On the contrary Australia is multicultural with a very short colonised history, this is not accounting for Aboriginal culture that has inhabited Australia for thousands of years. It could be argued that the Aboriginal culture in Australia used to culturally homogenous before Western invasion and colonisation took place. I haven't research that far into Australian culture yet. However, the two different historical contexts and culturally contexts will make for a very interesting comparison. I am also taking an engineering slant, focusing on education in the two countries and professional competencies seeing how much emphasis these institutions place on cultural awareness.

Japan has adopted many Western technologies, however, they have also managed to make them Japanese or do things the Japanese way. I am research into potential culture clashes for the Australian engineer when working in Japan and potentially with Japanese engineers. And vice versa for Japanese engineers in Australia.

I am also quite interested in investigating into whether there are any sociocognitive differences between Japanese engineers and Australian engineers. I know in education the Japanese are taught to rote learn whereas in Australia engineers are taught the basic concepts and then need to investigate and come to their own conclusions, the professor may not always be right. Furthermore, status generally ascribed in Japan so the university you go to is essential if you want to get a good and job and get in a good circle of contacts. In Australia status is more based on achievement so you do not have to go to the best university, generally to get a good job you need to show outstanding achievements. These type of cultural differences I believe do impact on the engineer that are produced in the respective countries and will be what I will be trying to prove. That engineers need to be aware that engineers from other countries will not always be the same and taught the same skills. Thus when working in global teams it is important to enhance the skills of each person and with cultural competency skills this will assist the renaissance engineer. Renaissance engineer was coined by Engels 2001, relating to the fact that nowadays an engineer needs to have more than just technical skills they also need to be socially and politically conscious.

Insight into Japanese Culture

I have started working on the sixth and final chapter, which is a comparison of Eastern to Western cultures and in particular Japan to Australia. I am still debating whether to focus on Australia or choose America. There is a lot of literature for America and I also have a bias from Australian culture. Then on the other hand one of the first steps in gaining intercultural competence is to attempt to view your own culture from an external point of view so this could be important that I attempt to do that for Australia. For the moment I am focusing on Japan. I have decided to characterise the Japanese culture in the models that I have presented in the previous chapters, so where Japan fits in on the Hofstede model and identify their dilemmas in the Trompenaars model and how Japan attempts to reconcile these dilemmas. I am also focusing in particular on engineering and will have a special focus of women engineers.

I am getting quite busy with exams so this section will probably take a bit of time. I have three full weeks to work on this project in July so I can afford to work a bit slowly throughout May and make sure that I pass my subjects here!

I still need to work on the intercultural communication chapter by adding a practical exercise at the end that I have yet to decide on.

Submission of Third Draft - Project Progress Review

I just submitted the third draft that contains chapters 1 through to 5. I have one more chapter to write and then I will need to write the intro and conclusion. Time wise I am on track. This chapter and the next are really the chapters where I can add value and start to use the foundations of what I have learnt from the previous 4 chapters. This makes them quite hard to write too, since they require my own thought. Whereas the other chapters were more defining and explaining concepts and testing their validity. These next two chapters also are where I link in to Engineering. These are the chapters where I need to prove my hypothesis of whether the study of culture really is relevant to engineers. I have been doing a lot of searching through databases and reading journal articles. There is quite a lot out there and I have to filter through to make sure that what I have is relevant and appropriate for my task.

The next chapter will deal with Eastern versus Western culture, I am hoping to focus on Japan and Australia.

Applying Theory into Practice!

Being on exchange has allowed me to experience several intercultural miscommunication encounters. The latest happened today when I met my french friend that told me he was just kicked out of his group for one of his subjects. They had a group project to hand in last week and basically he was away all last week, which he advised the group of. He went on to say it was unfair because they didn't warn him. Next he made an interesting comment that the person that kicked him out was Chinese and that he had heard that Chinese tend to have funny reactions like this sometimes. This triggered something in my mind about High context and Low context cultures. China is a High context culture, which means that they are not very direct in their communication compared to a low context culture like France. Thus my friend was a victim of intercultural miscommunication. He was upset that they didn't warn him beforehand and vice versa the Chinese person was probably upset that the french did not pick up the hints and forced them to be confrontational.

