62 Module 3 Sociocultural Forces individuals within these groups. Most anthropologists, whose focus it is to study culture, view it as the sum total of the beliefs, rules, techniques, institutions, and artifacts that characterize human populations.1 Culture also can be understood from the individual level as the “individual worldviews, social rules, and interpersonal dynamics characterizing a group of people set in a particular time and place.”2 We encourage you to think of culture in the way that seems the most useful to you, given a particular situation. Most anthropologists also agree that: 1. Culture is learned; we are not born with a culture. 2. The various aspects of culture are interrelated. 3. Culture is shared, patterned, and mutually constructed through social interaction. 4. Culture defines the boundaries of different groups.3 Society is composed of people living in their culture, often unaware of its influence on them. To understand a specific group, be it an organization or a society, an ethnic group or a social group, we need to understand its culture. Yet we cannot directly observe it, so we have to learn about culture by observing how it manifests itself: in the character of the social world in which it exists. In this book, we examine how culture at the national level affects individual and group behavior. Managers also will want to pay attention to understanding organizational cultures and various local ethnic and regional subcultures. Our concern when we discuss culture here is with deep culture, the beliefs, attitudes, and values we have learned, often as a child, as well as culture at the surface level, where it shows itself most readily. For example, our beliefs about what a marriage is often are evidenced in the rituals connected to a marriage ceremony, such as the sipping of sake, the bride’s use of henna, the breaking of a glass, the wedding dress, and the tossing of the bride’s bouquet. You might think of surface and deep culture as an iceberg, with the surface culture the small part visible above the water, only 15 percent, and the deeper, unknown portions of culture, values, attitudes, beliefs, below the water line. We look at the surface level when we consider how culture shows itself, later in this module. When we work in cultures different from our own, we have to communicate across social, legal, language, and other borders that we may not understand. Yet members of most societies consider their culture superior to all others, a habit known as ethnocentricity. When outsiders attempt to introduce their home culture’s approach in a business environment (the “German way,” the “Chinese way,” or the “British way”), the stubborn resistance they are likely to meet is a sign of this ethnocentricity. How do international business managers learn to live, work, and meet business goals in other cultures? Sometimes it’s a challenge. The first step is to accept that other cultures are different, and the next step is to learn the characteristics of those cultures in order to adapt to them. The anthropologist E. T. Hall claims managers can do this in only two ways: (1) spend a lifetime in a culture, or (2) undergo an extensive training program that covers the main characteristics of a culture, including the language. Such an intensive study program is much more than a briefing on a country’s customs. It is a study of what culture is and does that builds an understanding of the ways in which culture has institutionalized human behavior.4 So what does this learning program include for international managers? First, there is factual knowledge about the other culture, which is relatively easy to obtain. Managers also need training in sensitivity to the nuances of cultural differences, which requires some effort to develop. Unfortunately, most newcomers to international business need to hit the ground running and can rarely afford the time necessary for in-depth study of new cultures, despite Hall’s suggestions. They can, however, take the important first step of realizing that there are other cultures. And they can anticipate that these cultures will tend to be ethnocentric. In this module we look at some of the important areas of sociocultural difference that concern businesspeople, and at some of the cultural frameworks that are ethnocentricity The belief that your own culture is superior to other cultures
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