Dr Marieke de Mooij, Independent Consultant in Cross-Cultural Communication

Executive summary

The chapter summarises certain key characteristics of cross-cultural communication and presents a model frequently used in the analysis of cultural differences. In doing so, it attempts to underline the importance of cultural understanding to effective communication, influence and dialogue across national borders.

For international public diplomacy activities to be effective, it is necessary to know how national culture influences interaction and communication between people of different cultures. This chapter will argue that:

• there is no universal model of communication;
• the ‘western’ model of communication doesn’t work equally well in other parts of the world;
  
• communication will be more effective if it is adapted to the communication behaviour of those at whom it is targeted;
  
• we can draw on a growing body of knowledge from cross-cultural psychology, anthropology and international business to learn how national culture influences human motives, behaviour, and interpersonal and mass communication.

The future: a global village peopled by uniform citizens?

The concept of the ‘global village’ was coined by the Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan,¹ who argued that new technology acts as an extension of human beings and enhances existing human activities. He never said that, in this global village, people would be uniform. However, the assumption persists that global media, the World Wide Web and increased travel are gradually leading to a convergence of values and lifestyles across the globe. In reality, the degree of convergence is limited. In 2007 only 27 per cent of the inhabitants of 25 European countries said they had travelled abroad three times in the previous three years.² Only 9 per cent had a job that involved contact with organisations or people in other countries. The proportion of people around the world who regularly watch international television programmes is small relative to the size of potential audience. Television channels that might be expected to shape people’s opinions and lifestyles, such as CNN, were envisaged as global standard channels but have localised content and language. Increasingly, the World Wide Web recognises the country where a computer is based, and tailors the information it offers to local circumstances. How people use the internet also varies. According to the search engine Technorati,³ in 2006 there were more blogs in the Japanese language than in the English language. A few ubiquitous global brands are frequently used as examples of the success of global business in a global market. However, in most countries it is local brands that are most highly valued and trusted.⁴ In 2008 the most trusted car in France was Renault; in Germany and Austria it was Volkswagen; in the Czech Republic, Skoda; in India, Maruti; and in most of East Asia, Toyota or Honda.

Nor has increased wealth led to greater uniformity. On the contrary, rises in income levels have tended to reinforce existing cultural values. Additional income gives people greater freedom of choice and self-expression, but their choices (including how they adopt new technology) tend to conform to traditional values and patterns of behaviour. The result is divergence, rather than convergence, of behaviour across national cultures.⁵ For example, countries have converged in respect of the number of television sets owned per 1,000 people, but diverged in respect of the time those people spend watching television.

This persistent resistance to uniformity implies that effective interaction across national boundaries requires an understanding of differences in human behaviour and of the cultural values that give rise to these differences.

Cultural values

A value, in the context of this chapter, is a preference of one state of being over another.⁶ We want to be happy, not sad. We want to be healthy, not sick. Values are learned early in life. By the age of ten most children have their basic values firmly in place. As a result, values remain stable through generations. These values guide and determine attitudes and behaviour. We are not usually aware of our values; they operate unconsciously, like an automatic pilot.

In the English language the term ‘culture’ usually refers to the arts, education and science. In the context of this chapter, it is used in the broad anthropological sense and taken to mean a set of shared values (value system) of a group, as well as the manifestation of these values. A group can be constituted by the family, or by a profession, company, region or nation. Hence we speak of family culture, professional culture, corporate culture or national culture (the last being the focus of this chapter). In a value system, values are ordered in priority with respect to other values. For example, in North America individual happiness is a value of high priority, its pursuit a constitutional right, whereas in East Asia personal happiness has lower priority than perseverance and harmony.

Individuals are partly products of the value systems of the societies in which they grow up, and partly products of unique individual personality and experience. A society’s institutions reflect the value system shared by its individual members. Individuals are in turn guided by their shared culture and, in their behaviour, reinforce the society’s value system.⁷

In looking at how values drive behaviour, we need to recognise that there is a distinction between what people think ought to be desired and what they actually desire. The desirable reflects the general norms of a society and is interpreted and presented in terms of right or wrong. The desired is what we consider important for ourselves and what the majority actually do. The desirable and the desired do not always overlap.

We also need to recognise that the values that drive behaviour are not necessarily visible to the outside observer. When people point at what they call changing values, these are often changes in cultural practice. Roland gives the example of how an Indian man at work may dress in western clothes and disregard intercaste rules in eating and other rituals, while strictly observing all these codes and dressing traditionally at home.⁸

Comparison of national cultures requires us to look at the average value priorities of the individual members of a given national group in relation to those of the individual members of other national groups. A single national boundary can often encompass a range of diverse cultural groupings. But differences between nations tend to be larger than differences within nations and are reinforced over time, particularly in longer-established nations, by forces towards further integration (for example, a dominant language, common mass media, a national education system, and national markets for products and services).

