Essay on Assignment: Culture and Uncertainty Avoidance

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Essay:
When setting up operations in new overseas locations, some industries are more culturally sensitive than others. Using contrasting examples, how far can one evaluate a foreign culture?

Although there is a large transformation in instrumentation, telecommunication, and information systems, but cultural variance betwixt countries remain unchanged and it becomes more challenging for the international business organization. So to function with cultural differences need a clear thought of profounder level frameworks which clarify the reason of certain norms, manners, attitudes and why they are more suitable than other.
There are various models which focus on different aspects of cultural and provide a variety of aproaches to the assessment of cultural differences and similarities. Some models are far more complex, whilst others concentrate on purely sociological aspects of culture. The writer of this essay hereby to give emphasize on Hofstede`s framework to analyse and find out the applicability of his theory to evaluate a foreign culture when any business operating in overseas and later a brief comparison with other frameworks will be given.
Geert Hofstede defines how the values of a society`s member are effected by the culture and how they make link with individual behaviour by this model.
Six dimensions in Hofsted`s theory are Power Distance, Individualism, Uncertainty avoidance, Masculinity, Long Term Orientation, indulgence versus self-restraint (very recently added) Sometimes this framework is known as comparative research because it permits to differentiate globally within cultures.

Limitations of this methodology
The writer of this essay now find outs the actual applicability of this framework for evaluating a new foreign culture and.The framework has some remarkable limitations such as:
The methodology comparatively lacks of latest data which was also constrained as the only one company i.e.IBM was selected for data collection. Though it has duplication later but those have same shortage that is they are not depicted completely the recent transformation of political situation. This oversimplified speculation about national level culture based on a minor substantial populace who are the selected company`s selected employees with a belief that within every nation constant national culture.
Hofsted simplifies every nation`s whole population grounded on some tiny number of questionnaire responses by selecting respondents from only one company i.e. IBM which cannot be the whole nation`s representative. There is no facts to support this assumption, furthermore, his claims based on supposition about average national culture tendency or central tendency of IBM company that replicates the whole nation`s average national culture tendency is challenging. Also Question can be arisen that, does nation`s any other company`s average tendency assumption would have the same credibility like Hofstede`s assumption?

He states that individual of one nation shares national culture equally, according to this point there would not be any far-reaching differences in the responses to the similar query of his questionnaire survey but it is found. So it is faulty as well as makes it contradictory.

Although huge number of cultural and non-cultural factors exists he only references three non-interacting cultures i.e. Organizational, Occupational and National cultures. Argument from scholars that with these only three cultures respondents were psychologically automated perpetually. Beside these he specifies only IBM culture and respondents are professionally matched, so the variances of the questionnaire answer demonstrates national culture with ambiguity.

Although Hofstede turned out well to separate distinctive kinds of national culture and able to form sufficient clarification of national cultural variances but criticism lies in the weighing scale of those quantified values and the consequential
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