How To Understand Cross-Cultural Analysis

Cross-cultural analysis could be a very perplexing field to understand with many different viewpoints, aims and concepts. The origins of cross-cultural analysis in the 19th century world of colonialism was strongly grounded in the concept of cultural evolution, which claimed that all societies progress through an identical series of distinct evolutionary stages.

The origin of the word culture comes from the Latin verb colere = "tend, guard, cultivate, till". This concept is a human construct rather than a product of nature. The use of the English word in the sense of "cultivation through education" is first recorded in 1510. The use of the word to mean "the intellectual side of civilization" is from 1805; that of "collective customs and achievements of a people" is from 1867. The term Culture shock was first used in 1940.

How do we define culture?

How To Understand Cross-Cultural Analysis

There are literally hundreds of different definitions as writers have attempted to provide the all-encompassing definition.

Culture consists of language, ideas, beliefs, customs, taboos, codes, institutions, tools, techniques, works of art, rituals, ceremonies and symbols. It has played a crucial role in human evolution, allowing human beings to adapt the environment to their own purposes rather than depend solely on natural selection to achieve adaptive success. Every human society has its own particular culture, or sociocultural system. (Adapted from source: Encyclopaedia Britannica)

Generally culture can be seen as consisting of three elements:

Values - Values are ideas that tell what in life is considered important. Norms - Norms consists of expectations of how people should behave in different situations. Artefacts - Things or material culture - reflects the culture's values and norms but are tangible and manufactured by man.

Origins and evolution of Cross-cultural analysis
The first cross-cultural analyzes done in the West, were by anthropologists like Edward Burnett Tylor and Lewis H Morgan in the 19th century. Anthropology and Social Anthropology have come a long way since the belief in a gradual climb from stages of lower savagery to civilization, epitomized by Victorian England. Nowadays the concept of "culture" is in part a reaction against such earlier Western concepts and anthropologists argue that culture is "human nature," and that all people have a capacity to classify experiences, encode classifications symbolically and communicate such abstractions to others.

Typically anthropologists and social scientists tend to study people and human behavior among exotic tribes and cultures living in far off places rather than do field work among white-collared literate adults in modern cities. Advances in communication and technology and socio-political changes started transforming the modern workplace yet there were no guidelines based on research to help people interact with other people from other cultures. To address this gap arose the discipline of cross-cultural analysis or cross-cultural communication. The main theories of cross-cultural communication draw from the fields of anthropology, sociology, communication and psychology and are based on value differences among cultures. Edward T. Hall, Geert Hofstede, Fons Trompenaars, Shalom Schwartz and Clifford Geertz are some of the major contributors in this field.

How the social sciences study and analyze culture

Cultural anthropologists focus on symbolic culture whereas archaeologists focus on material and tangible culture. Sociobiologists study instinctive behavior in trying to explain the similarities, rather than the differences between cultures. They believe that human behavior cannot be satisfactorily explained entirely by 'cultural', 'environmental' or 'ethnic' factors. Some sociobiologists try to understand the many aspects of culture in the light of the concept of the meme, first introduced by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. Dawkins suggests the existence of units of culture - memes - roughly analogous to genes in evolutionary biology. Although this view has gained some popular currency, other anthropologists generally reject it.

Different types of cross-cultural comparison methods

Nowadays there are many types of Cross-cultural comparisons. One method is comparison of case studies. Controlled comparison among variants of a common derivation is another form of comparison. Typically anthropologists and other social scientists favor the third type called Cross-cultural studies, which uses field data from many societies to examine the scope of human behaviour and to test hypotheses about human behavior and culture.

Controlled comparison examines similar characteristics of a few societies while cross-cultural studies uses a sufficiently large sample that statistical analysis can be made to show relationships or lack of relationships between certain traits in question. The anthropological method of holocultural analysis or worldwide cross-cultural analysis is designed to test or develop a proposition through the statistical analysis of data on a sample of ten or more non literate societies from three or more geographical regions of the world. In this approach, cultural traits are taken out of the context of the whole culture and are compared with cultural traits in widely diverse cultures to determine patterns of regularities and differences within the broad base of the study.