Intercultural Communication

Things are coming along quite well, I have a lot of journal articles to read and I am quite excited because I found out that the IEEE actually hold an annual conference in Professional Communication. Over the years several of the topics at this conference has covered the issues of intercultural communication for the engineer and the importance of understanding national cultural for technical writing. Now I just need to read through the theories and many use the Hofstede dimensions as a basis for their research so this has been very useful that I have explained and analysed his results as this has provided me with the basis for understanding the and being able to move onto the next part of the intercultural learning. The next part is learning and this is followed by application.

I am falling a bit behind schedule because exams are coming up. I did kind of put some lag time into my planning and also in June I have 3 whole weeks to finish wiriting. Thus if I can draft out what I want to write, then in June I just have to fill in the gaps and make it coherent.

Second draft of Capstone complete

So far I am up to date with my progress for this paper. However, I have exams coming up in May so I really want to get as much as I can done before my exams. In saying that I will still have 3 weeks to finish my project after my last exam.

These last 2 weeks I have written the chapter on Trompenaars methodology and on critiquing both methodologies. It took me quite a while to find the critique articles using the database for UTS online library and DTU's online library, however, I was able to find all the articles I need for the time being. I actually read some very interesting critique of Dr Brendan McSweeney on Hofstede's model and Hofstede wrote a response to McSweeney's original and McSweeney wrote a rebuttal. Very interesting reading at how academics use subtleties in their critiques to show disrespect for each others work. In reading this series of journal articles it is very obvious that McSweeney disagrees with Hofstede's complete approach at attempting to measure culture differences. McSweeney does not offer an alternative, he just offers criticism of Hofstedes method. Now Hofstede even admits that his methodology is not the best and he challenges others to improve or find a better way.

I have found it quite difficult when reading these critiques not to be biased myself, I think I tend to like Hofstede's model and dislike Trompenaars so I like to show the more positive aspects of Hofstede's model. I will make a concerted attempt to stay neutral and let the "experts" fight it out, or prove their points.

So for the next 2 weeks my goal will be to start writing Chapter 5 which is intercultural communication. This section will start applying the theory that has been presented and critiqued in the previous chapters and will start to test the hypothesis of whether intercultural communication is relevant to the engineer.

Critiques of Models

I have spent the last couple of days reading critiques and I have reformatted the report. I will only be explaining Hofstede and Trompenaars and then in Chapter 4 critiquing both and the method of dimensions and discussing what will be used in the paper. I have found in database articles critiques from Trompenaars about Hofstede and vice versa, also Hofstede has included in his 2001 book a section on responses to critiques of his work since a lot of people mis use his work, that is apply it to an incorrect context. Nina Jacobs a management professor in Rotterdam, advocates a more modern approach to management. Now in management looking at the societal level is inappropriate since you manage people you need to look at an individual level. Thus using Hofstedes dimensions as bible in management studies is inherently flawed. Trompenaars inspite of this adopts this approach, I believe that he is more popularist and does not the empirical evidence to support his findings. His typologies in my definition cannot be called dimensions because some of them correlate to each other and he does not prove that they are different. Instead he takes this as a priori and from there applies the theory to the management practices. He has built up a world renowned profile for management consulting, however, maybe in all the hype people just accept what they are shown without questioning the validity.

Trompenaars compared Hofstede

I have started the section on Trompenaars and his seven dimensions of culture. Now he is very different to Hofstede since he is actually a management consultant and not a social scientist or anthropologist like Hofstede. So he uses the theory found in anthropology textbooks and applies it to practice. He acknowledges Hofstede's five dimensions, however, he does not adopt Hofstede's five dimensions. Instead he really adopts three dimensions from Parsons five relational orientations and from here devises seven dimensions. Thus his theory does not have the empirical backing that Hofstede has. He does have a database of 30000 manager responses to his questionnaire (which he does not publicly publish). However he does not statistically prove the dimensions like Hofstede has done. Trompenaars is more of the opinion that within each dimension a culture dances from one pole to the other in a cyclical motion. Thus unlike Hofstede being placed on a continuum between the two poles and each pole being the preferred characteristic, Trompenaars does not give quantitative scores for each country in each dimension. Trompenaars only has some graphs of respondents questions in each dimension. In this way his analysis does not prove empirically that each of these dimensions are statistically independent from each other, moreover, he provides a theoretical model that is yet to be tested. This could also be due to the fact that Hofstede was an engineer turned social scientist, thus he prefers using numbers and empirical proof, whereas Trompenaars is from an economic background and thus does not see the need for empirical proof. I am still researching this area, however, it seems that Trompenaars is more adapting the theory into practice, without validating the viability of the theory first. Whereas Hofstede has in my opinion proved his five dimensions to be statistically independent.

