The differences between cultures are leaded to misunderstandings in
many points.
3. FACTORS INFLUENSING VALUES
INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION: A GUIDE TO MEN OF ACTION
Anyone who has traveled abroad or dealt at all extensively with non-
Americans learns that punctuality is variously interpreted. It is one thing
to recognize this with the mind; to adjust to a different kind of
appointment time is quite another.
In Latin America, you should expect to spend hours waiting in outer
offices. If you bring your American interpretation of what constitutes
punctuality to a Latin-American office, you will fray your temper and
elevate your blood pressure. For a forty-five-minute wait is not unusual
-no more unusual than a five minute wait would be in the United States. No
insult is intended, no arbitrary pecking order is being established. If, in
the United States, you would not be outraged by a five-minute wait, you
should not be outraged by the Latin-American's forty-five-minute delay in
seeing you. The time pie is differently cut, that's all.
Further, the Latin American doesn't usually schedule individual
appointments to the exclusion of other appointments. The informal Clock of
his upbringing ticks more slowly and he rather enjoys seeing several people
on different matters at the same time. The three-ring circus atmosphere
which results, if interpreted in the American's scale of time and
propriety, seems to signal him to go away, to tell him that h~ is not being
properly treated, to indicate that his dignity is under attack. Not so. The
clock on the wall may look the same but it tells a different sort of time.
The cultural error may be compounded by' a further miscalculation. In
the United States, a consistently tardy man is likely to be considered
undependable, and by our cultural clock this is a reasonable conclusion.
For you to judge a Latin American by your scale of time values is to risk a
major error.
Suppose you have waited forty-five minutes and there is a man in his
office, by some miracle alone in the room with you. Do you now get down to
business and stop "wasting time"?
If you are not forewarned by experience or a friendly advisor, you may
try to do this. And it would usually be a mistake. For, in the American
culture, discussion is a means to an end: the deal. You try to make your
point quickly, efficiently, neatly. If your purpose is to arrange some
major affairs, your instinct is probably to settle the major issues first,
leave the details for later, possibly for the technical people to work out.
For the Latin American, the discussion is a part of the spice of life.
Just as he tends not to be overly concerned about reserving you your
specific segment of time, he tends not as rigidly to separate business from
non-business. He runs it all together and wants to make something of a
social event out of what you, in your .culture, regard as strictly
business.
The Latin American is not alone in this. The Greek businessman, partly
for the same and partly for different reasons, does not lean toward the
"hit-and-run" school of business behavior, either. The Greek businessman
adds to the social element, however, a feeling about what length of
discussion time constitutes go09 faith. In America, we show good faith by
ignoring the details. "Let's agree on the main points. The details will
take care of themselves."
Not so the Greek. He signifies good will and good faith by what may
seem to you an interminable discussion which includes every conceivable
detail. Otherwise, you see, he cannot help but feel that the other man
might be trying to pull the wool over his eyes. Our habit, in what we feel
to be our relaxed and friendly way, of postponing details until later
smacks the Greek between the eyes as a maneuver to flank him. Even if you
can somehow convince him that this is not the case, the meeting must still
go on a certain indefinite-but, by our standards, long-time or he will feel
disquieted.
The American desire to get down to business and on with other things
works to our disadvantage in other parts of the world, too; and not only in
business. The head of a large, successful Japanese firm commented: "You
Americans have a terrible weakness. We Japanese know about it and exploit
it every chance we get. You are impatient. We have learned that if we just
make you wait long enough, you'll agree to anything."
Whether this is literally true or not, the Japanese executive
singled out a trait of American culture which most of us share and which,
one may assume from the newspapers, the Russians have not overlooked,
either.
By acquaintance time we mean how long you must know a man be fore
you are willing to do business with him.
In the United States, if we know that a salesman represents a well
known, reputable company, and if we need his product, he may walk away from
the first meeting with an order in his pocket. A few minutes conversation
to decide matters of price, delivery, payment, model of product-nothing
more is involved. In Central America, local custom does not permit a
salesman to land in town, call on the customer and walk away with an order,
no matter how badly your prospect wants and needs your product. It is
traditional there that you must see your man at least three times before
you can discuss the nature of your business.
Does this mean that the South American businessman does not recognize
the merits of one product over another? Of course it doesn't. It is just
that the weight of tradition presses him to do business within a circle of
friends. If a product he needs is not available within his circle, he does
not go outside it so much as he enlarges the circle itself to include a new
friend who can supply the want. Apart from his cultural need to "feel
right" about a new relationship, there is the logic of his business system.
One of the realities of his life is that it is dangerous to enter into
business with someone over whom you have no more than formal, legal
"control." In the past decades, his legal system has not always been as
firm as ours and he has learned through experience that he needs the
sanctions implicit in the informal system of friendship.
Visiting time involves the question of who sets the time for a visit.
George Coelho, a social psychologist from India, gives an illustrative
case. A U.S. businessman received this invitation from an Indian
businessman: "Won't you and your family come and see us? Come any time."
Several weeks later, the Indian repeated the invitation in the same words.
Each time the American replied that he would certainly like to drop in-but
he never did. The reason is obvious in terms of our culture. Here "come any
time" is just an expression of friendliness. You are not really expected to
show up unless your host proposes a specific time. In India, on the
contrary, the words are meant literally-that the host is putting himself at
the disposal of his guest and really expects him to come. It is the essence
of politeness to leave it to the guest to set a time at his convenience. If
the guest never comes, the Indian naturally assumes that he does not want
to come. Such a misunderstanding can lead to a serious rift between men who
are trying to do business with each other.
Time schedules present Americans with another problem in many parts of
the world. Without schedules, deadlines, priorities, and timetables, we
tend to feel that our country could not run at all. Not only are they
essential to getting work done, but they also play an important role in the
informal communication process. Deadlines indicate priorities and
priorities signal the relative importance of people and the processes they
control. These are all so much a part of our lives that a day hardly passes
without some reference to them. "I have to be there by 6: 30." "If I don't
have these plans out by 5:00 they'll be useless." "I told J. B. I'd be
finished by noon tomorrow and now he tells me to drop everything and get
hot on the McDermott account. What do I do now?"
In our system, there are severe penalties for not completing work on
time and important rewards for holding to schedules. One's integrity and
reputation are at stake.
You can imagine the fundamental conflicts that arise when we attempt
to do business with people who are just as strongly oriented away from time
schedules as we are toward them.
The Middle Eastern peoples are a case in point. Not only is our idea
of time schedules no part of Arab life but the mere mention of a dead line
to an' Arab is like waving a red flag in front of a bull. In his culture,
your emphasis on a deadline has the emotional effect on him that his
backing you into a corner and threatening you with a club would have on
you.
One effect of this conflict of unconscious habit patterns is that
hundreds of American-owned radio sets are lying on the shelves of Arab
radio repair shops, untouched. The Americans made the serious cross-
cultural error of asking to have the repair completed by a certain time.
How do you cope with this? How does the Arab get another Arab to do
anything? Every culture has its own ways of bringing pressure to get
results. The usual Arab way is one which Americans avoid as "bad manners."
It is needling.
An Arab businessman whose car broke down explained it this way:
First, I go to the garage and tell the mechanic what is wrong with my
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