Culture and the Environment

Culture and the Environment

  • Submitted By: evelina25
  • Date Submitted: 08/24/2008 3:18 PM
  • Category: Business
  • Words: 678
  • Page: 3
  • Views: 5

The reality of today is that any corporation that chooses to engage in dealing with international business community does not have a choice but rather required to conduct a comprehensive research in order to understand if such project has a chance in a certain country not only based on financial risks present, but also base on cultural differences present. Among numerous factors which should be taken into consideration, our textbook covers seven dichotomy along which cultures are being evaluated, compared, contrasted and reconciled; yet, there is one more aspect we should consider—the environmental factors or “the role people assign to their natural environment” affect the formation of national and as a result corporate cultures (Trompenaars & Hampden-Turner, 1997, p. 145).
Cultural assumption can either enable or hurt any strategy put forward; consequently, understanding and interpreting factors that form the culture at any level, is vital activity where environmental factors play an important role. In the inner-directed cultures, the participant sees nature as mechanism which can be modified and altered based on the needs of participant (Trompenaars & Hampden-Turner, 1997) Opposing to the set of inner-direct values is outer-directed orientation which see the nature as an organism and is willingly subjugates to it (Trompenaars & Hampden-Turner, 1997). As further described by the authors, cultures that are “outer-directed,” that is, they take their cues from the environment around them versus the “inner-directed” cultures that generally have an internalized set of goals that come from within. The other-directed cultures are molded by the environment and, in a way, are due to the synthesis of the expectations and preferences of and relating to others while the inner-directed cultures are concerned with advancements.
Using Boeing U.S. and Boeing Russian offices to illustrate the inner and outer directedness in a real business setting, remind me of a...

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