Gurnek Bains - Cultural DNA: the psychology of globalization

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Copyright 2015 by Gurnek Bains. All rights reserved

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey

Published simultaneously in Canada

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Bains, Gurnek.

Cultural DNA : the psychology of globalization / Gurnek Bains.

pages cm

Includes index.

ISBN 978-1-118-92891-2 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Cultural intelligence. 2. LeadershipPsychological aspects. 3. Career development. 4. Culture and globalization. I. Title.

HM621.B343 2015

303.48'2dc23

2014044837

From the start this project has been a family affair. My wife Kylie has provided much support in generating ideas. Her Australian cultural DNA has also ensured that the project actually happened, rather than staying a piece of Indian reflective enquiry. My two teenage children, Akal and Aman, have also helped. Akal's interest in economics and Aman's in psychology has meant that I have been able to give them significant sub-projects. In what we quickly discovered was a very ambitious undertaking.

I also want to thank everyone at YSC who has contributed and all of our global offices for their local insights. Our research department has also undertaken painstaking analysis of our database. I also want to thank, Evgeniya Petrova, who did much of the literature research and Rosemary Burke-Kennedy who helped bring the manuscript to fruition.

Gurnek Bains
London 2015

We live in a world that is becoming flatter and flatter. Global business and trade, the ease of air travel, and the unending flow of information and communication are all combining to create a kind of homogenized, cultural soup into which we are all being inexorably pulled. Whether you are in Beijing, Dubai, or Reykjavk, the ubiquity of global brands and the extent of cultural fusion can make everything around you look and feel comfortingly familiar, if somewhat blandly uniform. Backpackers know this and go to great lengths, admittedly sometimes in a self-defeating, cattle-like manner, to discover corners of the world that our global culture has not yet infiltrated or homogenized.

However, one theme emerges with surprising regularity when you talk to people who have moved to a different culture and lived there for some timethis surface similarity is something of an illusion only held by the transient tourist or business traveler. You don't realize just how different this place really is once you have been here some time, people who have deeper experience will often say. While things can appear familiar on the surface, over time a gradual realization sinks in that the deep psychological and cultural instincts of different societies really are different in profound, nonsuperficial ways. You find that while it might have been easy to engage the culture initially, you eventually hit a permafrost layer through which an outsider cannot penetrate. Over time, you often become aware of just what you don't know or can't comprehend. The initial surface familiarity can be deceptive; just because people in Shanghai wear Gucci or Missoni or carry Prada handbags, it doesn't mean that they are Italians at heart.

The same happens when people from different cultural backgrounds marry or form long-term relationships, as is increasingly the case in our globalized village of a world. Initial assumptions around the similarity of values are tested over time and it frequently begins to dawn on people that their partner's original culture is more ingrained in them than they might have assumed. Subtle differences in attitude and orientation begin to emerge once the fog of early infatuation and surface familiarity lifts. This is not to say that relationships across cultural barriers are doomed or problematic. I myself, being Indian and married to an Australian, know and appreciate the richness that is inevitably a part of cross-cultural relationships. However, both my wife and I have realized over time that I am more Indian than I might have thought in my deepest instincts and actually she is more Australiandespite the fact that both of us on the surface appear to be quintessential exponents of middle-class British mores and values.

The central argument of this book is that while there is much that is common between humans, there are also subtle but profound differences between the psychological instincts of different cultures. Furthermore, the ultimate causes of these differences frequently lie buried in the pastoften in the very early period when that part of the world was being settled by the first human migrations. It is this echo from distant times that fundamentally affects each culture's psychological outlook. Like a distant drumbeat, this cultural DNA reverberates through the society, affecting the historical cycles it has experienced, its economic performance, political institutions, business ethos, and just about every other aspect of people's experience. People are not better than one another, or always very different, just sometimes so. As the world globalizes, it is likely that some of these differences will be ironed out. However, it is also likely that we will become more conscious, rather than less, of differences below the surface.

The problems in the European Community around creating a single currency illustrate the tensions that arise when overoptimistic globalizing sentiments hit the wall of deeply ingrained psychological differences. When the Euro was introduced in 1999, many multinational businesses greeted the idea of a single currency across the consenting EC countries with enthusiasm. A significant number of multinationals essentially dismantled their European national operations in favor of regional structures. There was massive investment in the European project from outside. For example, in spite of the prominence given to emerging markets, more than half of the investment of U.S. multinationals abroad in the period 2002 to 2011 actually went to Europe.