Summary 85 2. Slow down. In many countries, U.S. businesspeople are seen to be in a rush—in other words, unfriendly, arrogant, and untrustworthy. In other countries, the Japanese and Germans are considered somewhat time-obsessed. 3. Establish trust. Often, U.S.-style crisp business relationships will get you nowhere. Product quality, pricing, and clear contracts compete with the personal relationship and trust that are developed carefully and sincerely over time. The manager must establish himself or herself as simpatico, worthy of the business and dependable in the long run. 4. Understand the importance of language. Obviously, translations must be done by a professional who speaks both languages fluently, who has a vocabulary sensitive to nuance and connotation, and who has a talent for the idioms and imagery of each culture. Having an interpreter is critical, even when one of the parties speaks the other’s language. 5. Respect the culture. Manners are important. The traveling representative is a guest in the country and must respect the host’s rules. As a Saudi Arabian official states in one of the Going International films, “Americans in foreign countries have a tendency to treat the natives as foreigners; they forget that actually it is they who are the foreigners.” 6. Understand the components of culture. Any region’s culture is a sort of iceberg with two components: surface culture (fads, styles, food) and deep culture (attitudes, beliefs, values). Less than 15 percent of culture is visible, so strangers must look below the surface. SUMMARY LO 3-1 Describe what culture is. Culture is the sum total of the beliefs, rules, techniques, institutions, and artifacts that characterize human populations. In other words, culture consists of the “individual worldviews, social rules, and interpersonal dynamics characterizing a group of people set in a particular time and place.” Most anthropologists agree that culture is learned; the various aspects of culture are interrelated; culture is shared, patterned, and mutually constructed through social interaction; and culture defines the boundaries of different groups. LO 3-2 Identify the ways culture affects all business activity. Culture affects everything we do, and, thus, national cultural differences affect the functional areas of international business. Wide variations in cultural attitudes and values across markets require that many firms develop a variety of marketing mixes to reach their consumers. HR motivation practices are culturally affected. Leadership is greatly influenced by culture, as well. What is leadership thought to be? Is it patriarchal and hierarchical? Is the leader one among equals? Production managers have found that cultural values around attitudes toward change can seriously influence the acceptance of new production methods. Is employee evaluation understood as a development aid or an adversarial process? A culture’s accounting controls directly relate to its assumptions about people’s basic nature. Are the controls tight throughout the organization, suggesting low levels of trust, or loose, suggesting the culture assumes people will act honestly even when they are not closely monitored? Every business action is influenced by nationallevel cultural values. LO 3-3 Describe how culture shows itself. Because culture is not directly observable; it is manifested in the sociocultural aspects of a society. Culture manifests in, for example, a society’s aesthetics, religion, material culture, language, and social organization.
Geringer_InternationalBusiness
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