Understanding Cultural Differences : A Case Study of Chinese Culture

This paper aims to focus on differentiation of culture. Most cultural notions are stemmed from the concept work of Hofstede. They all begin with a classification of culture throughout the creation of an ontology that distinguishes relatable levels of reality. One illustration will be highlighted as a case study of Chinese culture because China continues improving with its process of globalization. Then, it finds itself straddling different national cultures that can lead to a problem of cross-cultural communication. This can cause a problem of miscommunication and misunderstanding which arises because people in different cultures often understand complex messages differently. Hence, a level theory of Hofstede was to act as a basic for the evaluation not only of national culture, but also of corporate culture. However, these level theories are not a very dynamic representation of culture and its manifestations that impoverishes the way that phenomenal manifestations of culture can be explained. On the other hand an alternative approach was adopted by Schwartz that did not talk ontology at all, it has been demonstrated that there is some relationship between the outcomes of the Hofstede and Schwartz results. A new ontology is also provided that is distinct from Hofstede's level theory, and derives from the paradigm of knowledge cybernetics by Yolles since 2006. This enables both the outcomes from Hofstede and Schwartz to be identified, and provides a new way of directly comparing different cultural mapping theories