Aims of cross-cultural analysis

Cross-cultural communication or inter cultural communication looks at how people from different cultural backgrounds try to communicate. It also tries to produce some guidelines, which help people from different cultures to better communicate with each other.

Culture has an interpretative function for the members of a group, which share that particular culture. Although all members of a group or society might share their culture, expressions of culture-resultant behaviour are modified by the individuals' personality, upbringing and life-experience to a considerable degree. Cross-cultural analysis aims at harnessing this utilitarian function of culture as a tool for increasing human adaptation and improving communication.

Cross-cultural management is seen as a discipline of international management focusing on cultural encounters, which aims to discover tools to handle cultural differences seen as sources of conflict or miscommunication.

How laypersons see culture

It is a daunting challenge to convey the findings of research and field work and discuss cross-cultural issues in diverse contexts such as corporate culture, workplace culture and inter cultural competency as laypeople tend to use the word 'culture' to refer to something refined, artistic and exclusive to a certain group of "artists" who function in a separate sphere than ordinary people in the workplace. Some typical allusions to culture:

Culture is the section in the newspaper where they review theatre, dance performances or write book reviews etc.

Culture is what parents teach their kids and grandparents teach their grandchildren.

"You don't have any culture," is what people say to you when you put your feet on the table at lunchtime or spit in front of guests.

"They just have a different culture," people say about those whose behaviour they don't understand but have to tolerate.

Different models of cross-cultural analysis

There are many models of cross-cultural analysis currently valid. The 'Iceberg' and the 'Onion' models are widely known. The popular 'Iceberg model' of culture developed by Selfridge and Sokolik, 1975 and W.L. French and C.H. Bell in 1979, identifies a visible area consisting of behaviour or clothing or symbols and artifacts of some form and a level of values or an invisible level.

Trying to define as complex a phenomenon as culture with just two layers proved quite a challenge and the 'Onion' model arose. Geert Hofstede (1991) proposed a set of four layers, each of which includes the lower level or is a result of the lower level. According to this view, 'culture' is like an onion that can be peeled, layer-by layer to reveal the content. Hofstede sees culture as "the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another."

Cross-cultural analysis often plots 'dimensions' such as orientation to time, space, communication, competitiveness, power etc., as complimentary pairs of attributes and different cultures are positioned in a continuum between these.

Hofstede dimensions to distinguish between cultures

The five dimensions Hofstede uses to distinguish between national cultures are:

Power distance, which measures the extent to which members of society accept how power is distributed unequally in that society. Individualism tells how people look after themselves and their immediate family only in contrast with Collectivism, where people belong to in-groups (families, clans or organizations) who look after them in exchange for loyalty. The dominant values of Masculinity, focussing on achievement and material success are contrasted with those of Femininity, which focus on caring for others and quality of life. Uncertainty avoidance measures the extent to which people feel threatened by uncertainty and ambiguity and try to avoid these situations. Confucian dynamism. This Long-term versus Short-term Orientation measured the fostering of virtues related to the past, i.e., respect for tradition, importance of keeping face and thrift.

Trompenaars dimensions to distinguish between cultures
Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner (1997) adopt a similar onion-like model of culture. However, their model expands the core level of the very basic two-layered model, rather than the outer level. In their view, culture is made up of basic assumptions at the core level. These 'basic assumptions' are somewhat similar to 'values' in the Hofstede model.

Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner use seven dimensions for their model of culture:

Universalism vs Particularism (what is more important - rules or relationships?) Individualism vs Communitarianism (do we function in a group or as an individual?) Neutral vs Emotional (do we display our emotions or keep them in check?) Specific vs Diffuse (how far do we get involved?) Achievement vs Ascription (do we have to prove ourselves to gain status or is it given to us just because we are a part of a structure?) Attitude to Time Past- / present- / future-orientatedness
Sequential time vs Synchronic time(do we do things one at a time or several things at once?)

