Theories of cultural awareness


Hofstede’s theory on cultural awareness:
everyone who is working should understand the difference in every culture and how it affects the work life in an office or worldwide.
He identified six categories which define culture
1.       Power Distance Index
2.       Collectivism vs. Individualism
3.       Uncertainty Avoidance Index
4.       Femininity vs. Masculinity
5.       Short-Term vs. Long-Term Orientation
6.       Restraint vs. Indulgence

Ferdinad Tönnies on cultural awareness:
He is searching the difference between Community and Society. He thinks that the inner will is the most important thing. He did a research about how you can say your opinion free to everyone and the critic you could get for this and how they could change political or social actions. And he thinks that every community and society have a collective will

If I think about my own experiences, I did in Finland compared with the theories I am totally agree with them. If we work together there is a collective will and it doesn’t matter which culture, because we have all the same target at least in the group work for the university. In my opinion it was never a big problem that we were from different culture. Maybe it differentiated which culture but I think the most have the same target and so it worked really well.
When I think about the definition of culture I am totally agree. Because we did this scale in one lecture and it is different for every culture but mostly the same. The biggest difference was with one exchange student from another country who had totally different meaning of everything. Then the work was hard to do and even the discussion in the lectures where hard, but we managed it. I think we can all learn a lot from other cultures.

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