Talk about English - Who on Earth are we? Part 9 | Текст песни

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Callum: Hello. Recently in our Talk about English series, Who on Earth are we? Marc
Beeby’s looked at the differences between cultures that value the individual,
and those that value the group, or the collective. Here’s Marc to tell us about
the work of someone who studied these differences.
Marc: One of the first people to recognise the importance of this distinction between
individualist and collectivist cultures was the Dutch researcher Geert Hofstede
- the man responsible for one of the largest intercultural surveys that’s ever
been conducted. And it’s Hofstede’s work and its results that we’ll be hearing
about today. We begin with some background to Hofstede’s research, from
Rebecca Fong, a teacher of intercultural communication from the University of
the West of England.
Rebecca Fong
Hofstede used 116,000 employees in over 40 different countries from the IBM company
which is an international business company. And he conducted a survey on the differences in
values and social behaviour amongst the employees, He was assuming that human behaviour
isn't random but to some extent predictable and so that in conducting this survey he'd be able
to identify sets of responses which might reveal patterns or value dimensions within and
across cultures.
Marc: Rebecca Fong. The topic of our last two programmes is one of Hofstede’s
value dimensions - the individualism/collectivism dimension. As we said,
cultures tend to fit somewhere along a scale between extreme individualism
and extreme collectivism. No culture would be exactly at one end of the scale
but would tend to fall somewhere between these two ‘poles’. All Hofstede’s
value dimensions measure cultural tendencies in this way - and we’re going to be looking briefly at three more of these value dimensions now. First, with the
help of Ana Baltazar from Brazil, and David Banks from Canada, Rebecca
Fong outlines Geert Hofstede’s ‘power distance dimension’.
Rebecca Fong
What the power distance dimension measures is the equality or inequality in a culture.
Hofstede's research involved questioning employers and employees on decision making
behaviours. He was interested in the style of decision making within a culture and the degree
of fear amongst the employees. And what he thought he'd be able to tell by looking at these
aspects was how authoritarian a culture was or how tolerant and he'd be able to see whether
the existence of hierarchy perpetuated inequalities within that culture. It seemed that high
power distance cultures - or cultures where there was a greater distance between the people at
the top and the people at the bottom would be ones in which consultation between bosses and
workers was less likely to operate and also on a purely practical level - where the head of a
company would experience greater status in such things a luxurious office or having a
chauffeur or privileges.
Ana Baltazar
I believe in Brazil this power relation is very strong. If you are the boss, probably you are
going to get ten times more well paid than your first assistant or something like that. But in
Brazil this power relation reflects into the politics and the culture in general and this is a
problem in a way.
Rebecca Fong
Hofstede discovered from his statistical analysis that the level of education in a culture was a
dominant factor in deciding the power distance - so in higher power distance cultures a higher
value was put on obedience and conformity as opposed to independence and some of this
could be seen to be because the workforce was perhaps less well-educated and more afraid of
disagreeing with their bosses.
...
Группа Learning English. Продолжение эпизода:
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/webcast/scripts/whoonearth/tae_whoonearth_09_080626.pdf

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