This is the best book I have read in 10 years, bar none. It is a study of IBM employees in 75 different countries, and how their cultural views of the world differ. I stumbled on this while reading some things about screen design in a computer journal. I had just returned from a trip to Tanzania, and I was fascinated by the profound difference in worldview that I encountered there. I've written more about that elsewhere. See "On an East African World View". This book is a scientific study of exactly that – how different peoples see different views of reality.
Every chapter opens with a little vignette or anecdote that perfectly captures the idea that the author is trying to present.
Just a couple of points from the book:
Nations that are relatively close geographically can be radically different culturally. Costa Rica is very different from most other South American Countries. Norway is very different from France in the “hierarchical” dimension – the way people consider leaders to be above others. Norway has almost no sense of difference – while France has an exalted one.
The king of Sweden was in a department store in Stockholm on Dec. 23, 1988, trying to buy some Christmas presents. He wanted to write a check. The clerk would not accept his check because he did not have a photo id. Other people stopped and tired to help. “He’s the king,” they told the clerk. She said, “I don’t care if he's the king, if he doesn’t have a photo id, he can’t cash a check.” They finally persuaded her by showing her his picture on a coin! She finally agreed to cash the check, after carefully noting his name and address . Scandinavians in general don’t put a lot of stock in position! (Hofstede, Cultures and Organizations, p. 72. 2005 edition.)
This worldview is very powerful, all pervasive, and we get it locked in by the time we are 8 or 10 years old. It never really changes beyond that point. It has to do with how we think about the world, people, rules, honesty, etc. Almost everything is colored by it, and we cannot really get beyond it without great difficulty. Where I was in Africa, the predominant view is that we are born into reality – God gives birth to us. There is no sense that we are in charge of reality as there is in my experience. Most east Africans do not see themselves as in charge of the world, don’t feel called upon to fix things, build things, avoid diseases, etc. They are simply part of the world, not in charge of it. This is much more of an ecological view than the dominant Western mentality. But it has some serious downsides as well.
Worldviews last a long, long time. The author theorizes that some of the differences he found in South America go back to the Mayan and Aztec influences. Some of the differences in Europe come from being inside of or outside of the Roman Empire.
Most of the non-western world has such a different view of hierarchy, honesty, and individuality, that our institutions of democracy and capitalism will likely never work there.
For a bit more on this, check out some of by blog entries - especially this one:
http://carlscheider.blogspot.com/2011/01/culture-and-developing-nations.html