the meaning of culture
THE MEANING OF CULTURE
One cannot enter into alliances without knowing the designs of one¡¯s neighbours
Sun Zi, The Art of War
1. Different cultures have different ways of achieving the same goals
2. It is useful to understand the cultural differences so that:
- You can translate the meaning of what the other is doing
- You can behave according to the other¡¯s rules when it is appropriate to do so
3. There are many roads into another culture for someone with curiosity, humility, patience and open-mindedness.
4. Those who most need to understand cross-cultural communication and management are those who work with people from other cultures
The reason why we at all face difficulties when dealing with people from a different culture is that our minds are conditioned culturally at an early age. Watching people from other cultures doing things in a different way usually cause both frustration and amusement. We smile and sometimes shake our heads when we see a foreign person doing something that appears odd to us while congratulating ourselves on our normality. Yet, we will soon discover if we live for several years abroad that we cannot categorize one culture as being more or less normal or acceptable than another.
Culture comes in layers, like an onion. To understand it you have to unpeel it layer by layer.
On the outer layer are the products of culture that you can see with the bare eye ¨C language, food, buildings, houses, markets, fashions and art. For example, a foreigner coming to China will see Chinese people doing Tai Chi in a park on an early morning, the crowded streets with thousands of people, honking horns and ringing bikes and mobile phones. These are expressions of deeper values and norms in a society that are not directly visible. The layers of values and norms are deeper within the ¡°onion¡±, and more difficult to...
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