scholarly journals Understanding Culture with a Transnational Population: a Value-Sensitive Approach

Author(s):  
Tag Alsheri ◽  
Norah Abokhodair ◽  
Patrick Olivier

It is widely acknowledged in design that culture is embodied in many aspects of an individual’s identity. Many design methods operationalize this understanding through the use of cultural markers or predefined cultural dimensions. Here, we take a first step to distil the culturally specific values of the Saudi culture. We adopt a bottom-up approach that allows for values to emerge from the data by reflecting on two studies of a transnational population: a form of identity where the choice of cultural values is conscious and deliberate. Despite their different goals, the two studies yield common overarching core cultural values. Using a value-sensitive approach, we propose a process for designers to identify culturally specific values, illustrating this in our context of interest: Saudi culture.

2021 ◽  
pp. 097215092198961
Author(s):  
Boudhayan Ganguly ◽  
Tirthankar Nag

Decades of globalization had led website designers to focus more on functionality and standardization catering to the global village. Nevertheless, do cultural dimensions matter in website design. Extant literature in the domain of e-commerce has explored cultural parameters in website design in limited contexts. In the current era, globalization is not just restricted to trade and commerce but subsumes other important categories such as education. This article examines the influence of culture on the design and layout of websites of schools, which has not been explored otherwise. Most prominent developed and developing economies have international schools with international course curriculum and content. It is thus becoming increasingly important to understand whether the schools are following a generic design of websites without considering the individual cultural values or giving more emphasis to local cultural values in developing websites. This study has sampled websites of schools from India, China and the USA and conducted a comparative analysis to get a comprehensive understanding of whether culture influences the website design of schools. For theorizing and initializing cultural parameters, the study refers to the seminal work of Hofstede and uses cultural markers to score websites using an instrument developed for the study. Subsequently, the article uses the well-accepted technique of support vector machine (SVM) to segregate the websites of schools of India, China and the USA based on cultural dimensions. The presence of a large number of misclassified cases indicates that perhaps an emic approach is needed for a better understanding of the design of websites of schools rather than an etic approach wherein we compare the schools using cultural dimensions. The study contributes to the academic literature by developing an instrument and a methodology for analysing cultural markers in website design for schools and may be useful for school administrators and designers to integrate cultural dimensions in website design.


Author(s):  
Priyastiwi Priyastiwi

The purpose of this article is to provide the basic model of Hofstede and Grays’ cultural values that relates the Hofstede’s cultural dimensions and Gray‘s accounting value. This article reviews some studies that prove the model and develop the research in the future. There are some evidences that link the Hofstede’s cultural values studies with the auditor’s judgment and decisions by developing a framework that categorizes the auditor’s judgments and decisions are most likely influenced by cross-cultural differences. The categories include risk assessment, risk decisions and ethical judgments. Understanding the impact of cultural factors on the practice of accounting and financial disclosure is important to achieve the harmonization of international accounting. Deep understanding about how the local values may affect the accounting practices and their impacts on the financial disclosure are important to ensure the international comparability of financial reporting. Gray’s framework (1988) expects how the culture may affect accounting practices at the national level. One area of the future studies will examine the impact of cultural dimensions to the values of accounting, auditing and decision making. Key word : Motivation, leadership style, job satisfaction, performance


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (10) ◽  
pp. 13201325
Author(s):  
Xin Yang

With their massiveness and openness, Moocs have become one of the most widespread and influential online learning forms, which leads to the fact that more and more designers with different cultural backgrounds are getting involved in the course design. As a result, the Mooc design such as the styles of the organization and presentation may correspondingly be influenced by cultural values of the designers, and then become barriers for learners. In order to locate the cultural influence reflected in the Mooc design in China, the introductory videos of three courses published on Coursera, which are designed by three well-known universities in China, are sampled for analysis from the aspects of power distance, individualism/collectivism and masculinity/femininity within the framework of Hofstede’s cultural dimensions. The findings indicate that the cultural features of the high-power distance, collectivism and femininity have shown their influence on the designing of these courses.


