I'm back in school--taking Intercultural Communications--and only have time for school reading. . .other books will have to wait until Thanksgiving break!

A detailed and fascinating review of Hofstede's dimensions, by the researcher himself, showing broad high-level insights into history and culture, although a bit tedious, as it often describes in detail relationships many of us implicitly understand.

Solid. Very detailed. Would be good as a book to reference if you are in a cross cultural situation or are finding it hard to work with someone from a different background. A little tedious to read all the stats if you have no immediate application.

This took a long time for me to get through because it is packed with information. It is a fascinating study into "culture" and what that word really means. There is a large discussion of different elements that distinguish different cultures based on survey data. They show how countries differ from each other in terms of these elements, which I thought was quite interesting, to think about how someone from Japan or China might have a different idea of how to approach a particular situation compared to my American ideas of culture. There's a lot of detail and statistical analysis of all of this survey data to explain the differences. I think this could have been more concisely explained. The last part of the book talks about the implications of these differences in culture and what it means in terms of business relations and governmental policies towards other countries that have different cultures. It concludes with a discussion of how culture evolves over time, which at times seemed to turn more into a rant against overpopulation of the earth and religious dogmas.

The topic is absolutely fascinating and one not covered much elsewhere so I really enjoyed the 500 pages or so of the book, but it just took me a long time to get through it because of the organization of the book and the more academic style of writing.

An IBM's survey cannot make generalizations on people of the country and all the businesses. Period. Above all - how does Europe have so many regions (east and west of nations) and Africa is one!
2 stars because the definitions of the cultural parameters were good - but labeling was entirely wrong and because there are better versions of these studies now the authors' website.

Naprawdę ciekawa pozycja dla osób zainteresowanych różnicami kulturowymi. Osobiście przeczytałam ją z polecenia mojej promotorki pracy licencjackiej i mam zamiar ją wykorzystać w pracy. Język jest przystępny, naukowy. W każdym dziale można znaleźć study cases, które pomagają zrozumieć o jakich problemach autor mówi.

The research was interesting, although maybe a little dated--I'm sure that it's influenced a lot of current thinking about multicultural society. Scholarly, but not too dry.