A couple of interesting articles in the Financial Times Management Supplement today (subscription required unfortunately).
One article on field service management software features a quote from Phil Dance, CIO of BT Wholesale, who recently implemented A.P.Solve's Taskforce in France; "the technology works, but you need to address its cultural impact... For us, moving from having a human being despatching staff to a piece of software telling them what to do required a big cultural change programme to help the engineering workforce see that the system was meant to help them and improve customer service - it's not 'Big Brother'."
I can just imagine the French engineers' reactions to the software being implemented. For a start their sense of pride would be at stake - being ordered around by a piece of software - pah! And then their fury at not being given the chance to have a really good argument with the despatcher about what work they should be doing, not to mention a bit of chitchat and maybe flirtation with the despatcher first. You'd have to have a lot of very practical reasons and be prepared for a big long logical debate with all the engineers before they accepted the new system.
The other article, which is slightly off-topic for this blog but on my mind at the moment in my occasional search for an amazing job, concerns the proliferation of terms in the personnel/human resources world, which all seem to describe the same thing. First it was personnel, then it was human resources and now it's human capital management. I would add to this list Organizational Development and possibly Organizational Change/Change Management.
If you look at a definition of Organizational Development it has a list of the same activities you would find in a definition of human resource management - leadership development, team development, career development, talent management (currently getting very trendy), change management, e-learning, coaching, training. Maybe they mean OD is HRM without the luncheon vouchers.
HCM seems to involve measuring the outcomes of HRM or OD (headcount, recruitment and termination figures, remuneration but also knowledge and how it relates to performance - hah, good luck with that one). OD is more about changing the culture of the company, using the above list of activities.
Quite frankly though, I am often tempted to do a "search and replace" on my resume for all these terms, interchangeably, depending on what the job ad is asking for.
Cinderella Bloggerfeller referred to a Blogspot blog written in English by an American in Tbilisi, Georgia. I thought I'd have a look at what LiveJournal has to offer and found that 48 (37 live) LiveJournal bloggers say they are from Georgia. American teen count about 50% - this time not 'ironic' like the 'Iraq' LiveJournal bloggers I looked at in a previous posting, I think, just living in Georgia USA and unaware that there is a country called Georgia too. The distinction between Georgia the US state and Georgia the country is made quite clear on LiveJournal so no excuses there.
The other 50% are blogs written in Russian or Georgian - apart from the odd bit (eg "evil days" for last Thursday's entry title) from this guy who also has a nice line in a perpetually rising and falling eyebrow on his user photo (top right hand corner), and clearly is not a teenager either. It's intriguing to see that someone is listening both to Nitin Sawhney and Metallica and decided to quote "Don't Cry For Me Argentina" in full ten days ago - seeing parallels with Georgia there? Some of them have become very active in the past few days, for example pepsikolka. Pepsikolka has done a lot of networking with others - she's a member of several LiveJournal communities and many of her friends come from Russia, Latvia, Ukraine, Greece, Germany as well as Georgia.
So, good points about LiveJournal - you can find blogs from people in other countries, you can get some idea about them from their music, their choice of emoticons, friends and designs... Otherwise I'm still contemplating moving this blog elsewhere for various reasons, some of which Ton has touched on.
Daniel Scuka, a Canadian who started a newsletter called Wireless Watch Japan and lived in Japan for many years is now in Germany and has just written a very useful article on the differences between the Japanese and European mobile markets. He says "the culture of mobile usage is probably not radically different between the two areas" but what has really struck him is the difference in pricing between mobile mail/messaging in Europe and Japan and the affect this is having on stunting the growth of third party content and mobile marketing in Europe. He also points to my perennial grouse - the way European operators try to keep their systems closed and not let anyone else get much of a share of the revenues from data services.
The International Telecommunication Union has published its first Digital Access Index. As they say, " the results suggest that English is no longer a decisive factor in quick technology adoption, especially as more content is made available in other languages." The US and the UK aren't even in the top 10 economies with the best digital access for their populations, whereas South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan are.
The index measures the overall ability of individuals in a country to access and use information and communication technology and uses 8 variables:
1. Fixed telephone subscribers per 100 inhabitants
2. Mobile cellular subscribers per 100 inhabitants
3. Internet access price as percentage of Gross National Income per capita
4. Adult Literacy
5. Combined primary, secondary and tertiary school enrolment level
6. International Internet bandwidth (bits) per capita
7. Broadband subscribers per 100 inhabitants
8. Internet users per 100 inhabitants
These variables explain why some unexpected countries (Slovenia for example) are judged to have high access levels. But it's interesting to see that on variable 8, the top five countries are Iceland, Sweden, South Korea, United States and Japan. Again, we should not assume that the internet is only attractive to English speakers.
