Capstone Project finding a topic!

Cultural Dimensions in International Engineering:

This is the topic that I have been thinking about for my final year capstone project. Now this is a non-technical topic and I want to investigate into how work practices differ across cultures. There are a lot of international Business textbooks that deal with this topic, however, in Engineering this topic seems to be left out... I believe that it is also important for engineers to understand the concept of culture and how different cultures may work differently to your own. This is important since nowadays more and more engineers have to work in international teams and to work most effectively in a team you need to understand how your teammates work best. I am not attempting to stereotype cultures, not in the slightest! I just want to investigate into what have academics in this field found that differentiates cultures and what models or theories have they identified in relation to culture.

So my starting point will be with defining what culture is and whether there really does exist three distinct cultures; national culture, organisational and occupational and how these relate to each other. From here I will start to explore several scholars attempts at identifying cultural dimensions, namely Hofstede's five dimensions. There are also works of other prominent scholars in the field that offer different viewpoints on cultural dimensions such as Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner and Schwartz. I am still researching into this area so I am sure there are more theories, however, I also have to define my scope as I want to be specific so that I don't have too general a topic. Once I identify a model of cultural dimensions I then hope to shed some light of this in the engineering workplace, I still don't know how but I am hoping with the research I will have more ideas in this section. I would like to put together a small handbook that summarises my findings and identifies key features that would be useful for the international engineer. I am planning to give a presentation on this topic at an International Women in Engineering seminar in July so I want to make my project relevant to the international engineer.

For the moment I am still in the definition phase. I will upload a draft calender of important dates for the projects and a Gantt chart with a breakdown of the tasks. This will be a literature review and analysis research project, so I am now getting my hands on all the books I can and filtering out the irrelevant ones so that I can focus only on the good ones and then start to read those!