Another issue I am debating is the relevance of Triandis in this paper. Triandis has written several chapters about individualism and collectivism, however, I am starting to realise he is more interested in psychology, that is at the individual level not at the societal level, which is anthropology. Thus I am not too sure if I will still include the chapter on him, because I don't think it will add any value. Furthermore having investigated into two different dimensional models that could be a good enough basis to move onto the next section of the project which is intercultural communication and then case study between Western and Eastern cultures.

It's starting to make sense!!

I have been detailing each of the Hofstede dimensions and from this I am able to apply it to my current situation and give a reason for the difference in cultures. I am currently on exchange in Denmark and I grew up in Australia. If you study the Hofstede scores both countries are similar in the dimensions of Power Distance, Individuality and Uncertainty Avoidance. They differ significantly on the Masculinity versus Feminity pole that is Australia is seen as more masculine and Denmark as a more feminine society. Now I can see this difference between the two societies even as simply as comparing the two social welfare systems, Denmark has a more socialist approach and thus help the underprivelaged that now they actually have a very big middle class and very few (legal) citizens in poverty. Furthermore it can be seen in the education system where the focus is on not failing, thus it is better to be an average student than to be the best student. The only marks given out in years 6,7 and 8 are only pass and fail. Whereas in Australia there is a focus more on trying to be the best student, students are graded from a very early age and even the concept of "Opportunity Classes" is something unheard of in Denmark.

Need to be Careful with Dodgy Internet Websites

It seems that one of the websites that I thought was quite a legitimate website, turns out to be a fraud. The website www.geert-hofstede.com was created by an international business student in the USA without the permission of Geert Hofstede himself. Dr Hofstede sort legal action to stop this website and basically found out that it was a 59 unemployed person that was behind this. Now the domain name has not been renewed. I was using this website to show graphs between two countries scores on the Hofstede dimensions. This is just a timely reminder that you can't always trust what you read on the web, so I will need to critically analyse any material that I get from the web in order to validate the originality and authenticity of the content.

Other than that I am going quite well with writing up Chapters 1 and 2, which I want to have the draft out by tonight. These chapters covers Cross Cultural Research (Definitions, Data Collection and Validation Methods) and Hofstede's five dimensions.

I found out about another survey called the GLOBE it was conducted in the 1990's and based on Hofstede's 5 dimensions they carried out a project and from their results they expanded to 18 dimensions of culture. Now it would be good to include this in my paper, however, I can't get access to the book and their results. Furthermore, with the Hofstede 5 dimensions that is enough for the purposes of my report since it is a general overview and this study derives from these original dimensions.

Another interesting fact I discovered was that Hofstede was originally a Mechanical Engineer. He worked as an engineer (and manager) for 10 years before doing a doctorate in Social Science and researching cross cultural issues. He stated in one interview that it was due to his engineering background that he was able to measure culture, as before him no social scientist was able to quantify differences in culture, many had come up with theories but none had any empircal evidence. Hofstede was also lucky in the fact that he had access to the IBM values and attitudes database and IBM let him analyse the data so that he was able to come up with his dimensions paradigm. Since Hofstede many studies have been carried out and there hasn't been one to date that contradicts the results Hofstede obtained in the 1980's. Of course he has critics, however, upon reading his data the evidence speaks for itself. The IBM data used matched samples of people, so that the main difference between respondents was their nationality.

Starting to Write Major Project

Since I handed in the proposal last week, I have been reading and decided that now it is time to start writing something! So I have started by scoping out the topics that I would like to cover in my report:
Introduction
Chap 1: Cross Cultural Studies - Data Collection and Validation Methods
Chap 2: Hofstede’s 5 dimensional model
Chap 3: Trompenaar’s 7 dimensional model
Chap 4: Detailed explanation of Triandis’ theory
Chap 5: Intercultural communication and the Engineer
Chap 6: Comparison of Western culture to Eastern culture
Conclusion
Now of course these can be changed and modified as needs be, this is just as a starting point. I am thinking that there could be too much theory as Chapters 1-4 are all theoretical and it will only be in Chapter 5 and 6 where I really start to get into the discussion of the theory in applications. I believe it is necessary though to include this theoretical foundation so that the reader can understand the concept of cultural dimensions and the various theories that are around.

