Strong and weak uncertainty-avoidance cultures

In a recent paper by Sasaguwa, Toyada, and Sakano (2006), they are grouping Australia, Belgium, Canada, England, France, Germany, Italy, Scotland, Spain, and the United States as individualistic countries, and China, Columbia, Ecuador, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Kazakhstan, Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Singapore, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines Thailand, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, The Netherlands, South Africa, [and] Switzerland as collectivistic.

The three Japanese authors of this paper must have regretted their allegiance to this rigid dichotomy “ individualistic versus collectivistic ”, because their results show that “students returning from so-called collectivistic countries were more individualistic than returnees from so-called individualistic countries”. Moreover, these 141 Japanese students had sojourned in 39 different countries, which as a sample per country means only 3.6 participants! One more example of this traditional approach to the study of culture and intercultural understanding can be found in a study by Merkin (2006) that reports data tending to confirm the following in Hofstede’s hypotheses:

[Hofstede 1]: Members of strong uncertainty-avoidance cultures are more likely to communicate ritualistically than members of weak uncertainty-avoidance cultures,

[Hofstede 2]: Members of strong uncertainty-avoidance cultures are less likely to use harmonious facework strategies than members of weak uncertainty-avoidance cultures,

[Hofstede 3]: Members of strong uncertainty-avoidance cultures will be more likely to respond to face threatening acts with aggression than members of weak uncertainty-avoidance cultures.

These confirmations are based on the following data: 658 college students (442 women and 216 men) representing the following six countries: Japan, Sweden, Israel, Hong Kong, Chile and the United States. The samples from each country were not equal, the United States having the largest number—241 students, and Hong Kong only 32.

From this data, one can have serious doubts about the scientific value of these confirmations of the Hofstede hypotheses which read “Members of strong Uncertainty-Avoidance cultures …”, when in this paper “members” is restricted to college students who in 5 of the 6 countries represent a very small number of participants.

As mentioned before, any social psychological research attempting to generalize from a college sample to a nation has no scientific basis. Several other examples could be given. It is quite clear, however, that intercultural research based on the traditional cultural dimensions is certainly not the key for intercultural understanding. From now on, research dealing with cultures can no longer be satisfied with the approach which consists only in trying to apply to all cultures so-called universal “cultural dimensions” or fixed sets of polar attributes.

Individualism versus Collectivism, the Case of Japan

In relation to the individualism-collectivism dimension, many scholars have disregarded the three facts mentioned above. A typical example is the Japanese culture. During the last 30 years, drastic changes have taken place in one aspect of Japanese culture: the group orientation. Jiko tassei, the promotion of the individual, is no longer a taboo subject. Individualization has been making strong inroads in the Japanese society. For the young generation, self, the individual, has become more important than the group. Recently, in a white paper, the Japanese government described these changes, giving examples.

An example is the young salary man who refuses to work late at night or during weekends because he wants to relax or do things that he likes. Or again, the young salary man who refuses to be transferred to another city, thus giving up a promotion, because he wants to be with his family. The lifetime employment, which is the lifetime commitment between corporations and their employees, is also under siege (Abegglen, 2003).

According to a survey by the Management and Coordination Agency, in the one-year period ending February 1989, about 2.5 million Japanese switched jobs. Seventy-three percent said they changed jobs to seek better working conditions for themselves. Gakusei Engokai in 1989 conducted a survey among young salary men aged between 20 and 30 in the Tokyo and Osaka areas: Seventy-four percent declared that their own personal work and happiness were more important than the company which employs them. Ninety percent of these same salary men also believe that in the future even more salary people will change jobs (Saint-Jacques, 2005). In a recent paper, Shigeyuki writes: Around the year 2000, personnel managers began talking about how the latest recruits had a whole new outlook. They said that the new employees were narrowly focused on their careers, interested only in themselves, and lacking loyalty to the company (2006).

The seniority-based wage systems and promotion systems are giving way to performance-based systems, and companies are looking for talented individuals who would be an asset for the company from day one.

This new “individualism” tendency also influenced the most basic group underlying all othergroups: the family. The rate of divorce has climbed to previously unknown heights. Japanese women marry later and have fewer children. Many women now decide not to marry. In the 2005 census, about 60 percent of women in their late twenties and 30 percent in their early thirties reported they were single. In comparison with the 1975 census, the first figure has roughly tripled and the second quintupled. In his recent book, The New Japan, Matsumoto, quoting his own research and that of several other scholars, makes the statement that “there is no support for the claim that Japanese are less individualistic and more collectivistic than Americans” (2002).

He makes the distinction of two groups in Japan, the young generation being more individualistic and the older generation still attached to the importance of the group. He proposes the concept of “individual collectivism,” that is, a society which can celebrate cultural diversity in thought and action, that is, individualism, while maintaining core values related to the importance of the group and hierarchy, that is, collectivism.

Robert Christopher was more than prophetic when in 1983 he wrote: “To an extent unmatched by the inhabitants of any other nations, the Japanese succeeded in marrying the social discipline that is the chief virtue of a strong collective consciousness with individualism” (Christopher, 1983). Moreover, it should be remembered, as Tanaka points out in his 2007 paper “Cultural Networks in Premodern Japan,” that the Japanese of the Edo period were not nearly as group-oriented (collectivism) as most people are inclined to believe. The Japanese of the Edo period did not have the group mentality in the sense in which this concept is generally understood: that is, a strong tendency for the individual to conform to group norms in respect to education, values, skills, fashions and lifestyle (Tanaka, 2007).

