66 Module 3 Sociocultural Forces Effectiveness (GLOBE) Research Project, a study developed and led by the scholar Robert House that engages social scientists and management scholars from around the world in ongoing research in an effort to better understand how culture affects leadership.6 Study Smart and Improve Your Grades Go to http://bit.ly/SmartBookNOW How Culture Shows Itself Now that we have discussed what culture is and its importance to international business managers, we’ll take a look at how a society’s culture shows or manifests itself. It’s quite simple, really: culture manifests in everything. We look briefly at aesthetics, religion, material culture, language and communication, and social organization. We then look at gift giving, because it is a complex cultural area new international managers often face. AESTHETICS Aesthetics is the area of philosophy that deals with beauty, so a culture’s aesthetics describes its sense of beauty and taste. The word’s origin is the Greek aistheˉtikos, meaning perceptible by the senses. A culture’s aesthetics is expressed in many areas, most directly and intentionally in art, drama, music, folklore, and dance. Art, including color and form, can convey a lot about culture to international managers because it contains symbolic meanings that are clues to values. Take the simple aspect of color. The color of mourning in the United States and Mexico is black, while it is black and white in East Asia, red in South Africa, and purple in Brazil and Thailand. You might want to consider those symbolic meanings in logo and packaging design. In the Islamic world, green is an optimistic and hopeful color, so an ad or package featuring green is inclined to provoke a positive response. Orange for Catholics in Northern Ireland is symbolic of the Protestant group Orange Order, perceived as hostile to Irish Catholics. So the slogan for the Orange telecommunications company (originally British, now French), “The future’s bright. . . . The future’s Orange” wasn’t exactly what its marketers wanted to communicate. Aesthetics applies to our ideas about our bodies and their physical beauty, as well. Take, for instance, the view of an ideal weight, which differs markedly across cultures. Often in richer countries the better off are thinner, while in poorer countries the poorest are thinner. In Japan, sumo athletes are intentionally obese, and in some areas of Nigeria girls enter “fattening rooms” to bulk up. Tattoos represent another aspect of aesthetic value differences across cultures. In some cultures, they are seen as beauty-enhancing, while in others they are a desecration. The remains of one of the oldest preserved humans, Otzi the Iceman from about 3300 bce, found in a glacier on the Austrian–Italian border, show that he was tattooed.7 In an interesting meaning reversal, criminals in Japan were once tattooed by authorities as a way to identify and humiliate them. Today, the Yakuza, members of a Japanese crime syndicate, proudly tattoo themselves to establish their in group identity. Music and folklore also communicate a culture’s aesthetics. A commercial that used a ballad in the United States might be better received in Mexico if accompanied by a bolero, or in Brazil a samba. A culture’s folklore can disclose much about a society’s way of life. Take, for example, the way Japanese accepted KFC’s story of its rustic, agricultural origins to a background of “My Old Kentucky Home,” and Colonel Sanders LO 3-3 Describe how culture shows itself. aesthetics A culture’s sense of beauty and good taste Tattoos add aesthetic appeal, or do they?
Geringer_InternationalBusiness
To see the actual publication please follow the link above