The Culture Map by Erin Meyer - Book Report/Review Example

Introduction

The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business by Erin Meyer is a book that brings out the differences that people working in multicultural environments encounter in their daily endeavors. The author uses her experience in the field of cross-cultural studies to provide practical research into how people experience other cultures different from their own. As the world of business turns to globalization to expand and rake in more profits, so does the businesses have to contend with training their culturally diverse workforce to cope with each other. Meyer’s book is based on personal assumptions of what the author perceives to be solutions to a cultural nightmare affecting many people dealing with cross-cultural contacts. Using various personal accounts of dealing with different people from different cultural backgrounds, the author creates an anthology of cultural observed stories and tries to provide solutions to the problems.

While it is important to acknowledge the cultural differences and the role they play in success or failures of global businesses, it is also important to avoid generalizations. The author draws from experiences and other perceived strange cultural observations to create a series of cultural elements that the author perceives to be important in dealing with different cultures. These cultural elements include communication, evaluation, persuasion, leadership and decision among other elements. In explaining how the cultural elements can be used in successful integration with other cultures, the author draws on different countries which the author perceives to use different magnitudes of the elements. For example, in a country like Japan, the author cites that they use implicit language in communication. The book also points to the use of technological communication like e-mails, and video conferencing among others as some of the communication modules that can lead to a lot of cultural misunderstanding. The book stresses on the importance of face to face communication as one way of avoiding misconceptions brought by technological communication. As a result of the problems that arise due to cultural differences amidst the inevitability of global businesses, the book suggests that there is a necessity of understanding human nature and personality differences as one way of ensuring success in business.

Discussion

The author uses observational research through personal and related people experiences to document and provide practical solutions to myriad problems presented by cultural differences in the global business world. It is interesting to note that the book is based on an anthology of cultural stories that the author perceives to be unique in the global business world. Moreover, the author seeks to provide a solution to what to the author is perceived as a major cultural problem in the business world. In one way or the other, the book seems to provide a personal problem encountered when dealing with different cultures. This is evident in the concepts that the author brings forward in the entirety of the book. Although, it is crucial to highlight that cultural differences are a problem especially to global business, the extent to which the writer assumes it can be solved solely lies on a personal basis and therefore cannot be used or relied upon. The author presents four key concepts in the book; organizational behavior, culture, cross-cultural communication and cultural diversity. Whereas, the whole book deals with more than four concepts, it is only plausible to say that the most of them are an overly representation of the key dimensions of cross-cultural differences.

The concept of culture and associated misconceptions

One of the key concepts in the work is culture. As described in many research findings and other pieces of work, culture is the wholesome entity that defines a people. Culture in the context of the book defines how all the other concepts and elements described in the book work or inter-relate to bring out the problems. One of the assumptions of the author is that culture works as a different entity from the other elements the author brings out. For example, culture is independent from communication or organizational culture and so forth. One of the underlying facts is that culture is the overall entity that carries and determines all the other facets as described by the author. Culture determines how people communicate, behave or misbehave, and are organized in any business. An important element to consider is the fact that any global business must and exists in a certain cultural setting. Other researches that have been proved to work have disapproved the way the author describes the solutions to issues arising due to cultural diversity in global businesses (Hofstede, 1980).

One of the most prolific and widely used solutions to cultural problems in global business is cultural profiling. Cultural profiling is a successful tool that seeks to understand other cultures through dissemination of information that underlies how different cultures behave. In cultural profiling has been used to develop organizational cultures that dictate organizational behavior and other used elements that characterize organizational set-ups. However, the author tries to underestimate the influence of culture as one factor that creates problems for global businesses. This is evident in the way the author realigns the elements that the author purports to be solutions to the problems. Many global businesses have utilized other cultural elements or dimensions to solve cultural diversity problems. The most commonly used dimensions are the Hofstede’s six dimensions that outline how cultural reactions to universal stimulus like power, distance and individualism among other stimulus affect people’s reactions when faced with people from other cultures. However, the dimensions use culture as the main driving force behind the behaviors. In this light, the author misses the critical feature that the book seems to tackle. As a work seeking to provide solutions to cross-cultural differences associated with global businesses, it would have been prudent to base the arguments from a common point of view, which is culture (Hofstede, Hofstede and Minkov, 2010). However, the book provides a scanty explanation of elements that relate to the author’s personal story and not from an overall cultural context that can be universally and comprehensively used by people to deal with cultural problems. In addition, to this gross personal assumption by the writer, the book tackles the problems from a personal interaction point of view. In this, the author presents solutions based on what seems to be friendly and deep lying interactions rather than business interactions that are professional.