Comparing national cultures: the Hofstede model

The best-known – and most frequently applied – model for comparing national cultures is that developed by the Dutch social psychologist Geert Hofstede.⁹ This model, first conceived in 1973, had by 2001 been validated by over 400 studies.¹⁰

Hofstede distinguishes five dimensions of national culture:

• individualism vs. collectivism;
  
• power distance;
  
• uncertainty avoidance;
  
• masculinity vs. femininity; and
  
• long-term vs. short-term orientation.

Countries are given a position on each dimension in the form of a score on a scale from 0 to 100. The combined scores for each country offer a picture of its national culture that enables it to be distinguished from that of other countries. The different national scores represent the different cultures; the differences in culture in turn explain differences in behaviour. Scores are currently available for 74 countries. The principal features of each dimension are set out below, together with some implications for cross-cultural communication.

Individualism vs. collectivism

In individualistic cultures, people grow up with the notion that they should each develop a unique personality and identity. People are ‘I’-conscious, express private opinions, and attach importance to self-actualisation. In collectivistic cultures, identities are based on the social system to which people belong. People are fundamentally interdependent and harmony is a key virtue.

The nations that score most highly on individualism are the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. (It could be argued that individualism originated in the UK.¹¹ The English language is the only language in the world that spells ‘I’ with a capital letter!) Asian, Latin American and African nations, by contrast, have low scores on individualism, identifying them as collectivistic. This means that 70–80 per cent of the world’s population share a broadly collectivistic culture.

Large vs. small power distance

Power distance is defined as the extent to which less powerful members of a society accept that power is distributed unequally, and indeed expect this to be the case. It is reflected in the values of both the less powerful and the more powerful members of that society. Asian, Latin American and African nations score highly on the ‘power distance’ scale. In Europe there is a divide, with high scores for France, Belgium and the Mediterranean nations, and low scores for the United Kingdom, United States, Germany, the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries.

Strong vs. weak uncertainty avoidance

Uncertainty avoidance is defined as the extent to which people feel threatened by, and try to avoid, situations that give rise to uncertainty and ambiguity. In some national cultures, people cope with uncertainty with relative ease. In others, people attempt to limit it by making rules and prescribing behaviour. The countries of southern and eastern Europe and of Latin America score high on uncertainty avoidance, as do South Korea and Japan, whereas the UK, Scandinavia and China have low scores.

Masculinity vs. femininity

A high score on this dimension indicates a national culture in which the dominant values are achievement and success. A low score represents a culture in which the dominant values are concern for others and quality of life, allied to a tendency to strive for consensus. Examples of nations with predominantly ‘masculine’ values are the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Mexico and Japan. Examples of nations with predominantly ‘feminine’ values are the Netherlands, the Scandinavian countries, Portugal, Spain, Chile and Thailand.

Long-term vs. short-term orientation

This fifth dimension measures variations in long-term versus short-term thinking. Characteristics of national cultures that think long-term are pragmatism, perseverance and thrift. National cultures that think short-term have a ‘buy now, pay later’ approach. National cultures in the West tend towards a short-term orientation and those in East Asia towards a long-term orientation.

Insights

Using the Hofstede model as a means of analysing and comparing different national cultures serves to convey to all who wish to engage across national boundaries the importance of a detailed understanding of the values and consequent behavioural patterns of one’s audience, interlocutor, colleague or partner. Some examples of the insights that it generates are listed below.

Children who grow up in individualistic cultures are expected to develop a critical mind, whereas children growing up in collectivistic cultures are expected to develop a receptive mind. As a result, their world-views are different. In collectivistic cultures, the group, family or tribe comes first. It constitutes a person’s identity.

In individualistic cultures, people tend to assess identity and personality in abstract terms.¹² ‘Collectivists’ will describe themselves in relation to others, and the description will vary with the context.¹³ For example, Chinese and Japanese languages have no equivalent term for ‘personality’ in the western sense.

In the political context, concepts of ‘nation-building’ may have less resonance in collectivistic cultures (in which relationships are rooted in group structures such as the family or tribe) than in individualistic cultures (where the abstract concept of the nation as a unique expression of a society may be more easily grasped).

Because of the high priority accorded to harmony, members of collectivistic cultures will not easily say ‘no’ explicitly. They have ways of saying ‘yes’ that to another insider mean ‘no’. An outsider may draw the wrong conclusion.

