Hofstede's Culture's Consequences

I finally got my hands on Hofstede's book Culture's Consequences, which is the starting point for my investigation. This book will provide the context for my research project and indepth insight into Hofstede's cross cultural research methodologies. This is a scholarly book for social scientist, thus it is quite difficult to understand certain concepts coming from an engineering background, yet it is important for me to understand these fundamental concepts so that I will be able to analyse properly the literature that I will be reading on this topic. Hence I will be using a lot of the definitions from this book. Furthermore, this book is the second edition, written 20 years after the first so it also discusses many of the other studies conducted in the interim of time and basically all the chapters have been rewritten so that this is the most accurate data of Hofstede's findings.

In Hofstede's original IBM surveys a large proportion of the actual participants were engineers! As shown Hofstede identified seven occupational categories;
1. Managers (all levels) country head office
2. Managers (all levels) branch offices, including sales, systems engineering and customer engineering managers
3. Systems engineers
4. Data processing sales representatives
5. Data processing customer engineers
6. Office products customer engineers
7. Administrative personnel, country head office, including clerks and professionals

Four out of the seven occupational categories included engineers and in every country surveyed there were always managers, sales representatives and customer engineers. I am currently reading about the data collection, treatment and validation.

I am still waiting for the uts engineering capstone website to put up information about when we have to hand in our proposal. I believe that it is due in next Friday. I have already submitted the draft and once that is returned I will finalise the proposal and submit it by next Friday the 23rd March.

In the meantime I will continue to read Culture's Consequence so that the fundamentals of this topic become clear to me and will allow me to conduct my literature review and analysis on cultural dimensions in international engineering.