In the global business world, people relate more on a professional basis that requires less personal interactions and thus writing off some of the elements described by the author. Nevertheless, it appears less convincing that all the elements described by the author are related to culture as the major facet that underlies the production of the book. Rather, they appear to be fragmented aspects of personal interactive sessions that detail how the author perceives to handle problems. Many research studies have pointed out to how an individual’s culture can lead to misinterpretations of other cultures. Further, culture as an entity cannot be learned through observations only but also by practicing the cultures to delineate the differences between the two. Studies on cultural differences affect global business like the Hofstede study on IBM organizational culture that yielded the six dimensions that is widely used in global business takes decades and overly rely on culture to decode the different reactions by different cultures. However, the author uses several instances where differences between cultures have led to misunderstandings as the basis for the arguments presented in the book. It is prudent thus to conclude that the author basis the arguments based not from an impartial observation, but argues from the differences she experiences between her culture and the cultures she interacts with. In fact, the solutions provided give glaring disparities between the elements cited in the book from one culture and another and not from a generalized viewpoint.

It is important to note that decoding different cultural meanings require generalized dimensions that appeal to all cultures especially given the extensive cultural network that global business leaders encounter in their life. Thus, the work is reiterative of a personal solution on how deal with the differences between one’s culture and another culture. In essence, the solutions provided cannot work on people who experience vast cultural differences in their global business dealings. Communication and language use forms a major part of the concepts argued by the author. One of the observations the author uses is the use of implicit and explicit language in delivering information from one individual to the other. In Japan, the author notes that implicit listening is emphasized. The other observation and generalization the author makes is use of high and low context languages where some cultures are argued to use one word to mean different meanings in different contexts. This is a gross personal generalization made by the author.

As exhibited in the book, the author only draws comparison of other cultures with her own culture, for instance, the author draws comparisons between English and French vocabulary. In such a personal context, the author fails in providing solutions that can be used in a wide range of cultures. Further, the number of words in a language cannot be used to generalize the use of one word to mean different things. In essence, all cultures use some words in different contexts to imply to different scenarios. In this case, discerning the meaning of the words requires implicit listening. Moreover, all cultures have implicit and explicit communications depending on the situation and the nature of communications. Thus, this cannot be used to determine or divide culture into high or low context languages. In addition to this, differences occur in individuals where not all Americans talk all time as it depends on the nature of communication. A professional communication requires a learned American to talk and listen at different times, whether they are the leaders or not (Meyer, 2014).

Organizational behavior and leadership

Despite the author’s mixed and repetitive arguments that indicate how her culture influenced the work and solutions provided to common problems, the author presents leadership as one of the major facet that affects organizational behavior. Organizational behavior is a subset of how leaders manage the organizations. It is apparent that different cultures ascribe to different forms of leadership. In some countries like Russia, Brazil and U.S.A., decisions are supposed to be made by the leader with the subordinates playing a very small role. While in other cultures, like the Japanese culture, leaders function as people to provide harmony and unity to the group. There is no defined hierarchical power structure. In cultures where power is hierarchical, organizational behavior tends to be different from an egalitarian type of leadership managed organizations. In the world of global business, however, such differences in leadership have been blurred by the fact that some form of leadership guarantees success in any culture it is applied to (Sonja, Matzaj and Monty, 2008).

Efforts towards having a standard global way of doing business and intercultural integration have blurred these differences. In fact, it is impossible to find cultures involved in global businesses that have not forsaken some of their entrenched cultural elements for the sake of success in business. In spite of this, leadership patterns affect the way organizational behaviors are developed and revolve around the leader. Despite marked differences in cultures, one common fact is that leaders act as role models whether in egalitarian or hierarchical cultures. The author pays attention to Hofstede’s famous power distance dimension, which looks at the acceptable levels of inequality in various cultures. Hofstede, a major figure in global business cultural solutions outlined the differences of inequality that characterize cultures as egalitarian or hierarchical. This dimension has extensively been used to describe organizational behavior in regard to how people behave towards others in a business setting. The author’s analysis of the leadership differences in cultures points out to the influence of the leadership type on how the organization behaves.