In the individualistic West, consistency is highly valued: attitudes are relatively consistent, and attitudes tend to predict behaviour. In collectivistic cultures, people’s attitudes, and also their behaviour, will vary more with social context. Thus measuring attitudes as a way of predicting behaviour will not be equally effective in all cultures.

The combination of scores on ‘power distance’ and ‘uncertainty avoidance’ shows up variations in the extent to which people in different national cultures consider that events and outcomes are the result of their own actions and behaviour or, conversely, are a function of factors outside their control – chance or fate, other more powerful people – or simply unpredictable. In western culture, where power distance tends to be low and uncertainty avoidance weak, the former attitude tends to prevail. In many other cultures, the belief that fate, or other, more powerful, actors, may intervene at any time reinforces the potential disjuncture between intentions and behaviour, as expressed intention has less importance or value.

Hospitality is very important in collectivistic cultures. A guest is welcome at any time. In individualistic cultures, one makes an appointment for a visit. Collectivists visiting an individualistic culture may feel neglected or even offended. However, because they deem it essential to maintain harmony they will adapt to the situation, and individualists will all too easily think that their visitors are like themselves.

In order to accomplish change in a collectivistic culture, whether in business or in politics, time has to be invested in building relationships and trust. It takes a long time to develop the harmonious relationships that facilitate effective cooperation.

Communication in individualistic cultures is explicit and verbal. But in collectivistic cultures communication is more indirect, again in order to preserve harmony. A direct communication style may be perceived as offensive.

People from individualistic cultures tend to believe that there are universal values that should be shared by all.¹⁴ They want other peoples to see the world the way they do. People from collectivistic cultures, on the other hand, more readily accept that different cultures have different values. In individualistic cultures, laws and rights are supposed to be the same for all members and applied indiscriminately to everybody. In collectivistic societies, laws and rights may differ from one category of people to another – if not in theory, then in the way laws are administered – and this is often not seen as wrong.¹⁵

In national cultures that score highly on the power distance scale, every one has their ‘rightful place’ in a social hierarchy. As a result, both the exercise and the acceptance of authority come naturally. In cultures with lower scores on this scale, independence and equality of rights and opportunity are highly valued. Western-style participatory democracy flourishes in national cultures that score high on individualism and low on power distance. In collectivistic cultures that score highly on power distance, leadership in both business and politics is more paternalistic. In 2004 a public opinion survey by a UN development programme found, to the dismay of North American journalists, that more than half of Latin American citizens would opt for an authoritarian regime in preference to a democratic government if that would solve their economic problems.¹⁶

Cultures characterised by strong uncertainty avoidance need rules and formality to structure life. This need is expressed in a search for truth and a belief in experts. Conflict and competition are perceived as threatening. In these cultures there is a greater respect for formal qualifications as signifiers of expertise and authority. Cultures characterised by low uncertainty avoidance are more innovative and open to change, and put a lower premium on externally defined ‘expertise’.

Nations with low scores on uncertainty avoidance can be successful because of their innovativeness (the United Kingdom, China) and nations with high scores can be successful because of their expertise in precision technology (Germany, Japan, South Korea). Different positions on this dimension of national culture are reflected in differing approaches to the adoption of new technology. Among developed countries, ownership of personal computers and internet penetration has been highest in nations that score low on uncertainty avoidance.

Cross-cultural communication

Some of these insights can usefully be drawn together to illuminate thinking about how to maximise the effectiveness of communication strategies, whether in a business or a political context.

For example, significant differences become apparent in how people receive and evaluate information. Whereas in western, individualistic cultures people acquire and process information more or less rationally and consciously via the media and opinion-formers, in collectivistic cultures people acquire information via implicit, interpersonal communication and base their decisions more on feelings and trust. In collectivistic cultures there is a continuous, almost unconscious flow of information between people – to the extent that when collectivists are asked for the source of their information in surveys, they frequently say they ‘don’t know’.¹⁷ For outsiders, a collectivistic culture in which so much information circulates implicitly can be confusing. The lesson here is the importance of finding a trusted intermediary who is integrated into the communication system. This is doubly important given that, in a collectivistic culture, the objectivity of a message may often be less significant than who is giving it: the effectiveness of the message will be gauged by the level of trust in the sender.

Another example relates to the extent to which people can think in conceptual and abstract terms. To take an example from a commercial context, asking people to connect abstract associations to brands will yield different results in different national cultures.¹⁸ Western marketers have adopted concepts of ‘personality’ or ‘identity’ to differentiate their brands and position them vis-à-vis competing brands. But these concepts have less impact in collectivistic cultures. Because of different communication styles among countries, global businesses have had to adapt their advertising (in terms of both message and medium) to local context.

