Over at The AppGap, Matthew Hodgson has made a post uniting some of the themes I've been blogging about recently: the effect of different cultures on the take up of Web 2.0 tools.
Of course, I have to add the industry standard disclaimer that I too have philosophical and technical doubts about Hofstede's categories like "Power Distance" but overall it's not a bad starting point in this case (and definitely a post worth reading) Hodgson points to some recent research:
The book The Emergence of the Relationship Economy looks at a wide range of factors in the adoption of social computing tools, including culture. In bringing together a number of studies, chapter nine [1] deals specifically with the issue of culture.
The book reports that cultures who have very high Power-Distance scores also have low adoption of social computing tools. What organisations are likely to be high Power-Distance cultures? Many government agencies, defence and security organisations, and manufacturing companies could be described in this way.
He goes on to muse on how to address the problem. I agree overall with his contention that you can build an organisational culture that accepts social web tools even where the national culture seems to mitigate against it. However, what I've seen so far is that many companies still fail to take the time to consider that there may be cultural differences across different branch offices before they roll out these tools. So I make that the most important take home point of this post: Find out what cultures are operating across your organisation before you roll out a one size fits all change program.
1 comment:
A great summary and thanks for the link love.
Culture is certainly one of the fundamental issues that can make or break a project, yet few people bother to ask the question 'how will it impact my project?'.
As we delve into systems that are based on social interaction we will certainly need to become more aware of these social factors.
M :)
Post a Comment