Quote:
Originally Posted by pjorourke
I came across this idea in a blog I follow:
"The secret of American’s collective success as a people is our ability to self-organize ourselves on both the small and large scale into highly effective teams The relative inability to self-organize into teams is why China and some other cultures have lagged behind in the modern world. Americans have long relied on activities like sports, theater, marching band etc to teach that one critical American cultural skill. ...
American culture is based on the seeming contradiction of extreme individualism combined with a near instant willingness and ability to join a team to accomplish any particular task. The way New Yorkers spontaneously organized to evacuate Manhattan on 9/11 represented a large scale and dramatic example of the type of self-organization that Americans reflexively engage in on a daily bases.
Germans and the Japanese also excel at organization and group work but they default to hierarchical, top-down organization. Absent leadership or a predefined structure, both Germans and Japanese have a relatively hard time organizing themselves. American organization, by contrast, is strongly bottom-up with very flat or even nonexistent hierarchies. No other people self-organizes to the degree Americans do."
Thoughts? Comments?
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I think its heavily biased and not up to date. America without top down hierarchies in organizations? As opposed to germany? As a psychologist studying marketing psychology as well, i do know that the organizations all benefit from the same - western - research. So if there is top down organizations as opposed to bottom up ones, its not dependent on nationality. Plus do not underestimate the chinese. It is shown in researches that they tend to be more helpful e.g in Africa with developing countries because they are less hierarchical then the americans or the germans and go with the people and involve them in decision making. It seems to work better than the western-eurocentristic nose up high approache big cultures with a big fat ego like americans or germans seem to have. They go in adifferent country wanting to make everything the way "THEY" are used in doing stuff (top down - eurocentristic) instead of bottom up (invovling cultural biases) which makes the countries more dependent than self sustainable.
Plus the recent fall down in the world market show americans are - well - overrated :-)
Watch Brat 2 for a humourous view on american culture (Brother 2 a russian awarded movie with subtitles) and no offense - I love americans and USA. I just don`t think they are as good as they think they are. And USA is full of hierarchies. Full of it.
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