Interaction with other cultures in the globalized world. A small example of Western and Easter culture

Abstract

Culture touches various forms of human life and as such is at the base of the social reagent and of the pure interaction between people in the social context.

Interacting with other cultures is very important in the age of globalization. Often, however, behaviors can be completely different, and you can interpret ways and situations in totally different ways. A gesture, a reasoning, can be offensive to others or may simply have different meanings. This happens both in the world of work and also in family social relations.

The effects of a culture can often become others in other cultures. In fact, it is not said that a virtuous gesture in one is read in the same way through the eyes of another culture. A direct investigation approach is essential to recalibrate our cultural perception and project it correctly into the new cultural context. Cultural intelligence and adaptation are crucial elements for achieving a good starting result.

Introduction

Culture is like an iceberg, as the spontaneous and visible manifestation is only a minor part of the cultural background in which a person has grown over time. For a manager, for example, it is important to understand that the cultural difference in a context of work and open inter­relationships is a very important factor on which he himself will have to work. In fact, if we consider the case of a globalized economy, the cultural difference from country to country has a large and often decisive social weight.

One can start from the presupposition in which the "patterned ways of thinking, feeling, and reacting, acquired and transmitted mainly by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievements of human groups, ie, historically derived and selected) ideas and especially their attached values "(Kroeber, 1952). We can say a priori that a culture is common to defined geographical areas, using the nation state as a point of reference, even if often this descriptive and generic envelope is not enough to correctly outline this meaning of culture, as culture can often be divided further in other areas or micro areas.

Cultural complexity, as defined by Hofstede in individualism-collectivism, power distance, uncertainty avoidance, and masculinity-femininity, are only essential starting points in which many scholars have found further bases and expansions of concepts to describe the reality and cultural diversity. Many cultures are individualistic, for example. I quote the case of Western culture which often bases its social and cultural interaction on models of little-expanded interaction and therefore involving the first group immediately adjacent to the individual. On the contrary, collectivist cultures, especially in Asian and Latin America forms of cultural and family representation, suggest a broad emphasis on the enlarged dimension, to the community.

In the particular case we can try to analyze this difference among three different cultures, the European, Latin American and the Asian culture.

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(Hofstede insight, Country Comparison)

As we can see from the graph, the cultural differences defined by Hofstede and its graphs are clearly different. in the comparison we immediately notice the critical points that distance the three cultures: the power distance, individualism, uncertainly avoidance, long term orientation.

According to the scheme provided by Hofstede Insight, power distance, dimension deals with the fact that all individuals in societies are not equal (Hofstede Insight, 2019) for Italy is definitely dedicated to decentralization and teamwork compared to the individual (in the North of the Country), the contrary case who in Philippines, as many as 94 of score, prefer a well- defined hierarchical relationship in which everyone has a place and willingly accept without explanation the hierarchical condition in which they live, thinking that the leader or autocrat is benevolent towards others. Colombia is in the middle The degree of individualism triumphs in Italy compared to the Philippines and Colombia. In Italy the concept of interaction with the people of the family closest to us triumphs almost completely with a score of 76. In this context, the individual elaborates his life in contact with a few people, remaining isolated in the community, preferring support from some close family member or friend and does not extend to other forms of external socialization such as belonging to a strong collective group. This vision is especially prominent in the cities of Northern Italy and in the richest areas, less impacting in the south. Personal fulfillment linked to one's career is very motivating for many people. Colombia with a score of 13 is the most collectivist from the three countries studied. Colombians keep a high level of interdependence among them.

This also happens to the Philippines where people belong to groups that take care of themselves in exchange for loyalty. In this collective context loyalty to the group it belongs to is fundamental and in the Philippines there are strong relationships in which everyone takes on the responsibility of others and in which the management is in groups and morality is profoundly linked to the feeling of loyalty manifested whose loss means loss in moral terms.

In uncertainty, Colombia got the highest score with 80. In this society, people deal with a lot of indecision for the future. Italy also had a high score in uncertainty, the forecast of uncertainty is strong in Italy with a number of 75. Italians feel at ease if future interactions are planned, even if they often do not accept to follow the rules deriving also simply from labor standards or from the penal code. In fact, being a people not inclined to uncertainty, it tries to give itself rules but little adapts to the static nature of these rules, preferring imaginative methods to escape from these rules. In the Philippines the score assigned is equal to 44 so they have a low preference to avoid uncertainty. In this context, people believe that few rules are necessary because if there are more rules that do not work, they should be modified or deleted. A further analysis highlights how punctuality, precision and innovation are not fundamental, especially this last one is seen as an opportunity.

Long term orientation describes well the example of Italy with a score of 61 in which we can say that the forecast for the future is linked to the context and time.

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