Latin Western European Business Culture Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Latin Western European Business Culture - Essay Example Collectivism, the propensity of people to stay within a long-term group, is also rated high. The Masculinity rating corresponds to emphasis laid on the traditional viewpoint of men's and women's roles, while Uncertainty avoidance rating indicates that rules and long-term employment within the same structure are preferred. Finally, the long term / short-term rating is in favour of longer term attitudes, based on perseverance and relationships ordered by status. These cultural dimensions give a basis from which to assess certain aspects of Latin Western European Business Culture. However it is not the complete picture. In the areas of business communication, particularly in face-to-face communication and business negotiations, it is also of interest to compare the concepts advanced by Hall (Hall) and in particular that of the high context and low context cultures. According to Hall, in a high context business culture, the information transmitted in a communication is minimised because implicitly much of the information required is already present in the setting. Low context cultures are the reverse: the communication contains far more information because this information is not present in the setting. According to this model, Latin culture is high-context. Besides the situations already mentioned, this model also finds particular application in the advertising and promotional activities that most businesses engage in. This kind of communica tion remains somewhat basic and even terse in Latin countries as compared to the other Western European groups (Anglo, Germanic and Nordic). Hall also elaborated a second theory of how different cultures structure their time, which he refers to as polychronic or monochronic time orientation. A top-level approach for Latin countries puts them into the polychronic category. The immediate implications are of the priority of interpersonal relations over schedule and appointments, the simultaneity of tasks and the mixing of work time and personal time. Like the other theories alluded to above, this generates different results when we consider the four countries on an individual basis. Because the creation of the European Community has encouraged the individual member countries to trade more among themselves and, by extension, with the rest of the world, it is interesting to note how the Latin Western European countries and their businesses fare in a cross-cultural context. In particular, a different principle is applied here, that of the Self Referencing Criteria or SRC defined by Lee (Lee). In essence, this describes the cultural trap of assuming that other countries use the same cultural values as one's own. It is the failure to perceive things from the standpoint of a person of a different culture. The Latin countries that we are dealing with here display marked differences in this regard. The first country to be examined using these tools of cultural investigation is France. It is a country which at the same time is Mediterranean and Latin, but which also exhibits a number of non-Latin characteristics, in keeping with its proximity to, or common borders with, a number of (mainly) Germanic countries such as Germany, Belgium and Switzerland. Of the five cultural dimensions, French business culture can be classified as follows. Power-distance is relatively high with top