The question that I and others who know about Japan and the mobile industry always ask is whether it is cultural barriers that are preventing the same sophistication of handsets, content and services that you see in Japan being adopted elsewhere.
Bill Morrow, of Vodafone Japan, was interviewed in the January 6th edition of the main business magazine in Japan, Nikkei Business, as part of an article on why Japanese handset manufacturers (NEC, Sharp, Toshiba) aren't doing so well outside their domestic market. He seems to be saying there isn't a cultural barrier, however he does point to one of the factors that I and others often highlight, which is the way that Japanese companies in the same supply chain collaborate very easily (Wa no seishin, or 'the spirit of harmony') when someone comes up with an idea like an electronic purse, to launch the new feature.
He says that he has no doubt consumers in Europe are just as interested in electronic purses or mobile phones with better music playing capability but at the moment their main criteria for buying a phone are voice and messaging capabilities. He does however point out that the needs of businesspeople when it comes to mobile phones are the same in Spain or the UK or Japan. He seems optimistic that Sharp and Toshiba are making the right preparations for bringing about a change in the rest of the world's attitudes to mobile phones.
Interesting nuggets from the literature review:
Richness or leanness is not an inherent property of electronic mail medium, but an emergent property of the interaction of the electronic mail medium with its organizational context. Social context is more important than the media itself for communication effectiveness.
Highly heterogeneous teams and highly homogeneous teams exhibit high levels of productivity, while moderately heterogeneous teams have lower levels of productivity. If the team used technology such as group decision support systems they outperformed those who did not and had higher levels of satisfaction. But there is higher process loss in heterogeneous teams (ie takes more time, more communication).
She concludes from her own research that email eliminates non-verbal intercultural miscommunication and helped team members bridge over space and time differences. The lack of nonverbal and social cues reduces miscommunication due to cultural diversity.
I wonder whether eliminating something, because it causes confusion, can really be said to produce better communications. It may eliminate misunderstanding if I slap my son's wrist when he tries to take a biscuit, rather than raising an eyebrow or asking if he would prefer a piece of fruit, but is this really going to improve our mother-child relationship?
Satinder Gill, who was then working in Japan at the NTT Basic Research Labs, and is now at the University of Middlesex gave a paper (pdf link) at the University of Sydney conference on Cultural Attitudes towards Communication and Technology in 1998. Yes, a bit old, and I've been meaning to blog it for months. Ah well.
She asserts that discussions of communication by email and videoconferencing assume a universality of culture because the non-English speaking cultures are making all the adjustments (eg addressing others and allowing themselves to be addressed by first name) and the English speaking cultures don't notice this.
The hypotheses of her research is that for Japan the perception of e-mail is that it is easier for conflicts to emerge and that face to face communication is valued much more and that in the UK, email is perceived as a functional communication media. There is a tendency to demarcate and separate functional communication from face to face, and that flaming also arises.
She finds that Japanese do indeed consider email to be insufficient, and try to meet off line - called 'ofumi' apparently. Also that they use a greater number of emoticons ( a point I often make in my training). They do find it useful for functional matters and some like the fact that it allows for greater equality of status and allowances do not have to be made for someone else's situation.
Female Japanese found email useful for keeping an appropriate distance, and found men to be less masculine via e-mail. Email is seen as impolite compared to a letter.
The British said they did not have any difficulties, but there was a variety of experiences with some saying that it was difficult to handle negativity via email and that they never communicate by email with people whom they do not already know. Only one spoke about considering the other person's situation.
Many reasons are given for the Chinese aversion ot using voice mail in an article in the Wall Street Journal in Jan 2006:
Most people use mobile phones and never turn them off even in meetings, movies and funerals.
Text messaging is the preferred substitute for voicemail messages.
Most are away from their desks in traditional face to face meetings and don't expect anyone to be around to answer their office phone or check messages.
Don't expect to leave a message or consider it a loss of face to do so.
Anyone of importance will have a secretary to answer the phone and take messages.
Less attention is paid to why Americans like it so much. The article seems to imply that Europeans like it equally, which I would dispute. The only reason given is that Americans travel a lot.
Following on from my above confession that I prefer e-mail to telephone for communication, I will now adminster a reminder to myself not to depend too much on e-mail.
An article in Wired talks about the recent research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, which shows that we only have a no better than random chance of working out whether an e-mail is sarcastic or sincere. Those who sent the messages thought their partners would correctly interpret the tone 80% of the time and the recipients thought they accurately interpreted the tone of the messages 90% of the time. The reason behind this gap between perception and reality is egocentrism, or the difficulty some people have in detaching themselves from their own perspective. Another article on this research can be found here.
