Chapter 2 and Readings Culture in Business and IT

1. Chapter 2 and Readings Culture in Business and IT

2. Learning Objectives • Define culture and explain its significance for business and for IT • Identify the components of culture • Describe what contributes to cultural diversity • Describe 2 frameworks used to classify cultures • Explain how national, organizational, and IS culture influence business decisions and actions • Discuss and give examples of implications of culture for Web site design and E-Business

3. Sources • Chapter 2, Wild/Wild/Han • Glasser “Be Nice” CIO magazine • Langhorne “Is your Web Site Sticky?” • Rutherford “How to avoid global website disasters” • Tweney, “The Defogger: Think Globally, Act Locally” • Adler, “From Boston to Beijing”

4. What is Culture? • The set of values, beliefs, rules, and institutions held by a specific group of people. • Patterns of behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols, embodied in artifacts. • Traditional ideas and attached values. • Shared by most members of some social group. • Older members try to pass to new members. • Shaping behavior, structuring perception of the world.

5. Aesthetics Physical &Environments Values &Attitudes Manners &Customs Education Culture Social Structure PersonalCommunication Religion Components of Culture

6. Aesthetics: Artifacts of Culture • Music • Painting • Dance • Drama • Architecture

7. Ethnocentricity • Ethnocentricity is the belief that one’s own ethnic group or culture is superior to that of others. • Problem with Ethnocentricity: • It causes people to view other culture in terms of their own, causing them to overlook important human and environmental differences among cultures.

8. National Culture Supports and promotes the concept of a national culture by building museums, and monuments to preserve the legacies of important events and people Subcultures A group of people who share a unique way of life within a larger, dominant culture It differs from the dominant culture in languages, race, values, or attitudes National Culture and Subcultures

9. Values and Attitudes • Values are beliefs, preferences, customs, ideas of what’s right and wrong • Example: Islamic law prohibits use of alcohol • Attitudes express values, reflect a person’s relationship to a product or service, and predispose a person to act or to react in particular • Example: Being on time is important to some cultures while it is not important in other cultures

10. Manners Appropriate ways of behaving, speaking, and dressing in a culture Examples: Adapt to personal space, or respect religious values Customs A behavior that is practiced within a homogenous group of people Example: Business of gift giving is customary in some countries but not in others. Manners and Customs

11. Social Structure Social Group Associations Nuclear Family: A person’s immediate relatives Extended Family: Broadens the nuclear family Social Status Social Stratification: Ranking people into social classes Social Mobility Caste System: People are born into a social rankings

12. Religion Human values often originate from religious beliefs

13. Personal Communication • Spoken Language: • Spoken and written vocabulary • Lingua Franca • Language that is understood by two parties who speak different native languages • Unspoken or Body Language • Communicates through unspoken cues such as hand gestures, facial expressions

14. Education • Important in passing on traditions, customs, and values. • Education Level: Nations with skilled, well-educated workforces attract all sorts of high-paying jobs, poorly educated countries attract the lowest-paying manufacturing jobs. • Brain Drain: The departure of highly educated people from one profession, geographic region or nation to another.

15. Physical & Material Environments • Topography: All the physical features that characterize the surface of a geographic region. • Climate: The weather conditions of a geographic region are called its climate.

16. Perception of self Relationship to external environment (nature) Trust and control (relationship to others) How should I spend my time? (achievement) Time orientation View of personal space Kluckhohn-Strodtbeck Framework

17. Individualism versusCollectivism AchievementversusNurturing Power Distance UncertaintyAvoidance Hofstede Framework

18. Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions • Power distance • Perceived degree of unequality among people • Uncertainty avoidance • Threat of uncertain situations & desire to avoid them via formality, intolerance of deviance • Individualism-collectivism • Extent to which individuals take care of themselves vs. others • Achievement vs. nurturing • Money, things, vs. people, quality of life

19. Cultural Influences on IT • Culture: • Collective mental programming that determines social behavior and practices • Shared values, attitudes, behaviors • Symbols, heroes, myths, rituals • Applies to: • National culture • Organizational culture • IS culture • All 3 affect management of IT in global organizations

20. Organizational Culture • Core values, beliefs, assumptions • Taught to new members • Historically determined, socially constructed • Difficult to change • Influenced by nationality, industry, task • Expressed through practices • More peripheral to individuals than national culture

21. Relationships between National and Organizational Cultures • More power distance often means: • More centralized control and power • Less local autonomy • More uncertainty avoidance often means: • More formalized work policies and practices • Less flexibility and informality, more rigid • Low tolerance for risk

22. Information Systems Culture • MIS shared values and practices • Acceptable technologies • Systems development methods • Relationships with end-users • Relationships with vendors • Policies re: e-mail use, Internet access • Important in understanding IS strategy and politics within an organization • Difficult to change • May lead to outsourcing

23. IS, Organizational, and National Cultures • Difficult to map directly • Yet could help in managing IT in global organizations • Affects transfer of technologies to subsidiary organizations • Cultures affect values, work practices, tasks, power, and thus individual and organizational responses to change

24. Headquarters and Subsidiary IS Cultures • When common systems are implemented between headquarters & subsidiaries, culture gap may occur • Symptoms: • Headqtrs complain that subsidiary is resisting change • Subsidiaries complain that hdqtrs doesn’t understand • More likely between developed and developing nations • Also when differences in power distance and uncertainty avoidance

25. France High power distance High uncertainty avoidance IT Top-down control Little distributed Limited end-user involvement US Low power distance Low uncertainty avoidance IT Distributed processing Open access End-user involvement Example: France/US (p. 171)

26. Possible Results • US subsidiary resists top-down control • End-users involvement restricted or ignored • Responsibility for system limited • Possible Solutions: • Train managers and end-users • Move IS personnel to subsidiary location • Respect core values and cultures

27. Implications for Management • National culture, especially power distance and uncertainty avoidance, can influence IS culture and IS practices in organizations • When these factors differ between headquarters and subsidiaries, a gap occurs which makes it harder to establish IS linkages • Resulting problems are often blamed on technology or resistance to change • Culture must be studied and planned along with technology • Planning may reduce cost, time, conflict

28. Multi-cultural Web Site Design • Dialects as well as languages • Symbols, icons, metaphors • Currency, date, address formats • Local regulations • ICT infrastructure • Internationalization (think globally) • Localization (act locally)

29. Think Globally Site infrastructure On-line branding Standard image Content management software with templates Act Locally Multiple languages Costs $50-100K Local content Think Globally, Act Locally