Culture Frameworks 73 SPECIAL FOCUS: GIFT GIVING IN BUSINESS Gift giving in the business context is an important and often confusing aspect of every international manager’s life. Everywhere, some sort of entertainment outside office hours that includes the exchange of gifts is part of the process of getting better acquainted. In all cultures, exchanging gifts follows a set of rules members of the culture have internalized and, in our native culture, we may not be aware of these rules because they represent our accustomed way of doing things. In cultures that tolerate high levels of social inequality and are hierarchical, gift-giving etiquette is markedly different from that in other cultures where power is more equally distributed. Marcel Mauss, an anthropologist who studied the role of gifts in early societies, theorizes that gift giving operated within the society as a way to acknowledge interrelationships and obligations.12 Mauss argued that in archaic societies, individual, family, and communal interests combined to make a social system that needed to acknowledge in public its interrelationships and obligations. A gift has a magic-like quality, he pointed out, because it carries with it more than the item itself; it carries some of the giver, which confers on the receiver an obligation to reciprocate. The ritual of gift giving in international business is important because it creates a social bond that requires you to be a giver, a receiver, and a holder of an obligation to the other person in the exchange. This series of roles and reciprocal obligations creates solidarity, which can lead to trust. On a practical level, the first point to figure out about gifts in a new culture is how the ritual plays out. What constitutes an acceptable gift, and what is the public role of gift giving? In Japan, for example, people never give an unwrapped gift or visit a home empty-handed. A gift is presented with the comment that it is only a trifle, which implies that the humble social position of the giver does not permit giving a gift in keeping with the high status of the recipient. The recipient, in turn, will not open the gift in front of the giver, in order to spare him or her any embarrassment. The intention of gift giving in Japan is to convey the giver’s thoughtfulness and consideration for the receiver, who, over time, builds up trust and confidence in the giver. Every country will have an etiquette and set of implicit rules around the giving of gifts: their timing, their value, how they are to be presented. Managers should learn what these are.13 Many organizations also have policies designed to separate gift giving from bribery or extortion, so managers will want to keep these guidelines in mind as well. Study Smart and Improve Your Grades Go to http://bit.ly/SmartBookNOW Culture Frameworks International managers can quickly build a general sense of what to expect in a culture by using analytical frameworks developed by researchers. As we review several of these frameworks, remember two things: first, your own culture functions as an implicit reference point for comparison; and second, this is just the beginning, the very tip of the iceberg, of understanding the complexity of other cultures. The studies of cultural values on which the frameworks are based include work by Hall,14 Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck,15 House,16 Hofstede,17 Schwartz,18 and Trompenaars.19 Here we look at four of these frameworks, those developed by Hall, Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck, Hofstede, and Trompenaars, so that you will have a sense of what conceptual tools are available to help you begin to understand other cultures. This rich material is an introduction to an area of multidiscipline research: international management, marketing, psychology, anthropology, and sociology. House’s Globe Study, mentioned in our discussion of leadership across cultures, is an ambitious and interesting project that examines leadership patterns around the globe using value and practice dimensions to measure LO 3-4 Describe four frameworks for analyzing culture.
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