With my interest in the cross cultural uses of IT I would love to be able to understand and analyse blogs and other information on the internet from countries whose languages I don't speak. But, uh, duh, I can't because I can't read them. Not only that, it's really hard to find them in the first place. For example, if you put "Chinese blogs" into Google, you get a nice list of blogs based in China, but written in English, usually by Westerners living in China. Searching for "mandarin blogs" or "pinyin blogs" doesn't get you much further. So I tried what I do when looking for Japanese stuff on the web, go to Google in the native language version, but I can't type in Chinese like I can for Japanese (both linguistic and keyboard/software constraints) so I tried typing 'blog' in English, and - finally - I see something promising. One of the links is to this blog - XuPing's Space. It looks really interesting - he (or she) is obviously interested in the same things as me - blogs and how they relate to Knowledge Management, e-learning etc. With my 1 year of Mandarin studies I can see some of his diagrams relate to 'people' and 'words' and the different ways they connect. But that's it - I don't know their gender or where they are (could be China, could be Taiwan) let alone what they're trying to say.
We get excited about how global we the blogosphere or the internet have become when Iranians start blogging, but again, it's when they're blogging in English that they get our attention. There is a list of Iranian blogs written in Persian who won prizes recently btw - but, well, it's all Greek to me.
The language used matters because English as a language has various characteristics that force you to express yourself in certain ways - because of the 'subject verb object' construction, it is less easy to be as vague as you can be in other languages. It is therefore much more 'low context' (although British English native speakers can be pretty good at writing in a 'read between the lines' high context way ;-)).
These frustrations with the Anglosphere's own blindness to its non-globality, conscious or unconscious, are expressed in a post on the Chicagoboyz blog as well as some good statistics from Melvyn Bragg (!) on the commercial reasons why we only care about the English language speaking countries.
Continuing on from looking at The Mesopotamian blog, I saw a list of 9 other blogs written by Iraqis - they're all on Blogspot. Then I recollected that LiveJournal had a big list of where all their users came from, with links. Sure enough there are 260 LiveJournal users in Iraq.
Except there aren't. Yup, I was being naive and reckoning without the oh-so-ironic (in an Alanis Morissette sort of way) American teen who makes up the majority of LiveJournal users as far as I can tell. I clicked through 50 of the most recently updated and my rough estimate is that 80% are American teens living in Podunk, and the rest are US soldiers in Iraq, plus a few Americans who are out there on infrastructure building projects - oh, and two Russians for some unfathomable reason.
Actually it is quite interesting reading the US soldier blogs - with my HR/organisational change hat on I am trying and failing to imagine how their 'managers' maintain morale and purpose - maybe LiveJournal is a good place for them to vent though, and one shouldn't read too much into some of their down moments. You can find them by going to www.livejournal.com/users/ and then adding spastik-bob, givingintoashes, paladyn, rebelcoyote, mykmykmotorbyke, slownewsday, hawkinbagdad, themeshuggener, bumpthekoala, desertfox11m, combatpattybot.
So maybe LiveJournal isn't quite as multicultural as I had hoped. Another reason for choosing them now looking less attractive....
The Dissident Frogman recently added a quiet version of one of his banners to his blog. Apparently the noisy version was annoying Spartacus, an American blogger.The banner was a Flash movie which played every time you visited his site, complete with spooky music.
The Dissident Frogman's site is still full of distractions and very 'busy' to a Northern European or American's taste. It is bilingual, has lots of graphics, Flash movies, things in boxes, interjected comments in different fonts, obscure references, lots of links... All very well designed and stylish, but, I would say, a classic example of French polychronicity. As the Halls put it in 'Understanding Cultural Differences', "the most important thing to know about the French is that they are high on the polychronic scale. This means they do many things at once, they can tolerate constant interruptions...they use all their senses, visual, auditory and olfactory."
Merde in France, another bilingual French blog also makes a lot of use of cartoons, obscure references and links and is similarly quite difficult to follow for this plodding monochronous Brit. Goodness knows what these guys will do to their blogs if we ever get smellovision on the internet.
The Mesapotamian, an Iranian blog written in English, has had a recent brush with cultural communication differences. Alaa, the blog owner, wrote a very moving response ("I don't want to say anything to spoil this moment of awe. I kneel and kiss your hand.") to an American woman who left a comment on his blog about her two sons in the US Army, one in Iraq, one who was in Iraq.