Author(s):  
TAM PHAM

Advertising is increasingly important in every corner of the world.  It has become an indispensable part for both producers and consumers in modern society to boost the production and consumption of the products. To succeed in advertising, one component advertisers cannot ignore is cultural values because they are one of the determinants of customers’ behavior. Of the cultural dimensions, individualism and collectivism are considered the most important one. This study, therefore, sets the light on an overview of how individualism and collectivism is manifested in advertising in term of advertising themes, advertising creative tactics and linguistic advertising features in empirical studies. It then specifies what have and has not been done on the topic alike so that anyone interested in the field will find the gaps for their future research.


Author(s):  
John Hamon Salisbury ◽  
Penda Tomlinson

Flow, the concept developed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi over the last forty years or so (see Csikszentmihalyi 1975) has been invoked quite often with respect to the way players engage with digital games (e.g. Baron 2012; Cowley et al. 2008; Sweetser and Wyeth 2005; Brathwaite & Schreiber, 2009; Fullerton, Swain, & Hoffman, 2008; Schell, 2008). However, Kubey & Csikszentmihalyi (2002) have argued that ‘video games’ are in fact likely to promote undesirable experiences of a kind Csikszentmihalyi refers to as ‘entropy’ or unstructured and unsatisfying life experiences. This paper explores Csikszentmihalyi’s greater thesis and examines how a broader reading of Flow theory can potentially help us understand Flow like engagements beyond the simple mechanistic view of challenge explicitly introduce personally expressed cultural values into the conditions of Flow. By doing so we can then provide a value centric analysis and design approach, similar to that of Cockton’s (2004; 2012) proposal, to include values in general software design. That is, the very nature of challenges and rewards needs to be considered in order to investigate how overcoming or receiving such challenges would be positively or negatively perceived by individuals, from particular cultures, holding particular values. Thus we hope that we have dealt with the apparent contradiction in using Csikszentmihalyi’s concept in the study of games despite his criticism of such a move, and have provided some indication of how we can deal with unspecified rewards and the differential perception and engagement with potentially equivalent challenges while still supporting the accepted thesis of Flow.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 22-28
Author(s):  
T. V. Danylovа ◽  
◽  
V.A. Budegay

An essential feature of the contemporary globalized world is the emergence and active development of a network of interactions between the representatives of the different cultural and civilizational communities that was not typical during the previous historical epochs. Under these conditions, there is a process of restructuring of every culture, every civilization system. If earlier the processes of civilizational and cultural renewal had lasted for centuries and millennia, today they have been taking place over years and decades. Nowadays, there is a conglomeration of cultural-civilizational communities that are different in history, traditions, languages, and religions. They develop, interact and mutually influence each other through cultural and civilizational dialogue. These relatively independent societies have to coexist within common information space, in which intercultural and intercivilizational communication is an important factor in regulating both internal life and relations between countries. G. Hofstede made a great contribution to the development of cultural dimensions theory. The works of G. Hofstede gave rise to an influential research tradition in the field of intercultural interactions. They are actively used by the researchers and consultants in the field of international business and communication. They continue to be a major resource in intercultural research and inspire the study of both cultural values and other aspects of culture. The article aims to highlight Hofstede’s cultural dimensions theory. The author used an anthropological integrative approach, comparative analysis and interpretive research paradigm.


2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-49
Author(s):  
Ousanee Sawagvudcharee ◽  
Maurice Yolles ◽  
Chanchai Bunchapattanasakda ◽  
Buncha Limpabandhu