At the moment I have started writing Chapter 2 as I am reviewing Hofstede's book Cultures Consequence and also Cultures and Organisations: Software of the Mind. I hope to have a rough draft of chapter 1 and 2 to hand in on Monday for review. Moreso that Pam can see if I am missing any particular area or should modify the current sections.

Final Proposal Submitted

I have submitted the final proposal on Monday and now I have continued my reading. I am reading Hofstedes Cultures Consequence book, which is very detailed account of his research methods and dimensions of culture that he has identified. I have found some very interesting points so far in my reading, in particular in relation to the fifth dimension that was later added. Originally Hofstede identified four dimensions of culture through his IBM studies. Now the researchers who devised the questionnaire were all Westerners so it had a Western bias. In current cross cultural research it is a must to have people from distinct cultures collaborate together to devise the questionnaire, however, Hofstede was a pioneer in this field and it wasn't thought of at the time to do that. This does not invalidate the results of his IBM survey, since several other prominent surveys done in recent years have supported Hofstede's original dimensions. In 1980s when his book came out it was widely criticesed and acclaimed. Through this criticism it was decided to do a Chinese Value Survey, so devise a questionnaire by Eastern scholars. This survey validated three out of the four Hofstede dimensions, it did not identify Uncertainty Avoidance as a dimension. It did identify a fifth dimension based on Confucian Dynamism or otherwise known as short-term orientation versus long-term orientation. This was not identified by the Western survey just as Uncertainty Avoidance was not identified by the Chinese survey so this shows that cultural bias of the questionner can influence the results. It may be asked are there more dimensions? Hofstedes reply is that potentially there are, however, they must be proved to be statistically uncorrelated to the other dimensions already identified. Interestingly we use dimensions as a construct to simplify complex concepts, so we don't want to have too many otherwise it won't be simple any more! One famous scholar, Miller (1956) in an essay argued that the magical number seven plus or minus two, represents a limit to the human capacity for processing information (Hofstede 2001, 71).

I will continue reading and also familiarising myself with the program Latex so that I can produce professionally looking documents.

Review of Draft Proposal

From the review Pam suggested that I do a general study on cultural dimensions and then focus in depth on two countries. I think this is a very good idea and I would like to look into the difference between the Occident and and the Orient, otherwise known as the East and the West. To define the scope even further it will be between Asian culture and Anglo culture. Hence I was looking into the Hofstede scores and I think Australia and Japan will make a very interesting comparison since they seem to represent opposites of each other in relation to Hofstede's and Trompenaars cultural dimensions models.

Firstly some interesting points to make about Japan is according to Scarborough (1998) Japan is one of the worlds most homogenised societies as historically it has been very isolated. This has also influenced the collectiveness of the culture as it has been described by some scholars as the 'rice culture' so in order to survive off the land the group has to be able to cooperate effectively. Japan is the only industrialised country in Hofstede's scores to be classified as collectivist. Hofstede also found Japan to be the most masculine of all cultures. This again can be traced back to historical origins, the sumaris and meiji. From Trompenaars research he has found Japan to be a high-context culture, this means that there is a lot of hidden meaning behind words. Whereas a high-content (such as Australia) these cultures are a lot more explicit in their communication. Also from Trompenaars Japan is described as an ascriptive country so status is ascribe to people in terms of age, family, education level etc. The opposite to ascribed culture is achievement based (such as Australia) status is based on one's successes and achievements. Another key feature is that Japan has a strong Uncertainty Avoidance, due once again to the historical origins.

Now Japan's cultural tendencies seem to stem directly from their historical origins and being a very homogenised society these all appear to make sense. Australia on the other hand is a multi cultural society with a colonised history of little over 200 years. Australia could be described as a cultural 'melting pot'. Now how can our culture be defined and categorised when there is such a diverse population? Well from the research common tendencies can be seen and an unique culture can be identified or at least common values. Well I am still deciding whether to focus on Australia, USA or Great Britain; I think the USA or Australia would be interesting because of this cultural melting pot. I need to read further and find where the most relevant literature exists.