Mr JoJo, (who describes himself as Western in outlook), left this comment:
"Do you know what the image of Alaa going down on his knees in awe brought to my mind? Well, it's a slave my friends. We Africans know alot about going on one's knees in a "moment of awe". American slaves did as well. There is NO need for him to go on his knees and kiss anyone's hands to show his appreciation for their help, support or sacrifice. Quite frankly the whole notion highly disturbs me. Showing gratitude is one thing; crawling head-over-heels to debase oneself is another. I hope I am not misunderstood [...]
What I am trying to tell Alaa is that it is not necessary for him to play to his audience. I may be wrong but the notion of his going down on his knees in awe smacks of over dramatization. It appeared to me as a calculated statement made to elicit a favorable reaction"
You can imagine this led to quite a lot of debate on The Mesopotamian, mostly quite restrained, as I think a large number of the commenters realised they were dealing with cultural differences rather than deliberate nastiness. Looking for some theoretical back up to my sense that there was a culture clash going on I picked up Hofstede to look at the results of his research with regard to Iraqis and Westerners such as Americans and Brits. The biggest difference between Iraqis (in Hofstede lumped in with Arab nations as a whole) and Americans/Brits in the various dimensions Hofstede looks at is in what he calls 'uncertainty avoidance' - which is a measure of how comfortable people are with ambiguity, measured by how stressed they feel at work, how rule oriented they are and so on. Americans have fairly weak uncertainty avoidance, whereas Arab countries have quite strong uncertainty avoidance. In Arab countries therefore, it is the norm that "emotions may at proper times and places be ventilated", compared to "emotions should not be shown" for the USA and Northern Europeans. Interestingly, West and East African countries are pretty similar to Arab countries on most of the dimensions, apart from uncertainty avoidance, where they are closer to the US.
So what might seem rather florid, over-emotional and possibly manipulative language to Alaa's Western readers is not at all how an Arab reader would react to Alaa's language. As the Saudi woman who trained me in intercultural theory recently told me, it's not uncommon for Arabs to cry at work. To give Mr JoJo credit, he came round to seeing that Alaa was just expressing himself in a way that was quite normal in Iraq.
AT Kearney very generously allow free downloads of their annual Mobinet study on international trends in mobile usage, done in conjunction with Cambridge University's business school, the Judge Institute of Managemement. This year's Mobinet 6 came out in June but has recently been picked up by a bored or desperate journalist as 'Breaking News' on RCR Wireless. Which in turn led to it being picked up by the always excellent TheFeature
The survey asks 5,600 mobile phone users in 15 countries about their attitudes towards mobile phones, and finds that Americans are concerned about privacy, security and complexity, Europeans about cost and technology and and the Japanese about keypad usability, content and speed of acccess.
So, is this a cultural difference or simply due to the differing stages of maturity of these markets?
Cross cultural studies (see Edward T. Hall and Mildred Reed Hall's 'Understanding Cultural Differences' for example) highlight the value that Americans place on personal privacy, but certain Europeans (the Germans for example) have been shown to have even stronger senses of privacy -"a culture in which it is a breach of privacy to open someone else's refrigerator". Perhaps what is more at stake for Americans is their belief in uninfringable rights.
Europeans are regarded as too diverse in cultural terms by intercultural theorists to be able to make any very sophisticated comment about the conclusion that Europeans are stingy and the survey doesn't explain what "being concerned about technology" means. It could be that Europeans are concerned about whether the technology actually works or that they are concerned that they won't know how to use it. The Japanese concern about keypad usability, content and speed of access yet again shows what demanding and meticulous customers they are.
When I was asked to speak in July this year at a Voxpolitics meeting in London about politics and blogs, with the brief that I talk about moblogs and anything relevant from Japan, I soon hit a brick wall. There wasn't any connection between mobile phone-based blogging in Japan and politics. In fact I couldn't even find any general Japanese web blogs that had a political focus. Unsurprisingly, explaining this to the audience of keen-as-mustard geek bloggers and warbloggers did not go down particularly well. Lesson learnt - if asked to speak, make sure that the brief you are given really will lead to something substantial and relevant to the audience.
I've now seen this on Japan Media Review, a site I've looked at many times and printed off lots from in the past. I unaccountably failed to spot this article in time for the July talk about how Japanese anti-war activists are using their mobile phones and the internet to organise themselves. But, rather as my friends in Hong Kong explained when I asked them about mobile phones, blogs and the democracy protests in July (in desperation for something to say to those fierce Voxpolitics bloggers!), it turns out that mobile phones were mostly used to organise and coordinate protests rather than to create moblogs.