These days, countries around the world continue with their process of globalization in the digital business and marketing. However, they find themselves straddling different national cultures, which lead to problems of cross-cultural communication management resulting in, for instance, miscommunication and misunderstanding. Consequently, an understanding of the characterisation or mapping of culture is significant, and while there are not many theories of cultural mapping, most stem from the base work of Hofstede. Basically, most people begin with a categorisation of culture through the creation of an ontology that differentiates relatable levels of reality, as a theory of levels allows culture to be broken down into parts that can be analysed more easily. It also helps them to facilitate the creation of a set of generic or universal dimensions of culture which can be used to map different cultures. However, a problem with this theoretical approach is that it does not offer a very dynamic representation of culture, and it has manifestations that impoverish the way that phenomenal manifestations of culture can be explained. On the other hand, there is an alternative approach was adopted by Schwartz. This approach does not discuss ontology but it creates a value inventory in which respondents assess ‘comprehensive’ cultural values. Consequently, there is some relationship between outcome of Hofstede’s and Schwartz’s results. Yolles has developed a theory of Knowledge Cybernetics that delivers a new ontology and a dynamic modelling approach. Schwartz’s results have been merged into this, resulting in a new theory dynamic theory of culture quite distinct from Hofstede’s level theory.


Author(s):  
Khaled Saleh Al Omoush ◽  
Raed Musbah Alqirem ◽  
Amin A. Shaqrah

The purpose of this study is to develop and validate a comprehensive model for the determinants of household Internet adoption through identifying the driving internal beliefs of individuals and the effect of cultural values on behavioral intention to adopt the household Internet among Jordanians. Given the widely recognized effect of cultural values on adoption of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), this study, applying Hofstede’s multidimensional framework, investigated the effect of cultural values on the behavioral intention to household Internet adoption in micro level. The empirical examination of the research model indicated that the behavioral intention to household Internet adoption is determined directly by five internal beliefs, including perceived needs, perceived risks, perceived ease of use, perceived resources, and perceived image. The results provide supporting empirical evidence linking most of Hofstede’s cultural dimensions to behavioral intention to household Internet adoption. With the exception of power distance, the results showed that collectivism (low individualism), masculinity, long-term orientation, and uncertainty avoidance had significant effects on the behavioral intention to household Internet adoption. The results demonstrated differences in the driving forces and cultural impact on Internet adoption between households and organizations settings.


2013 ◽  
pp. 211-257
Author(s):  
Agnes Neulinger ◽  
Tino Bech-Larsen ◽  
Jacob Rosendahl ◽  
Audur Hermannsdóttir ◽  
Regina Karveliene ◽  
...  

The chapter focuses on cultural differences in consumption across Europe and describes general attitudes towards consumption and brands, the significance of shopping, and how these are linked to the motives of consumption of alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks. These topics have been analysed using the Hofstede dimensions, and the evaluation also considers regional differences within the European Union. The main objective of this research is to attempt to understand consumption patterns and national cultural dimensions, general consumption values, and what their connections are to alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinking patterns. The main research question is how cultural styles influence consumption styles within Europe. This analysis concluded that some European societies are more adaptable to cross-cultural influence than others in relation to beverage consumption. The authors’ findings suggest that the cultural dimensions identified by Hofstede supported the understanding of cultural differences related to purchasing, brands and beverage consumption both at national and individual levels. However, there is an overlap between some countries in their drinking behaviour, which supports the claim that existing cultural patterns cannot fully explain the new beverage trends, especially in alcohol consumption. This indicates the necessity of a shift toward new dimensions with regard to beverage consumption and/or eventually consumer behaviour.


Author(s):  
Georg Dutschke ◽  
Julio Garcia del Junco ◽  
Francisco Espansandín-Bustelo ◽  
Mariana Dutschke ◽  
Beatriz Palacios Florencio

Investigations related to national culture and young are becoming more important (Brown et al., 2002; Larson, 2011). Gelhaar et al. (2007) state that “there is great concern about the poor academic performance and wiling to entrepreneurship of the adolescents and young adults in European countries, especially in the southern regions, where youth unemployment is very high”. For Iberia it's very important that adolescents and young adults have the want to become entrepreneurs, by developing new projects but, mainly, by having entrepreneurship as a purpose for their professional life. Entrepreneurship should be developed both at an individual level and within the organizations. It´s key to achive success, since originates innovation, both incremental and disruptive. This exploratory research aims to identify the relations between teenagers' socio and cultural values and their want to become entrepreneurs. In concrete, if socio and cultural dimensions identified by Hofstede and Minkov (2010) are related with the want to become entrepreneur.


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