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.

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.

Draft Project Proposal

Since the last blog I have put together my draft project proposal and am now awaiting the response so that I can modify it and baseline the document as my proposal. In the meantime I ordered the International Management by Richard Mead, which has arrived and I will start to read that as it is another of my fundamental books for this topic. Thus at the moment I am still reading and gathering information and planning out this project.

Investigation into Hofstede and Trompenaars dimensions of culture

The past two weeks I have been reading the following two books:

- Trompenaars F. & Hampden-Turner C., 2006, Riding the Waves of Culture: Understanding Cultural Diversity in Business, 2nd Ed., Nicholas Brealey Publishing, London

- Hofstede G., 1991, Cultures and Organisations: Intercultural Cooperation and Its Importance for Survival; Software of the Mind, Profile Books, London

The two books offer two different perspectives on the dimensions of cultures and I have found that these are the two leading scholars in this field of cultural studies. These two models of dimensions of culture I think will form the basis of my project. From reading these two books I now understand more about how culture can be described in terms of dimensions.

Hofstede originally identified four dimensions of culture in his original study on IBM employees from the period 1968-1972. His four dimensions are:
Power Distance Index (PDI)
Individualism - Collectivism
Masculinity – Femininity
Uncertainty Avoidance Index (UAI)
The book Software of the Mind, explains in detail these dimensions and how they apply to generic, family, student and workplace situations. These four dimensions can give us an insight into the differences between cultures. Power Distance Index is defined as ‘…the extent to which the less powerful members of institutions and organisations within a country expect and accept that power is distributed unequally.’ (Hofstede, Software of the Mind, 28). This relates to Trompenaars dimension of ascriptive and achievement oriented cultures. In the sense that a culture with a high PDI tends to ascribe status to its leaders, whereas cultures with low PDI tends to base status and power on achievement.

Individualism and Collectivism have been covered by both Hofstede and Trompenaars and is defined by Hofstede as ‘Individualism pertains to societies in which the ties between individuals are loose: everyone is expected to look after himself or herself and his or her immediate family. Collectivism as its opposite pertains to societies in which people from birth onwards are integrated into strong, cohesive ingroups, which throughout people’s lifetime continue to protect them in exchange for unquestioning loyalty.’ (Hofstede, software, 51) The definition for masculinity – femininity are described in terms of poles, with the ‘masculine’ pole having the following features:
Earnings: Have opportunities for high earnings.
Recognition: Get the recognition you deserve when you do a good job
Advancement: Have an opportunity for advancement to higher level jobs.
Challenge: Have challenging work to do, work from which you get a personal sense of accomplishment.

The ‘feminine’ pole features are:
Manager: Have a good working relationship with your direct superior
Cooperation: Work with people who cooperate well with one another
Living area: Live in an area desirable to you and your family
Employment security: Have the security that you will be able to work for your company as long as you want to. (Hofstede, 82, Software of the Mind)

Trompenaars and Hampden-Turners seven dimensions of culture (Trompenaar, Hampden-Turner, 2006):
Universalism – Particularism: universalism is that laws apply everywhere equally, particularism is when the rules can be bent in certain situations.
Individualism – Communitarian: Similar to Hofstedes dimension of individualism and collectivism.
Neutral – Affective: Neutral is not exhibiting emotions, whereas affective cultures are ones in which are very expressive emotionally.
Specific – Diffuse: Specific is when your boss at work is only your boss in the workplace at the supermarket he is just another person. Diffuse cultures regard their boss at work as their boss in every aspect, so at the supermarket will still talk to them like their superior.
Achievement – Ascription: Status is based on achievement and past performance, whereas ascribed cultures base status on education level, age and family background.
Internal – External: how we control and how we react to the environment around, internal means that are inner directed so we derive ideas internally and then apply them to the environment. External means that ideas are derived from the surrounding environment and then applied to individuals.

As can be seen these two scholars offer two different models for classifying dimensions of culture and this will be the starting point for my project. Also after reading these two books it is becoming more clear to me how this topic really is relevant to engineers, as I have been a bit worried about the relevancy of my topic to engineering. However, many engineers end up in management and I have read already many stories where projects fail due simply to culture differences and management styles, as one type of management style may work in one culture yet when tried in a different culture it is a disaster. On the other side of the coin it can be seen that combining certain qualities can enhance the success of a project. Hence this is a very interesting topic with a lot to be revealed in the coming weeks. For the moment I am still working on the proposal.

Gantt Chart of Capstone

This is a Gantt chart for my project. Please click on the image to enlargen it.

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!