This understanding of cultural difference, and of the consequent variance in patterns of behaviour, is also crucial when deciding which media to use in support of commercial or political communication and engagement strategies. In individualistic cultures people read more than in collectivistic cultures; in the latter, people tend to be more visually oriented. Consequently, in the former, press media are effective channels of influence; in the latter, television is a more important medium. There are implications also for use of the World Wide Web: effective website design is more visual, and less verbal, in Asia, Latin America and Africa. The new interactive possibilities of the Web brought together under the rubric of ‘Web 2.0’ demand even more cultural understanding, as online users should expect to encounter unfamiliar communication behaviour, based on cultural difference, in their virtual encounters with other users across the world.

Cultural difference must also be factored into how businesses that want to understand their markets, and governments that want to listen to foreign publics, conduct survey research. Variations in the extent to which people will be ready to give a positive or negative answer to a direct question, or to which expressed attitudes will predict behaviour, must be taken into account. For example, culture influences the way people respond to scales, such that some nationalities may habitually opt for high scores, or middling scores, and this means that data collected in different parts of the world may not be comparable.¹⁹

Conclusion

The brief survey in this chapter has attempted to lodge in the mind of the reader three propositions:

Differences in national culture, and the values that underpin them, are resilient. Modernisation can result in evolution of cultural practice, but underlying values are less susceptible to rapid change. Chinese teenagers may wear jeans, but this doesn’t necessarily affect their attitudes towards authority. Moreover, the increased wealth brought by globalisation is likely to reinforce, rather than diminish, differences in behaviour between national cultures.

These differences mean that there can be no universal model for communicating and influencing effectively across national boundaries. Strategies for communication and influence need to be rooted in a detailed, context-specific understanding of both the behavioural patterns and the underlying cultural values of those with whom we want to engage.

Recognition of this is a vital first step for professionals, whether in the commercial, the political or the diplomatic arena, who want to exert influence upon and engage with others across the globe.

Notes

1. M. McLuhan, Understanding media: the extensions of man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964).

2. European cultural values, Special Eurobarometer 278 (Brussels: European Commission, 2007).

3. http://technorati.com.

4. Findings from various brand value studies as well as from Reader’s Digest Trusted Brands surveys. For the 2008 survey see http://www.rdtrustedbrands.com.

5. M. de Mooij, Consumer behavior and culture (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2004).

6. M. Rokeach, The nature of human values (New York: Free Press, 1973).

7. G. Hofstede, Culture’s consequences, 2nd edn (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2001), pp.15–17; S. H. Schwartz, ‘Beyond individualism/collectivism’, in U. Kim, H. C. Triandis et al., eds, Individualism and collectivism: theory, method, and applications, vol. 18: Cross-cultural research and methodology (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994), pp. 92–3.

8. A. Roland, In search of self in India and Japan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 94.

9. G. Hofstede and G. J. Hofstede, Cultures and organizations: software of the mind, 2nd edn (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2005).

10. Hofstede, Culture’s consequences.

11. A. Macfarlane, The origins of English individualism (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1978).

12. H. R. Markus and S. Kitayama, ‘The cultural psychology of personality’, Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 29, 1998, pp. 63–87.

13. A. Norenzayan, I. Choi and R. E. Nisbett, ‘Cultural similarities and differences in social influence: evidence from behavioral predictions and lay theories of behavior’, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 28, 2002, pp. 109–20.

14. N. J. Adler, International dimensions of organizational behavior, 2nd edn (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1991), p. 47.

15. Hofstede and Hofstede, Cultures and organizations, p. 105.

16. Democracy in Latin America (UN Non-Governmental Liaison Service, 2004), available in draft form at http://www.un-ngls.org/democracy-undp-publication.htm.

17. Consumers Survey, Flash Eurobarometer 117 (Brussels: European Commission, 2002).

18. Ming-Huei Hsieh, ‘Measuring global brand equity using cross-national survey data’, Journal of International Marketing 12, 2004, pp. 28–57.

19. Gordon W. Cheung and Roger B. Rensvold, ‘Assessing extreme and acquiescence response sets in cross-cultural research using structural equations modeling’, Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 31, 2000, pp. 187–212; Irvine Clarke III, ‘Extreme response style in cross-cultural research’, International Marketing Review 18, 2001, pp. 301–24; Fons van de Vijver and Kwok Leung, Methods and data analysis for cross-cultural research (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997), p. 15.