Task 1. Retell the text in 3 sentences answering the following question: how did the huge spectrum of the cultures of today appear in the world.

Task 2. You’ve seen the phrase ‘values patterns’ in the first lines of the text. Read the following definition of the word ‘value’ and think what four values dominate in our culture.

A value is the belief that a certain part of life is especially important. Every culture places different emphasis on family, work, religion, honor in the community, love and so on.

1.___________________

2. __________________

3. __________________

4. __________________

Task 3. The main reason for studying business across cultures is finding mutual understanding with your business partners. Here are some of the most common idioms that express understanding or inability to understand. Match the idioms and their definitions.

 

1. to catch on	a. to be too difficult to understand
2. to be beyond someone	b. to understand
3. to see	c. to begin to understand
4. to read between the lines	d. to listen to someone and try to understand despite one’s own anger
6. To hear someone out	e. to listen carefully and hear what is said and left unsaid

Task 4. Complete the following sentences with the correct idioms.

1. Most training programs give the trainees a few months to ______________ to how the business works.
2. That new computer program _______________ him. He just doesn’t understand the most basic applications.
3. It is important to ________________ even when you are angry. Most communication problems develop because people just don’t try to listen to one another.
4. That is a very well-marketed product. I can _____________ why it is so successful.
5. When negotiating with people from other cultures, it is important to consider everything carefully and to _______________. What someone does not say is often as important as what one says.

Text 2. Dimensions of national cultures (part 1)

Geert Hofstede has operated in an international environment since 1965, and his curiosity as a social psychologist led him to the comparison of nations, first as a travelling international staff member of a multinational (IBM) and later as a visiting professor at an international business school in Switzerland. His 1980 book Culture's Consequences combined his personal experiences with the statistical analysis of two unique data bases. The first and largest comprised answers of matched employee samples from 40 different countries to the same attitude survey questions. The second consisted of answers to some of these same questions by his executive students who came from 15 countries and from a variety of companies and industries. Systematic differences between nations in these two data bases occurred in particular for questions dealing with values. Values, in this case, are "broad preferences for one state of affairs over others", and they are mostly unconscious.

The first four dimensions

The values that distinguished countries (rather than individuals) from each other grouped themselves statistically into four clusters. They dealt with four anthropological problem areas that different national societies handle differently: ways of coping with inequality, ways of coping with uncertainty, the relationship of the individual with her or his primary group, and the emotional implications of having been born as a girl or as a boy. These became the Hofstede dimensions of national culture:

· Power Distance

· Uncertainty Avoidance

· Individualism versus Collectivism

· Masculinity versus Femininity.

Between 1990 and 2002, these dimensions were largely replicated in six other cross-national studies on very different populations from consumers to airline pilots, covering between 14 and 28 countries. In the 2010 third edition of the book Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind, scores on the dimensions are listed for 76 countries.

 (The source: http://geerthofstede.nl/dimensions-of-national-cultures)

Task 1. Retell the text in 5 sentences using the following table.

4 dimensions of national culture	four anthropological problem areas that different national societies handle differently
Power distance	ways of coping with inequality
Uncertainty Avoidance	ways of coping with uncertainty
Individualism versus Collectivism	the relationship of the individual with her or his primary group
Masculinity versus Femininity	the emotional implications of having been born as a girl or as a boy

Text 3. Dimensions of national cultures (part 2)

Power Distance

Power distance is the extent to which the less powerful members of organizations and institutions (like the family) accept and expect that power is distributed unequally. This represents inequality (more versus less), but defined from below, not from above. It suggests that a society's level of inequality is endorsed by the followers as much as by the leaders. Power and inequality, of course, are extremely fundamental facts of any society and anybody with some international experience will be aware that “all societies are unequal, but some are more unequal than others".

Uncertainty Avoidance

Uncertainty avoidance deals with a society's tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity. It indicates to what extent a culture programs its members to feel either uncomfortable or comfortable in unstructured situations. Unstructured situations are novel, unknown, surprising, different from usual. Uncertainty avoiding cultures try to minimize the possibility of such situations by strict laws and rules, safety and security measures, and on the philosophical and religious level by a belief in absolute Truth: "there can only be one Truth and we have it". People in uncertainty avoiding countries are also more emotional, and motivated by inner nervous energy. The opposite type, uncertainty accepting cultures, are more tolerant of opinions different from what they are used to; they try to have as few rules as possible, and on the philosophical and religious level they are relativist and allow many currents to flow side by side. People within these cultures are more phlegmatic and contemplative, and not expected by their environment to express emotions.

Individualism

Individualism on the one side versus its opposite, collectivism, is the degree to which individuals are integrated into groups. On the individualist side we find societies in which the ties between individuals are loose: everyone is expected to look after her/himself and her/his immediate family. On the collectivist side, we find societies in which people from birth onwards are integrated into strong, cohesive in-groups, often extended families (with uncles, aunts and grandparents) which continue protecting them in exchange for unquestioning loyalty. The word collectivism in this sense has no political meaning: it refers to the group, not to the state. Again, the issue addressed by this dimension is an extremely fundamental one, regarding all societies in the world.

Masculinity

Masculinity versus its opposite, femininity, refers to the distribution of emotional roles between the genders which is another fundamental issue for any society to which a range of solutions are found. The IBM studies revealed that (a) women's values differ less among societies than men's values; (b) men's values from one country to another contain a dimension from very assertive and competitive and maximally different from women's values on the one side, to modest and caring and similar to women's values on the other. The assertive pole has been called masculine and the modest, caring pole feminine. The women in feminine countries have the same modest, caring values as the men; in the masculine countries they are more assertive and more competitive, but not as much as the men, so that these countries show a gap between men's values and women's values.

(The source: http://geerthofstede.nl/dimensions-of-national-cultures)