Cultural Dimensions in Corporate Relationships - Satu Teerikangas - June 3, 2003, 1:20 p.m.

Symposium: "A New Base for Corporate Relations: From Strategic Deceit to Trustworthy Action", Nokia House, Espoo Finland, Tuesday, June 3, 2003.

This digest was created in real-time during the meeting, based on the speaker's presentation(s) and comments from the audience. These should not be viewed as official transcripts of the meeting, but only as an interpretation by a single individual. Lapses, grammatical errors, and typing mistakes may not have been corrected. Questions about content should be directed to the originator. These notes have been contributed by David Ing (daviding@systemicbusiness.org) at the IBM Advanced Business Institute ( http://www.ibm.com/abi ).

[Satu Teerikangas]

Cultural view

We often speak of national cultures, but now entering a different world.

We living in a world where mixing cultures are a part of everyday life

• Amount of international context
• Historically, people within 20km
• Industrial revolution
• Now talk around globe

Has man been able to adapt itself to the changing conditions?

What is culture?

• Difficult because there are so many definitions and views
• Which? Corporate, industry, departments, social class, gender differences
• What view as a researcher? Cross-cultural psychologist, anthropologist, …
• Different concepts related: identity, race, nationalism, diversity, values - hard to draw the line
• How should I see it?
• Cultures don't exist, because they're constructed, .. or
• Yes, they do exist … or
• Culture explains everything
• All views are biased towards different directions

Some framing for culture:

• Culture as a collective programming
• Culture not as independent persons
• Depends on environment
• Culture as world views
• Not bad or good, e.g. Finland summer cottages, living as a third world country -- simple life as poor.
• Nokia world view as different from IBM world view

Hofstede 1991: Linkage of personality, culture and human nature

• Pyramid:
• Human nature: hunger, emotion, ..
• Culture: conditions human nature
• Personality: specific to individual, but sometime overrides culture

Instead of just understanding culture, want to depict different types of culture.

• Most research looks at national culture, few as cross-culture.
• National culture ,e.g. China
• Regional: Beijing vs. Guangdong
• Social culture
• Professional: engineering
• …

Other view: an iceberg model to represent culture

• Things that you see, and those you don't see.
• Visible: artifacts, practices and behaviours
• Invisible: values, norms, beliefs, accepted assumptions about our existence.
• Visible are just cues into the hidden part of culture.
• May be able to change most visible corporate cultures, but have to live with national cultures

May find 200 different assumptions

• Three categories
• Relationships about the environment
• Relationship with other people
• Communications
• Study on Finns, Chinese and Japanese

In corporate relationships, can see icebergs that collide into each other

• e.g. it's usually R&D people who usually operate globally; production people are local.

Research mixed on prolonged stay and contact on a new culture: culture shock curve, Furnham 1986

• Honeymoon
• Culture shock
• Acculturation
• Breaking through