Criticism of current models
One of the weaknesses of cross-cultural analysis has been the inability to transcend the tendency to equalize culture with the concept of the nation state. A nation state is a political unit consisting of an autonomous state inhabited predominantly by a people sharing a common culture, history, and language or languages. In real life, cultures do not have strict physical boundaries and borders like nation states. Its expression and even core beliefs can assume many permutations and combinations as we move across distances.

There is some criticism in the field that this approach is out of phase with global business today, with transnational companies facing the challenges of the management of global knowledge networks and multicultural project teams, interacting and collaborating across boundaries using new communication technologies.

Some writers like Nigel Holden (2001) suggest an alternative approach, which acknowledges the growing complexity of inter- and intra-organizational connections and identities, and offers theoretical concepts to think about organizations and multiple cultures in a globalizing business context.

In spite of all the shortcomings and criticisms faced by the Hofstede model, it is very much favoured by trainers and researchers. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, it is a wonderful and easy to use tool to quantify cultural differences so that they can be discussed. Discussing and debating differences is after all the main method of training and learning. Secondly, Hofstede's research at IBM was conducted in the workplace, so Hofstede tools brings cross-cultural analysis closer to the business side of the workplace, away from anthropology, which is a matter for universities.

Bibliography and suggested reading:

Dawkins, Richard (1976). The Selfish Gene. Oxford University Press French, W.L. and C.H. Bell (1979). Organization development. New Jersey: Prentice Hall. Hofstede, Geert "Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind", 1997 Holden, Nigel 2001, Cross-Cultural Management: A Knowledge Management Perspective, Financial Times Management

How To Understand Cross-Cultural Analysis
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Quotation adapted from The Online Etymology Dictionary. http://www.etymonline.com

Rana Sinha is a cross-cultural trainer and author. He was born in India, studied and lived in many places and traveled in over 80 countries, acquiring cross-cultural knowledge and building an extensive network of professionals. He has spent many years developing and delivering Cross-cultural Training, Professional Communications skills, Personal Development and Management solutions to all types of organizations and businesses in many countries. He now lives in Helsinki, Finland and runs http://www.dot-connect.com, which specializes in human resource development as well as communication and management skills training with cross-cultural emphasis. Read his cross-cultural blog http://originalwavelength.blogspot.com

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McDonalds Business Analysis

'In the 1990s managers will be judged on their ability to identify, cultivate, and exploit the core competencies that make growth possible - indeed, they'll have to rethink the concept of the corporation it self.'

C K Prahalad and G Hamel 1990

Organizations do not exist in vacuum. They operate within a competitive industrial environment. Analyzing its competitors not only enables an organization to identify its own strengths and weaknesses but also help to identify opportunities for and threats to the organization from its industrial environment. SWOT analysis is a systematic analysis of these factors and the strategy that reflects the best match between them.

McDonalds Business Analysis

Let us analyze these principals in relation to the core competence of McDonalds, one of the largest food chain companies in the world. Let us first start with the strengths and the positive aspects which define the performance of this company. How can we define the company's strengths? Strength is a distinctive competence that gives the firm a comparative advantage in the market place. For instance financial resources, image, market leadership and buyer supplier relations etc
McDonalds is the no: 1 fast food chain stores with a 40 million customers visiting it per day. It has over 30,000 branches in 120 countries. It derives 80% of its revenues from eight countries like Canada, Brazil, Germany, France, Japan, UK, Australia and US. The greatest strength was creating an image in the minds of the people and introducing them to the fast food culture. Delivery speed, customer care and cleanliness are the core strengths on which these stores expanded. They created a corporate symbol and their advertisement campaigns were highly successful in establishing the brand image and logo in the minds of the millions. Two main competitors generally identified with McDonalds are the Burger King and the KFC. McDonalds marketing strategy is concerned with the internal resources, external environment and its basic competencies along with its share holders.