There does seem to be some kind of cultural barrier (and not just because of government censorship) to being overtly political on weblogs in (certain? all?) Asian countries. An indicator of this is the ban in Japan on using the internet for electioneering, for fear of libel.
One of the Japanese anti-war organisations' websites does have a weblog (and even calls it a weblog) though. But it has no comments, just links to relevant news stories, which is something that I have seen with other Japanese blogs - comments, if they exist at all, are often one liners.
At least it is still being kept up-to-date - another thing I noticed with Japanese blogs in general was that many of even the most popular ones had been shut down by their owners, who were finding it too much work for no money after a couple of years of fun. (I had to duck the flak again when I made this point at Voxpolitics ;-) ).
I see that the Clay Shirky article from 1999 I linked to in a previous entry has already been the subject of criticism in the past. Multilingual web usability consultants based in Canada, content.nu (who don't seem to exist any more as their website tells you bluntly that it hasn't been updated since 2001) accuse Shirky of saying something I don't think he was saying - that thanks to the internet, English will conquer all and minority languages will wither away.
Actually I think his underlying assumption is one that both Content.nu and I would probably agree on, which is that people will always and everywhere prefer to look at websites (and any other IT interface) in their native language. This means that parallel worlds of knowledge - in different languages - can result, rarely intercommunicating. Yes you can have multilingual websites, and that's where contenu.nu's advice will come in handy. But most multilingual websites are designed to make sure that customers feel comfortable buying online from a company that isn't from their home country, rather than attempts to exchange knowledge.
This criticism of Shirky's article was resurrected on blogalization.org, which is itself a self-declared example of a gateway or cultural spanner - as I was discussing in a previous post. Interestingly, all the bilingual blogs there I've seen are bilingual in the sense of English plus another language. So maybe English is the gateway language. Perhaps this was what Shirky was getting at when he said the English was the Official Second Language, and that's different from saying that English will wipe out other languages on the web.
I'm still getting to grips with what blogalization.org is all about and have a lurking fear that given the rather snippy tone of some of the contributions there, I may be about to get a whole newbie earful of grief about my ignorance of previous debates on Clay Shirky and no doubt others. But both Ton and Olaf have been very welcoming of me since I linked to them, so here's hoping!
I've often wondered if e-mail is making monochronic cultures more polychronic. People from monochronic cultures (USA, Switzerland, Germany and Scandinavia) see time in a linear way and like to focus on one job at a time in a highly concentrated way. Always-on e-mail is therefore anathema to this, as it interrupts their work with irrelevant demands. People from polychronic cultures (France, Latin America, Arab countries) presumably treat e-mail as just one of the many tasks they are juggling at once, not minding the distraction, happy to look at e-mails, talk on the phone and write a report all at once. Although I have Scandinavian roots I'm polychronic when it comes to work - I sometimes have so many windows open on my computer that I used to crash it (before I got XP!)
It seems that American business school students are becoming much more polychronic in the way they behave in the classroom, e-mailing and surfing the web while participating in discussions. Some faculty are happy with this, presumably if they feel comfortable that the e-mailing and surfing are all related to the topic in hand. But remembering the whispered comments that used to ripple across the room at my business school, I bet half the e-mails and surfing are tangential at best to the topic in hand... This article is mostly a plug for a book, but I like the anecdote about the author being surprised at the way his 10 year old daughter was able to incorporate instant messaging, watching TV and talking on the phone into getting her homework done. This shift in work habits has been going on for a while though - I remember my parents being totally unconvinced that I could do my homework and listen to music at the same time. Now I actually need music to work!
An oldie but a goodie from Clay Shirky in 1999 talking about a Dentsu Institute for Human Studies report which showed that people from Asian countries who speak English are more likely to be online than those who don't. I wonder if this study was done again, whether anything would have changed. Access to the internet via mobile phones may well have shifted the balance away from English speakers in South Korea and Japan...
I am intrigued by his idea (or is it Dentsu's) at the end of the article about gateways - places where large numbers of multilingual people live such as New Delhi or Hong Kong, smoothing the transition between language networks. It ties into the exchange between Olaf Brugman and Ton Zijlstra last month about the need for individuals who are network straddlers or connectors, where you are trying to get knowledge to flow across language divides. As Ton says, the solution is not to centralise the translation effort or try to adopt one language in an organisation. Mechanical translation is not sufficient yet either and in any case, may never be sufficient, given that knowledge, not data is what needs to be transmitted, and knowledge needs human intervention to be transmitted successfully.
