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Fons Trompenaars

Charles Hampden-Turner

The Seven Cultures Of Capitalism: Value Systems for Creating Wealth in Britain, the United States, Germany, France, Japan, Sweden and the Netherlands Hardcover – Import, January 1, 1994

by Charles & Fons Trompenaars Hampden-Turner (Author)

4.6 6 ratings

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Print length

416 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Piatkus
Publication date

January 1, 1994
ISBN-10

0749913304
ISBN-13

978-0749913304
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4.6 out of 5

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HvL

Practical help

Reviewed in the United States on February 12, 2014

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The authors provide useful and useable advice for sensing different cutural aspects, and then adjust, cope or manage the cultures in a practical way. Worth a read.

2 people found this helpful

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Kaitin D. Sherwood

I wish this weren't out of print!

Reviewed in the United States on April 8, 1999

This book examines a number of different countries and the priorities that shape them. While different cultures may all share the same values - be honest, treat your friends well, etc - what is telling is how different cultures *prioritize*.
For example, if you are in a situation where you see your friend at fault in a car accident, and you are called upon to testify, what do you do? While Americans tend to value truth-telling over loyalty to friends, Asians tend to value loyalty to friends over truth-telling. Both choices are shocking to the opposite: "How can you lie like that?" vs. "How can you let your friend down like that?"
This book looks at a number of cultures and how they differ. It's a fascinating read, and has changed how I look at the world.

25 people found this helpful

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San Patch

Perceptive and Stimulating Insight

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 7, 2009

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The theme of this book is that wealth creation is a function of the resolution of a seven dilemmas facing a national economy. These are:

' Making rules and discovering expectations. Does the culture value universal or particular rules of conduct?
' Constructing and deconstructing. Are phenomena analysed into their parts or are the phenomena integrated and taken as a whole?
' Management of communities of individuals. Does the culture value the rights of the individual over and above those of the group?
' Internalising the outside world. Which are the more important guides to actions; our inner directed judgments or the demands of the outside world?
' Choosing among achievers. How does the national culture assign status? By ascription or achievement?
' Conception of time. Does the culture perceive time as sequential and linear or as synchronous and cyclical?

By examining how seven nations - United States, Britain, The Netherlands, France, Sweden, Japan and Germany - attempt to resolve these contradictions, the authors argue that the resolution of the dilemmas has a direct impact on the ability to create wealth and adapt in a global economy.

The authors, who are US-educated, use the first half of the book to examine the US system. By contrasting American style capitalism with Japan's capitalist system, they authors show that the American individualist model is severely limited by its inability to respond coherently to external threats. Messrs Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner argue that while the communitarian Japanese tend to focus on market share in key technologies, American managers tend to focus on short-term profits. The implication is that American firms tend to seek profit for profit's sake regardless of the industry. This, in the authors' opinion, weakens the United States because it loses ground in key technologies such as biotechnology, which while not profitable in the short term, tend to be quite profitable in the long term.

The authors also attempt to explain the Japanese regard for old age. In Japanese thought, by living longer one makes more mistakes and can help others by owning up to this. One's old age does not necessarily mean that one has been right but one must have learned wisdom after the event.

I found the analysis of French and British management culture to be the most stimulating aspect of the book. As one who has worked for a British-Dutch and a French company, I mostly agreed with the authors' perceptive analysis of all these cultures. Some nuggets of insight from the book are:

FRENCH ATTITUDES TO HIERARCHY
There is an inherent contradiction between the ideals of "liberté, egalité and fraternité" of the French and the country's hierarchical organisations. Hierarchy seems to be ascribed by potential. As long as one attends the right schools, then one is assured of a rapid rise within the French management system. The impact of this "ascription" is that the French business elite is closed and incestuous.

GERMAN AMBIVALENCE TO MONEY
Germans tend to distrust money in itself. For them, money is but a means to capture the value in `real' stuff. German culture tends to shy away from high finance. Instead, German culture reveres machinery and equipment that have been painstakingly constructed to the highest standard.

BRITISH IDEOLOGY
British culture, which gave birth to the industrial revolution, is in a love affair with words. Thus, British culture rewards the "talkers" rather than the "doers". The culture then creates a false choice between education and business, workers and managers, government and business etc. These contradictions, which the Germans and Japanese seemed to have solved effectively, still dominate British cultural attitudes. The authors further argue that this polarised thinking hurts its managers because it creates "false concreteness" where it does not exist.

The book is based on a series of questionnaires that the authors administered to 15,000 managers from the seven countries over a period of 10 years. The authors periodically present the results of the questionnaires in order to buttress their assertions/observations of the national culture in question.

The book has a few shortcomings. They argue that the "failure to phase out soul-destroying work and substitute more challenging opportunities [in the West] risks turning a whole generation of young people against business per se. This appears to have happened in the late 1960's and 1970's to American baby-boom radicals". However, Messrs Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner fail to show how this could be. Personally, I thought that the authors attempt to reduce movement as complex as the radicalisation of the baby boomers to mere economics was disingenuous; I suspect that there were deeper issues of politics and the crisis of authority at stake.

Its shortcomings notwithstanding, the Seven Cultures of Capitalism is an excellent mirror through which we can examine our national culture and its unquestioned assumptions. I found the book to be perceptive and stimulating. It deserves my 4 stars.

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The Seven Cultures Of Capitalism: Value Systems for Creating Wealth in Britain, the United States, Germany, France, Japan, Sweden and the Netherlands Hardcover – Import, January 1, 1994

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