McDonald's product value is also its greatest strengths. Customers know what to expect when they walk into a McDonalds store. It gives great emphasis to human resources by satisfying both the customer and the employees. Next is the innovation aspect wherein new products line up to catch up with the new trends and tastes of the people. Its diversity into other new business ventures can also be considered as its strengths.

How effective are these strengths to the company in the long run? McDonalds today is not that amendable as it was during its inception. What are the driving factors which results in its present decline in terms of sales and services? To analyze this factor we have to look at the weaknesses part of the companies business and marketing strategy. What can generally be termed as a weakness of a company? The same factors which were considered as strengths also become a weakness if it impedes the overall performance of the company.

Customer trends change and so does their choices. People are generally tired of the same brands that they had been using over the years, so when they do not see the expected innovation they migrate to new brands. Moreover people see McDonalds every where and this over exposure might also be a reason for abstinence. Moreover maintaining the standards of such a huge chain becomes feasible and when there is lack of quality service in one store it effects the whole brand.

The secret of any marketing strategy is to reach the target audience. And here again the target audience should be chosen carefully. In the case of McDonalds as projected in its ads, the targeted audiences were the kids. Demographics and customer financial and psychological aspects define a business concerns success. Health conscious women and senior citizen comprise the major population but kids soon grow out to become adults. Recent law suits and documentaries resulted in the companies recent innovation and a major change related to health related product ranges and this switch over as per the needs of today's trend and needs has increased the lost popularity of McDonalds a bit.
All the above factors point out the external strengths and weaknesses. There are also internal factors which affect the performance and overall benefits the company stands to enjoy. Kids based marketing strategy which was earlier a weakness has changed since 2003. Now more teenagers and adults rule the McDonalds ad world. The research and develop which lacked earlier is also looked into and the brand quality is being defined with various research and development options today. McDonald at one stage started concentrating on expansion and growing big that it missed out on key factors like quality maintenance and R&D.

One major threat to any brand is its relationship between the management and the franchise dealers. Organization strength is the back bone of any concern and when that starts shaking the whole system will collapse. But slowing McDonald is recovering from all these weaknesses as its brand managers can easily communicate, compare and improve their services through the latest technological developments wherein they can use the internet to motivate, compare and improve upon other centers performances.

The overall analysis of all the external and internal strengths and weaknesses on this company should be linked in order to draft a sustainable plan for the companies' further improvement. For any improvement or expansion the internal resources must be readily available. And thus analyzing this aspect can lead to a modified strategy to suit its vision. Keeping in mind the available resources the planner should think globally. Hence making use of all the core competencies the firm can definitely sustain in the competitive market.

The change in the top managerial level has creating a new wave in its performance and major changes have been implemented to retain and sustain the brand quality and innovation. As the new CEO rightly quotes,

"The world has changed. Our customers have changed. We have to change too."
James R. Cantaloupe, Chairman and CEO, McDonald's, 2003

Now let us analyze the sustainable competitive advantage of the company. What is sustainable competitive advantage? How can it be related to McDonalds? SCA is the advantage a company has which is difficult or impossible for other companies to possess or break through. It can either be the brand, dynamic customer care, cost structure or its patent. Whatever the advantage in order to be considered as sustainable it should either be proprietary or distinctive. Other than this three different aspects that help in SCA are,

o The managerial and organizational process should share a good integration and coordination. The much needed 'value' is created thereby as everyone strives to work for a common goal. The organization should learn and bring about changes according to the need of the hour and should always be flexible to changes in the environment such as customer trends, legal or government restriction and developments in the technology. McDonalds is presently concentrating on this advantage by concentrating on organizational behavior and managerial expertise. Previously this advantage was ignored as the organization was more into expansion of its outlets over the globe than strengthening its core advantage. As the result the revenue did not see much of a change while newer outlets were open. The company suffered a massive loss first time since their inceptions which further lead to the change in the managerial heads.

o Technological, structural and financial assets of a company are excellent market position which helps in the SCA. McDonalds no doubt is abundant with such aspects like structure, technology and finance. To identify and implement these assets in the proper direction towards the improvement of the company is all that is needed. After 2003 the company has really started to concentrate on its greatest advantages.

o Most of all the greatest advantage is the vision or the dream with which the company was started. Sustaining this dream over the years is any companies' greatest advantage. A brand usually revolves around this vision sustaining this vision and working in lieu with it is a great SCA. McDonalds was started out to help people who had very little time to cook or was too busy to get into a proper restaurant. The vision was to provide quick service, cheap products and quality satisfaction. Keeping this vision in mind the company which slackened a bit because of incompetent franchise holders is being weeded and new and better people are put in this place as the torch bearers of the company sustaining and living the vision.

