Culture Frameworks 75 FIGURE 3. 5 Examples of High- and Low-Context Cultures and Occupations High Context Japanese Chinese Arab Greek Mexican Spanish Italian French French Canadian English English Canadian American (U.S.) Scandanavian German German-Swiss Low Context High Context Human Resources Marketing/Sales Management Manufacturing Products R&D Technical Information Systems Engineers Finance Low Context The explicit communicator in an LC culture is direct, unsubtle, and unambiguous: What you say is what you mean. There is relatively less subtlety. “Telling it like it is” is understood as a positive trait, whereas in HC cultures, such directness could be considered brash, rude, or embarrassingly unsubtle or naive. Figure 3.5 shows examples of HC and LC cultures and applies context to business areas, in order to help you build your sense of high and low context. Hall’s work also suggests that LC cultures tend to be monochronic, which means they characterize time as linear, tangible, and divisible into blocks, consistent with an economic understanding of time, that it is a scarce resource to be measured, saved, and spent.20 A monochronic approach to time emphasizes planning and schedules. In contrast, HC cultures tend to be polychronic. That is, two or more activities are carried out within the same clock block; switching among activities can be both desirable and productive. We think of this as multitasking.21 KLUCKHOHN AND STRODTBECK’S CULTURAL ORIENTATIONS FRAMEWORK U.S. anthropologists Florence Kluckhohn and Fred Strodtbeck developed a classification system22 for cultural values based on universal problems to which all cultures offer solutions. The five problems are: 1. What relationship should people have to nature? That is, how should they think about their activities with regard to nature? 2. What sorts of relationships should exist among individuals? 3. What are the preferred forms or modes of human activity? 4. What is the best way to think about time? 5. What is the basic nature of humans? Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck’s framework extends Hall’s work, helping us further understand beliefs, and hence actions, in other cultures. These values are charted in Figure 3.6, along with their categorization into high and low context, so that you can see how they might be useful together. Let’s look at each. Relationship to nature describes the culture’s understanding of how to live in the natural world. The values here range along a continuum from mastery to harmony and then to subjugation. In North America, for example, there is a predominant sense of mastery over nature, although with the rise of the environmental movement and awareness of climate monochronic Having to do with linear time, sequential activities polychronic Having to do with simultaneous activities, multitasking
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