On some level I have no right to complain about what I complained about in yesterday’s post. When I first went to China at 23, I was a roiling mess of self-righteous “concern” for China in its failure to be exactly like the U.S. It’s taken almost 20 years of learning for me to nuance [...]

In today’s online Wall Street Journal, this piece appeared. Reading it was an odd experience. The headline goes like this: “Obama, Hu Highlight Cooperation.” The first three paragraphs are right on point, with high-level summaries of the nature of Hu’s and Obama’s conversations. Then, suddenly, the fourth paragraph:
Mr. Obama’s statement also pointedly noted the U.S. [...]

Back from a week of consulting in China. The organization is a new company looking to implement a new model of outsourcing. For many reasons I’m optimistic about the company’s prospects, not least of which is that the leadership combines experience from the Mainland, Hong Kong, Taiwan and the U.S. The multiple perspectives will play [...]

A fourth dimension of culture used by Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner that impacts Westerners in China — especially Americans — is what they call “ascription” versus “achievement”:
All societies give certain of their members higher status than others, signaling that unusual attention should be focused upon such people and their activities. While some societies accord status to [...]

While we’re on the subject of Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner’s seven dimensions (in earlier posts we’ve looked at specific/diffuse and universalism/particularism), let’s have a look at another of these dimensions that’s relevant to topics addressed in the blog: internal versus external “locus of control.” In the authors’ words:
Societies which conduct business have developed two major orientations [...]

Several weeks ago I introduced the notion of dimensions of culture, and took a look at the system of dimensions devised by Geert Hofstede. Others have devised other systems. One of the most famous of these is the “seven-dimension” system created by Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner. Today we’re taking a look at one of [...]

Last week I introduced Francis Hsu’s framework and the notion of “Layer 3.” Readers’ comments on that post reminded me of something I read years ago by Chinese anthropologist Fei Xiaotong.
Fei, whom we heard from once before, spent academic year 1943-44 in the United States, during the closing phase of World War II. He observed that America is [...]

My favorite cultural research result of all time comes from psychology. The study was conducted by Li-Jun Ji, Kaiping Peng and Richard E. Nisbett (Culture, Control and Perception of Relationships in the Environment, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2000, vol. 78, No. 5, 943-955). For anyone who might have thought that culture is some [...]

The Chinese flipside of the radical American individualism I addressed yesterday is sometimes called “collectivism.” It’s a broad cover term that’s used in many different ways. Today we’ll take a look at one anthropologist’s view of Chinese and Western notions of group membership.
In 1971, anthropologist Francis Hsu published the intimidatingly titled “Psychosocial Homeostasis and Jen: [...]

On an email list I subscribe to, we’ve been discussing stereotypes, and how Americans often conflate “generalization” with “stereotype,” leading to a reluctance to talk about groups at all, for fear of dishonoring individuality. Back when I was designing a research project several years ago, I wanted to look into differing ways Chinese and Americans [...]