Culture Shock and Poor Adjustment Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3000 words

Culture Shock and Poor Adjustment - Essay Example The discussion can be put into perspective by considering the altering trends in the pantheon of cultural research. In the 19th century, the problem of cultural group independence was introduced for the first time by Sir Francis Galton in his work over correlation (Bird and Fang, 2009, p. 139). Galton stated that the cultural groups could not be considered entirely independent of each other because of the strong relationships created by the processes of cultural transfusion. As a result, the focus of research became cultures in toto and little work was done to draw comparisons across cultures. During the 1950s, the cultural change had attracted a lot of scholarly attention which led to the evolution of cultural ecology as a response to the natural environment (Steward, 1955). During the 1970s, there occurred rapid theoretical development in the field of anthropology’s cultural research. Keesing (1974) differentiated between the ideational theory of culture in which culture is visualized as the structural, symbolic, and cognitive systems, and the ecological theory of culture in which culture is visualized as an adaptive system. Efforts were made to deal with the complex matter of culture by â€Å"cutting . . . the culture concept down to size†¦[into] a narrowed, specialized, and†¦theoretically more powerful concept†.In order to understand the effect of internationalization of the telecommunications organization that is currently based in the UK, there is need to explore the country differences in the culture of organizations. â€Å"The effect size of country at the individual and organization levels, while not expected to be the same, is expected to be related, if it is accepted that differences in individual level characteristics (e.g. cultural values) of organizational members do, to some degree, translate into organization level differences in culture† (Gerhart, 2008, p. 264). Nelson and Gopalan (2003) conducted a large-scale mu lti-country research to measure the organization culture. To achieve this, they collected the data of a total of 288 organizations based in three countries with very different cultures i.e. India, the United States, and Brazil. The researchers first obtained the organization culture profiles for each of the three countries and then determined the extent to which the cultures complied with the national culture profiles for the countries from which the organizations were selected. Nelson and Gopalan (2003) found that the culture of 79 per cent of the organizations was not isomorphic with their respective national cultures of the countries. Another research on the country based differences in