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.