The author states that leadership differences are due to the entrenched norms of cultures that tend either to relegate or promote power among individuals. Whereas in China power is measured in terms of monetary power and thus equated to more leadership power, Australians on the other hand play down the essence of monetary power among leaders. This affects the way organizations behave in general. Organizations have been described as innovative or rewarding among other terms used to describe different organizations. However, the most unknown fact is that it is the organizational behavior that characterizes the group as either innovative or rewarding. Whether in egalitarian or hierarchical cultures, policies adopted directly or indirectly, for example, in wage differences may highly affect the behavior of employees. Consequently, this defines the organizational behavior, as a result of policies adopted by the leadership. The author uses diversity as a major propping point of the arguments (Makin and Cox, 2004).

Misconception of diversity and cultural differences

Diversity in this case refers to differences in cultures as observed. One of the main arguments adopted in the book is that different countries have different cultures, and thus there is Japanese, Denmark, Scandinavian, French and American cultures among many other cultures. As the author integrates with people from different countries, there’s an overlying assumption that each country has its unique culture that characterizes business transactions and that can be used as a template for other intercultural problems. It is a fact that many countries involved in global business have people with different cultures. For example, the author observes that a friend living in American has Russian and Serbian origin. This undermines the author’s solutions when dealing with people from one country in that not all observe the country’s dominant culture. This presents a common trend adopted by the author in her arguments; that of using personal experiences and observations to draw generalizations and conclusions. Whereas, it is a fact that diversity of cultures exists even in one country, the author does not acknowledge this fact.

The author equates countries with cultures, drawing a lot of mistakes in the conclusions. It appears that the author’s culture and personal perceptions play a huge role in the conclusions and solutions provided. The author also negates the importance of people’s diversity as a product of culture. The author views do not differentiate between personality and natural differences with culture as seen in the concluding remarks. In essence, global businesses can only be successful through understanding cultural differences and not personality differences. In many instances, culture defines people’s personalities and not the other way round. This is one of the glaring misconceptions the author makes in the work.

Most of the author’s arguments are based on personal encounters with several people from different cultures. On a light note, it is important to acknowledge the emphasis on how culture is an impediment to successful cross-cultural interactions that underlie global business processes. On the other hand, it is crucial to note that cross-cultural differences are overtly differences between cultures. Culture dictates people’s life as it is the only unconscious control that influences people’s nature and personalities. When dealing with alien cultures, it is important to note that our own culture has a high influence on how we perceive the other cultures. Cultural studies emphasize on the need to view other cultures in their own accord while resisting ethnocentrism. Further, a conclusive study that can comprehensively provide solutions cannot be based on few professional encounters with few people from different cultures.

However, the author’s recommendations and solutions point out to a great influence of one’s culture. This represents a great deviation from research findings that not only dictate how intercultural studies should be conducted but also on recommendation of how one should relate with other cultures. Global businesses have successfully used cultural profiling and other models that present a consensus on what global businesses face pertaining to cultural differences. This models and profiles do not agree with the arguments provided by the author. In many ways, the author seems to present conclusions based from friendly and not professional interactions. Cultures have been shown to share some aspects of elements like communication, leadership styles and organizational behaviors that have been described as very different in cultures. Yet, some aspects outlined overlap in cultures.

Conclusion

The book, which is based on an anthology of encounters with people from different cultures bases its arguments from personal perception of how differences in cultures should be addressed. Although there are existing problems that global businesses encounter due to differences in cultures, the book presents some ineffective solutions to the problem. In recent times, cultural diversity has been used to the advantage of global businesses. Extensive research studies have not only revealed common traits in different cultures but have also provided elements that have been used successfully by global leaders. However, much of the author’s arguments have been based on an ethnocentric view of other cultures, thus providing generalizations on repetitive issues. Whereas, the author purports to provide cultural map to global businesses, the result is a mixed and personally crafted solutions, much to the dismay of the reader. A point to ponder is the use of the recommendations and solutions provided in the book when presented with countries that the author have not come into contact with. Further, it is impossible to successfully relate with cultures listed in the book as most cases are specific to the author.