they add, "Looking back to half a century of development assistance, most observers agree that the effectiveness of much of the spending has been dismal. I suggest to google some critical assessments of Hofstede so you rank this book where it really belongs. This is not bad -- they simply need to be above board and stop pretending to take the role of the neutral outsider (at least to better influence those of us who are American conservatives; we are big into distinguishing between fact and evaluation of fact; these evaluations are always done through a person's own personal gridwork). I am currently working on my doctorate in global leadership, and I was hoping that this text would be a great resource for my program.

The evolutionary perspective is the apex with which we should view all life-related phenomena, at least if we don’t want to end up with the ivory archipelago, a situation where each separate subject proposes theories and analyses data that have no coherent, overarching implications for other subjects at all, meaning that they could be uttering the most complete nonsense without being corrected by other views. This financed (still does) and maintains of the lifestyles of ‘home’ citizens and increases investitures of their pension funds. But amazing Hofstede, he got it right to be the most cited European sociologist in today's sociology. Having flown 1900+ hours in a NATO staffed flying unit, I found the insights in this book invaluable for understanding the various effects of culture on cockpit etiquette and flight safety.While most other books on the matter either remain hopelessly vague, or loose themselves in academic abstractions, Hofstede really gets down to it. The fifth dimension which was later added based on results from the Far East and Asia - Long- versus Short-Term Orientation - is not discussed in this book.

The first part describes Hofstede's famous dimensions of national culture, the second discusses cultures in organizations and lasts the implications of all the earlier chapters. Part three consist of two concluding chapters of which the first discusses intercultural encounters and culture shocks. I picked it up from the university’s library as I needed to refer to the original source for my dissertation and by the time I got to that specific part I needed, I decided I might as well finish it.Both practical and theoretical, this is the only book that I know of that really describes and explains cultural differences on various levels (family, school, work. In any of the countries mentioned, how can Hofstede say that he can form a view of the whole cultural situation based on a handful of IBM middle managers? POWER DISTANCE: The extent to which the less powerful members of institutions and organisations within a country expect and accept that power is distributed unequally. Projects funded by international agencies such as the World Bank in theory do not have this constraint, but they have to satisfy the agency’s objectives, which often also conflict with the receivers’ objectives.

In Part Four, he discusses how intercultural encounters are affected by these dimensions and how awareness and acceptance of these differences can yield more effective results. In many cases the numbers were so low that it compared unfavourably even to those hair product adverts (83% or 160 people said they prefer our hair product).Hofstede is of opinion that culture does *not* change or that it takes a very very long time before it changes (relative to each other). On the basis of such a revised declaration, victims of political and religious fundamentalisms can be protected; this protection should prevail over national sovereignty'', followed by the acknowledgement of historical record ''The nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century was the age of Europe; Europeans and their offspring overseas were the “lords of humankind,” who colonized most of the outside world while wealth owed from outside to inside'' but cannot seem to see the continuation of the practice so resort to vulgar opinion ''freedom from want became recognized as a fundamental human right, and around 1950 programs of development aid were gradually started, financed by the rich countries and with the poor ones as receivers. The book itself does not use any mathematical approach; those who want to check the numbers should refer to another of Dr. So while this was one of the great books I read this year, I still think that the title of book is misleading - for organizational cultures is not the mainstay of the book; national culture is. Development aid money often has political strings attached to it: it has to be spent in a way that satisfies the values, if not the interests, of the donor country citizens and politicians, whether or not such values are shared by citizens and politicians at the receiving end.

Rather than look at total giving (or perecentage) OF A SOCIETY, they authors confuse a society with its government. Interestingly enough, Malcolm Gladwell wrote an excellent chapter in his Nov 2008 book Outliers (also highly recommended) based on this, i.Starting from the most superficial, SYMBOLS are words, gestures, pictures or objects that carry a particular meaning that is recognise as such only by those who share the culture. Although the authors do make a serious attempt to look at things from other perspectives, they simply cannot divorce themselves from their own cultural preferances. We need to understand the purpose of all of the behaviours instantiated by our cultures, which all tend towards the maintenance (and eventual enlargement) of the moral circle, or the group of people to whom we owe our allegiance. To understand what it means to be human I think it is good to look at how our cultures provide for our basic needs, and how varied these cultures are. I am very interested in cross-cultural differences at various levels, in organizations but also in families and education.