Anglo-American Networking and Chinese Guanxi. Emic Differences and a Culture General Process Model

The Japanese are renowned for working to preserve face, while Americans are considered frank. Frankness is taken to extremes at places like M.I.T., Stanford, and Israel. An Israeli friend was coaching me in direct speaking: When I saw him after he had to miss a review meeting, I said, "We missed you at the meeting." He replied, "In Israel, we would say, 'Why weren't you there?'" In other cultures, such as the church organization described earlier, even disagreeing mildly or taking initiative are considered slightly negative behaviors, signs of a person having excessive ego. As a result of differences around frankness in speach, people coming from different cultures can have difficulty working together. The overly frank person strikes the other as rash and abrasive, while the overly polite person strikes the other as not forthcoming, not contributing. Professional Subcultures Each profession also builds its own culture, with its own cultural values and norms. Project managers have theirs, as do experienced object-oriented developers, relational database designers, COBOL programmers, sales people, users, and so on ...»