The same researchers also wrote another article looked at how stereotypes (regarding intelligence or shyness for example) persevere when using e-mail.
I was going to say that all this should make one doubly cautious if there are cultural differences as well. But actually most people working in a multinational context are probably more aware that they need to avoid sarcasm and stereotyping then they do with people from the same culture as them.
Hat tip to pootergeek.
Blog backlog 3. More from the Financial Times mobility issue of November 12 2005.
The final article in the mobility issue was about people who choose to cut themselves off from e-mail or not to have a mobile phone. It focuses on Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen, who now routes e-mail through his assistant and Jonathan Liebenau, a senior lecturer in Information Systems, who chooses not to have a mobile phone and asks students and colleagues to e-mail him instead. As the writer says, it is about which particular dragon you wish to control.
It also seems to me about how people view and manage their networks. Sen stopped trying to deal with his e-mail because of the overwhelming number that came in after he won the Nobel Prize. Liebenau feels e-mail is better than people asking quick casual questions face to face, because such questions are better articulated in written form and better dealt with by him as an e-mail response. I suspect that Sen is far more relationship focused than Liebenau, and felt panicked by the volume of e-mails because of the number of relationships that might potentially need nurturing that it represented. Liebenau is far more task focused, and presumably is not going to waste time in e-mails building a relationship.
Personally I (secretly I hope) react badly to calls coming in via mobile phone or work phone, feeling it is an intrusion of my privacy or flow of work. I use e-mail all the time though, both to build relationships and to get task related questions dealt with. Having said that, I often use the phone to talk to customers because I think I get better idea of what their true reaction or wants are and also to talk to colleagues in more relationship oriented countries like Spain or Italy.
Blog backlog 2. More from the FT mobility issue of November 12 2006.
The point that many developing countries are leapfrogging fixed line problems and adopting mobile telephony has been made many times. The article in the FT had interest for me beyond that in its description of how ordinary Kenyans have been able to enter the market economy (and escape state sector corruption) thanks to mobile phones. One woman uses hers to run her freelance mobile massage service. Another uses it to find out what the market prices for her vegetables were before transporting them there. Another has added on a phone booth business to his one man tailoring business and is dreaming of hiring another tailor, reinvesting any cash he makes into credit for the phone booth, instead of frittering it away as he used to.
Operators have adapted to local market conditions by providing services such as texting commodity prices to farmers and allowing one user to text airtime to another.
Blog backlog. First up, FT magazine's mobility issue from November 12 2005. No link.
A graduate student from the Philippines was surprised at the lack of texting among his American friends in the Philippines he was accustomed to getting and sending dozens of messages a day. "If I've been to sleep and don't have at least four messages when I wake up, I feel no one loves me". Teens in the UK are similar I think.
According to Glenn Woroch, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley, most technologies become less widely used as they reach a bigger sphere of people, but this has not been the case with mobile phones. The amount of time the average person spends with his or her mobile is going up.
Another difference in the spread of mobile communications is that many of the technologies associated with it were not created for business use first. Looking at how most Japanese teenagers use their mobiles suggests to the journalist that pervasive communications are strengthening social bonds, not breaking them down. Japanese teenagers expect messages to be returned immediately or at least within 30 minutes, or a social convention has been violated. Forgetting to take your mobile with your or letting the battery die are also social misdemeanours. Messages are also used to pave the way from virtual to real communication, for example phoning or meeting someone.
The journalist wonders whether business executives are as happy to be permanently connected. Leaving your BlackBerry behind or letting the battery die would be their social faux pas. I've certainly noticed in the past year that there is less need to warn people about switching off their mobiles, but a lot more surreptitious BlackBerry checking in my seminars. But it is very industry specific, and does not seem to be culturally related. Middle managers in IT/electronics or sales/purchasing roles are particularly prone to leaving their phones or BlackBerries on and checking them or letting them ring and checking the names, even when in face to face meetings. Japanese, Germans and British all lament this tendency.
Woroch says that leaving all communication channels open and checking them is setting too low a price on a scarce resource - access to a worker's time. Polychronic people don't have quite such a strong sense that there is a time scarcity of course so may feel less like there should be a high price. Interestingly it is an academic from polychronic Italy who laments the way that time is socially perceived as something that must be filled up to the very last folds, and that we are eliminating the positive aspects of lost time.
A survey by Surfkitchen on mobile phone usage uncovers some differences between Germany, USA, Italy, China, UK, Spain and Japan. Rather frustratingly, further analysis of the results is not possible because they don't even have the full report on their site, so we have to go on the press release. One comment I can make is that it is notable how the most relationship oriented cultures on the list (China and Italy) completely rely on their mobile phones to maintain those relationships.