To sum it all up SCA means implementing the best value based strategy using all the advantages which are unique to the company and that which cannot be copied or replicated by other competitors. The importance of this SCA can be evident by the reply the great investment guru Warren Buffet gave when asked about how he evaluates his investment portfolio. He simply answered 'sustainable competitive advantage'. Hence based on the dynamic integrated and intelligent human resources can always be the only dependable and sustainable SCA.
Outsourcing boom or doom in today's business environment

Today everything is outsourced from employee appointment to finance and customer care. No organization is best enough to handle all kinds of work. Moreover concentrating on every detail is not possible with a big concern especially like McDonalds. But great care should be taken not to outsource the core competences of the company. General advantages of outsourcing are cheap service, knowledge of markets offshore, flexible resources, speedy operations, expansion in supplier relationship etc. most of all the company can concentrate on its core competencies and outsource rest of its operation. Recently McDonald has tested its drive through order facility. Wherein it makes sure that the order placed with the outlet is accurate. The order taken by the outsourced company is reverted back to the home restaurant. These call center has a digital camera which clicks the vehicle you drive through and the delivery man back home can integrate the order and the person who placed it using the image of the car. Outsourcing thus helps in the increase of the external suppliers and fills up the difficulties faced because of the lack of the latest technologies and other innovations.

What started of as a success story with McDonalds had to face a number of risks, competitions and major set backs. What makes it still strong and ranked among the top business concerns is its core competences and the sustainable competitive advantages both internal and external. Of course keeping up with the changing times the company has also set foot in outsourcing but the point to keep in mind here is not to be driven away by this outsourcing mania. This company has started to revert back to its golden glory recently because of large scale revamping of its organizational and structural changes being implemented.

Conclusion:

No particular competitive strategy is guaranteed to achieve success at all times. Risk attitudes can change and vary by industry volatility and environmental uncertainty and several internal conditions also might be involved. Thus the "four P's" of marketing (product, price, place and promotion) provide a good starting point for consideration of the requirements of strategy implementation in the marketing function. The mix of these marketing elements should be appropriate and the plans for each of the elements should also be appropriate.

The marketing function is consumer oriented and hence marketing decisions are based on the careful identification of consumer needs and on the design of marketing strategies to meet those needs. The distribution system brings the product or service to the place where in can best fill customer needs. Access to distribution can mean all the differences between success and failure for a new product. Because many products require support from distribution channels in the form of prompt service, rapid order processing etc the choice of distributors, wholesalers and jobbers is extremely important.

Promotion is more than advertising. The location, size and nature of markets which the business strategy defines will guide promotion mix decisions and should indicate the content of promotional material as well. Pricing is a complex issue because it is related to cost, volume, trade offs etc and because it is frequently used as a competitive weapon. Pricing policy changes are likely to provoke competitor response. Using price to jockey for position can lead to price wars, which usually hurt all participants.

Marketing has received increasingly greater attention in the competitive business since the early modern era. The old concept of marketing focused on the firms existing products and considered marketing to consist of selling and promotion to maximize sales at a profit. The new concept however focuses on the firms existing potential customers and seeks to earn profit through customer satisfaction with an integrated marketing program.

McDonalds Business Analysis
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I am a freelance writer inspirational and hard working. For me work is worship. I love to do deadline oriented jobs as it is a great test to my vitality, skill and my creativity. I have an unending passion to learn more things. I learn from my failures and drive through success equally.

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