Identity

Closely related to the concept of culture are the notions of individual, social and national identities. Identity, particularly in the age of globalization, is never a fixed reality, a pre-given identification; it is a dynamic and evolving reality. “ Cultural identity is a matter of becoming as well as being. It belongs to the future as much as to the past. It is not something which already exists, transcending places, time, history and culture. Cultural identities come from somewhere, they have histories. But like everything which is historical, they undergo constant transformation” (Hall, 1990). “Identity is never a priori, not a finished product” (Bhabba, 1986). “Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold” (“Yeats”). This famous quotation from Yeats, which he wrote in the aftermath of the First World War, has often been used to highlight the current sense of cultural fragmentation and dislocation of the individual in the new world dominated by globalization.

In this new world, individual identities, group identity, cultural and ethnic identity, as well as national identity are no longer clearly defined concepts to which individuals and groups can relate and find their own identification. Identity is no longer conceptualized as a given but rather as something which is constantly negotiated and struggled over (Saint-Jacques, 2002). In this world, the individual’s activity has been diversifying and group membership becomes more pluralistic; belonging to a number of groups means that the individual will have several identities or multiple identities. The case of immigrants is a good example. In a recent article, Van Oudenhoven, Ward and Masgoret write that immigrants may give up parts of their cultural heritage without giving up their cultural identity (2006), Hybridity and multiple identities (whether affirmed or negated) are part of the human condition, and we should begin considering them as “normal” (Boyland, 2005).

In their recent paper, Bhatia and Ram (2009) rightly make the point that acculturation and immigrant identity is not only an individual process: “We call for a shift from conceptualizing acculturation and immigrant identity as an individual process to a more broad, contextual, and political phenomenon”. Their research shows clearly that the acculturation experiences of Indian immigrants living in the diaspora in the United States “are constructed through a dynamic, back-and-forth play concurrently between structure and self, being privileged and marginalized, caught in the web of socio-political and historical forces”. Human beings are living at the same time within particular cultural settings, on the one hand, and between different cultural environments, on the other one. Bayart (2005) argues that identities are fluid, never homogenous and sometimes invented. Fixed cultural identities never exist.

Globalization can be a profoundly enriching process, opening minds to new ideas and experiences, and strengthening the finest values of humanity. “ The homogenizing influences of globalization that are most often condemned by the new nationalists and by cultural romanticists are actually positive: globalization promotes integration and the removal not only of cultural barriers but of many of the negative dimensions of culture. Globalization is a vital step toward both a more stable world and better lives for the people in it ” (Rothkopf, 1997). This new approach to intercultural understanding might help intercultural communication.

 

Instruction: This text is consructedaround three problems: the opposition of strong uncertainty-avoidance cultures vs. weak uncertainty-avoidance cultures, the dichotomy of individualism vs. collectivism and four aspects of identities: individual, social, cultural and national identities. You are expected to highlight these problems basing onexplicit facts and details given in the passage. You have to locate and identify the information and determine the author’s idea, purpose, attitude, etc. If you are not sure from your first reading where to look for specific answers, use scanning techniques. The order of facts or details in the text follows the order in which ideas are presented in the passage. In other words, the opening information you need will usually come near the beginning of the passage; the next factual information will follow that, and so on. Knowing this should help you locate the information you need.

 

• Focus on one or two key words as you read the stem of each question. Lock these words in your mind.

• Scan the passage looking for the key words or their synonyms. Look only for these words. Do NOT try to read every word of the passage.

• It may help to focus your attention. Don't reread the passage completely – just look for key words.

• When you find the key words in the passage, carefully read the sentence in which they occur. You may have to read the sentence preceding or following that sentence as well.

• Compare the information you read with possible answer choices.

Factual Questions

· What did the author observe while studying the paper of the three Japanese authors about the dichotomy of individualistic versus collectivistic?

(A) They must have regretted their allegiance to this rigid dichotomy “ individualistic versus collectivistic ”;

(B) Students returning from so-called collectivistic countries were more individualistic than returnees from so-called individualistic countries;

(C) The traditional approach to the study of culture and intercultural understanding was wrong.

· What terms have been used for the articles of Hofstede’s hypotheses?

· Why did the author have serious doubts about the scientific value of the confirmations of the Hofstede hypotheses?

· What does the term strong uncertainty-avoidance cultures refer to?

· Where in the passage does the author first discuss " fixed sets of polar attributes?

· Where in the passage does the author specifically stress that individual identities, group identity, cultural and ethnic identity, as well as national identity are no longer clearly defined concepts?

· In what paragraph does the author first mention that identity is never a finished product?

Scanning questions

Scanning questions are usually easy to answer. Use the same techniques for scanning given about detail questions. For each question, locate that part of the passage in which the answer will probably be found, and write it out. Don't worry about answering the question itself, only about finding the information. Do these scanning questions as fast as you can.

Sample Questions

· What is inferred in the following quatation from Robert Christopher?

“To an extent unmatched by the inhabitants of any other nations, the Japanese succeeded in marrying the social discipline that is the chief virtue of a strong collective consciousness with individualism” What is the term for using in real life features associated with different languages?

· What is inferred in the following sentences?

Immigrants may give up parts of their cultural heritage without giving up their cultural identity.

“ Cultural identity is a matter of becoming as well as being. ”

· Where in the text are the negative dimensions of culture mentioned?