Similar concepts exist in knowledge management - that each team (if it's functioning well), has a member who spends a lot of time communicating with team members and other teams, and is the hub for knowledge transfer - the kind of person who's always forwarding interesting articles to people (yes, I confess, I do it all the time). And you find people like this being identified in intercultural theory too - called 'cultural spanners', who are able to switch between two national cultures inside a company, interpreting what is going on to different interest groups.
Like Adam in the Garden of Eden, if you name something, you supposedly have the ownership of it. The coinage of 'weblog', its shortened form 'blog' and now 'moblog' (mobile + blog) has been claimed for English speaking male Westerners: Jorn Barger in December 1997 for 'weblog', Peter Merholz for 'blog' and Adam Greenfield in November 2002 for 'moblog'. It's not surprising therefore that blogging is seen by some non-white bloggers as "...a technology that is mostly the pursuit of upper middle class white males and does diddly to change the real world."
Blog-like sites, whose owners would not recognise the terms weblog, blog or moblog, have been up and running before 'blog' was coined - but they are unknown in the West because they are not written in English, or don't use the standard blog software that Westerners are familiar with. They can be called blogs in that they are in a diary format and contain links to other sites, with comments. In Japanese, they are snappily known as 'kojin nyuuzu saito' ?????????or individual news sites - or just simply ??or diaries. Blog sites with cameraphone photos inserted are also common in Japan, where cameraphones have been available since 2000. Many of these sites are more sophisticated than the systems currently being touted as 'moblogs' in the West in that they can be viewed and published to directly from a mobile phone browser.
'Blog' has become known as a word and concept in Japan recently. A book is about to come out called ?Bloggers? and when surveyed, 65% of the owners of 'kojin nyuuzu saito' said they would be happy to classify their sites as blogs.
Nonetheless, I think there is a difference in the way bloggers (and their equivalents) design and write their blogs in different cultures, particularly when it comes to warblogs and other overtly political, argumentative blogs. I will return to this in later postings.
I've just been re-doing a PowerPoint presentation that was originally created by a Japanese businessman. I couldn't see it working with a British audience so I replaced the dark blue swirling background with plain white, made all the fonts the same (arial - sans serif seems to be the best for a British audience?), cut down the number of colours used and dropped some of the less necessary text.
So I wonder, is it just me applying my own aesthetics or is this a crosscultural difference between Japanese and British taste in slides? When I was working for a Japanese company in Japan a few years ago, we hardly ever used PowerPoint - I got the impression such presentations were regarded with suspicion. Rightly, Edward Tufte would say.
Maybe high context cultures like Japan find slide presentations too unsubtle - they give lots of low context information and therefore not the real story. And perhaps I am appealing to the high context side of British nature, by ensuring that the presentation is aesthetically pleasing (subtext to the presentation is therefore - I'm intelligent and a person of taste and education, so you can trust my products).
When I was seven years old, I was the only Westerner at my all-Japanese school in Sendai, in the north of Japan. One of our projects in art class was to make a mask, and I chose to make a mask of a tengu. Tengu are demons or goblins in Japanese mythology, mischievous rather than evil, who live in trees and are master swordfighters. They are sometimes depicted as part bird, or as red skinned mountain priests, with long noses. This site has more on them.
I thought at the time I made a good mask, and I seem to remember my parents thought so too. But I got a strange reaction from the teachers - who laughed knowingly and said that my choice of character was to be expected. I didn't really understand this and I still am not sure what they meant. I do know I felt humiliated and embarrassed. Was it because I was a westerner, and westerners are famous in Japan for having long noses? Commodore Perry was depicted as a Tengu when he first arrived in Japan in the 1850s.
Or was it because Tengu and long noses symbolise conceitedness in Japan, and I was thought to be rather too full of myself? I was sure of how good my mask was, especially as everyone else in the class had created dull and predictable princess masks.
Paranoia, ignorance of symbols, refusing to conform to a cultural norm - I now realise they are all signs of intercultural frictions, and I still can't help liking Tengu masks!
I called this blog "hightext" to encapsulate the main point I want to make about cross cultural communication and ICT (information and communication technologies). ICT is mostly and unavoidably very low context. The message is contained in the text. Body language, signs of status, seniority, networks, connections, education, gender etc are almost always missing. Low context cultures are happy with this and assume everyone else is. High context cultures are uncomfortable with the messages received from low context cultures in this medium, and often try to find ways to create higher contexts, hence my coinage of hightext.