Studies have found wide cultural variation in answers to the question: “In the companies for which you have worked, what percent of time do people typically spend on tasks that are part of their job description.” For example, people working in companies in large cities in the United States tend to report in the range of “80 percent task time, 20 percent social time.” On the other hand, people working in companies in India, Nepal, Indonesia, Malaysia, and some Latin American countries tend to give answers closer to “50 percent task time, 50 percent social time” ( Brislin and Kim, 2003). People tend to spend more of their work time on-task in some cultures and more of that time socializing-informal chatting, having tea or coffee with others, etc.-in other cultures. Time spent within the workplace also varies across cultures. European nations tend to also emphasize work, with many differences among countries, but generally put greater emphasis on preserving nonwork time than do people in the United States and Japan ( Levine, 2012). The differences are marked even within highly industrialized countries, The United States and Japan are famous for long work hours, as exemplified by the terms “workaholic” and “ karoshi” (“death by overwork”) (Levine, 1997). Although some balance is universal, the preferred formulas differ both across cultures and between individuals in each culture. There are cultural differences in the value placed on work, on leisure, and upon the balance between the two. The following dimensions are particularly prone to different cultural, as well as individual, interpretations: Work Versus Leisure No dictionary clearly defines these rules of time for them or for strangers who stumble over the maddening incongruities between the time sense they bring with them and the one they face in a new land.Ĭultures may differ on many aspects of social time-its value, meaning, how it should be divided, allocated, and measured.
They are either familiar and comfortable or unfamiliar and wrong.” The world over, children simply pick up their society’s conceptions of early and late, of waiting and rushing, of the past, the present, and the future, as they mature. These informal patterns of time “are seldom, if ever, made explicit. Half a century ago anthropologist Edward Hall described cultural rules of social time as the “ silent language” ( Hall, 1983). The idea that "time is money" may be good for business but is it good for society in general? What other ways do people around the world conceptualize and experience time? The list included a wide range of items familiar to fearful travelers, such as “the type of food eaten,” the “personal cleanliness of most people,” “the number of people of your own race,” and “the general standard of living.” But aside from mastering the foreign language, the two greatest difficulties for the Peace Corps volunteers were concerned with social time: “the general pace of life,” followed by one of its most significant components, “how punctual most people are” ( Spradley & Phillips, 1972).
In one particularly telling study of the roots of culture shock, Spradley and Phillips asked a group of returning Peace Corps volunteers to rank 33 items concerning the amount of cultural adjustment each had required of them. Research shows that cultural differences in time can be as vast as those between languages.
Beliefs about time remain profoundly different from culture to culture. This way of thinking about time is not universal, however. With time and things on the same value scale, we can establish how many of our working hours equal the price of a product in a store. Remarkably, the civilized mind has reduced time-the most obscure and abstract of all intangibles-to the most objective of all quantities: money. Workers are paid by the hour, lawyers charge by the minute, and advertising is sold by the second (US$3.3 million for a 30-second commercial, or a little over $110,000 per second, for the 2012 Super Bowl). It is said that “time is money” in industrialized economies. Use these concepts to better understand the hidden dimensions of culture.Explore major components of social time.Understand how cultures differ in the views of time and the importance of these differences for social behavior.
0 kommentar(er)
