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Building Cross-cultural Competence: How to Create Wealth from Conflicting Values CHARLES HAMPDEN-TURNER and FONS TROMPENAARS. Chichester: JoUn Wiley and Sons Ltd, 2000. 388 pp. ISBN 0471495271
Eighteen years of research on cultural values in more than 40 countries led Charles Hampden-Turner and Fons Trompenaars, the authors of Building Crosscultural Competence: Haw to Create Wealth from Conflicting Values to, as they claim, significant discoveries. Like in several other publications (1993, 1998) HampdenTurner and Trompenaars once again come back to the notion of systematic and regular differences between cultures. Six dimensions that form, according to the authors, the universal scaffolding used to build each particular culture, are: universalism vs. particularism, individualism vs. communitarianism, specificity vs. diffusion, achieved status vs. ascribed status, inner direction vs. outer direction and sequential time vs. synchronous lime. These dimensions have been defined after extended comparative studies involving nearly 50,000 respondents, and are described in a detailed way both in the present book and in previous publications by Hampden-Turner and Trompenaars. The authors refer to the following concept: 'cultures are not arbitrary or randomly different from one another. They are instead mirror images of one another's values [. ..]. The ideal we seek in this book is to perceive and think in both directions. This is another way of arguing that we must learn to think in circles.1 The reasoning in this volume develops around these six circular dimensions. Those cultural components serve as a basis to analyse in what way cultural diversity manifests itself in everyday life, and as a starting point of research aimed at the reconstruction of the ways in which it influences cross-border cooperation. A circular approach to reconciling cultural dimensions, suggesting some affinity with the hermeneutical circle and the hermeneutical debate on the compromise between a whole and its parts, adds in a pictorial manner a visual representation of alliances between seemingly irreconcilable cultural elements. In addition to the description of six dimensions, the book contains examples of their practical manifestation in business, industry, religion, society, science, ethics and politics.
Between the Comic Strips
The style of this book is one of its biggest assets: it is lively, the book reads well, and cases and anecdotes fascinate. Through colourful stories, often borrowed from world-famous novels and movies, the...