You can check the culture of your own country against other countries online on Geert Hofstede’s own company website, where the scores on cultural dimensions discussed in this post are published. As mentioned earlier, this may be helpful in estimating expected culture shock when entering a new country - furterhmore, and this is what it is aimed at, it may be helpful in understanding how to manage branches in multinational corporations. 

Apparently my home country of Norway is so feminized we come out on the extreme lower end of the masculinity dimension, together with Sweden, with values of 8 and 5 respectively on a scale that goes to at least 110 (which is the score of the macho Slovakians). This IBM study can’t possibly have included measures on the ability to light bonfires in the snow, cross-country skiing in storms and fist-fighting polar bears..

The view expressed on the website may also present a fundament some people may object to:

“Culture is more often a source of conflict than of synergy. Cultural differences are a nuisance at best and often a disaster.”     Prof. Geert Hofstede, Emeritus Professor, Maastricht University

Read more about Geert Hofstede in his wikipedia write-up or his own website. There’s also some criticism of his work - not surprisingly. This paper takes a critical look at the application of the data and does a simple case of comparing Australia and Indonesia, but comes to the conclusion that there are more support for Hofstede’s approach than there are problems. There’s also a lengthy criticism here by Prof. Brendan McSweeney of the University of Essex.

In a piece of research released twelve years ago and seemingly immediately forgotten, Lawrence R. Zeitlin at City University of New York wrote a report on how to estimate the severity of culture shock. By using measurements of common cultural values taken from a business study of over 160.000 employees in 53 different countries, he extracted a value representing the cultural distance between two countries. This value again, can be used to measure the amount of culture shock that should be expected when cultures meet.

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The US soldier magazine Stars and Stripes reports on the problems some american soldiers have with going home to the States after being posted in Europe. Apparently, after adjusting to European life, some soldiers are so accustomed to the slower European lifestyle that they find the competitive and money-oriented life back home both confusing and less rewarding than what they experienced while being stationed out:

It was seriously overwhelming,” said the Dayton, Ohio, native, who has been stationed in Europe for eight of the past 13 years and now works at RAF Upwood in England. “I forgot how to use the phone in the States. I forgot how the gas pumps worked. I couldn’t even rent a car in Dallas because I didn’t have a credit card because you pay cash for most everything in Germany.”

Jones had been jolted by culture shock when he first moved overseas in 1999. When he returned to the States after a few years abroad, he felt similarly disoriented. It was culture shock, in reverse.

I’ll suggest that reverse culture shock is worse than normal culture shock: the latter is almost a normal part of getting into a new culture, and has the advantage that there is always the normality of home to compare with. In the reverse culture shock, however, the normality has turned out to be non-existent, and there is nowhere to return to if it doesn’t work. 

Except, of course, just somewhere else, or back to the new home, as some of the soldiers in the original article found out. 

The blog Vagabondish has a list of advice on how one traveller dealt with her shock of coming home, Christian at nomad4ever has some other musings on returning home. However, although the initial culture shock may be equal for both travelers and ex-pats who lives abroad for an extended period of time (like soldiers), the problem of reverse culture shock is probably bigger for the latter group. When establishing a normal, routined day-to-day life in a foreign culture, a lot of new habits will form, that will be confusing and frustrated on return to the home culture. Someone traveling and exploring will most likely not form any new everyday habits, since every day is new anyways. 

Has anyone else had experience with reverse culture shock?

Reuters reports (”Switching languages can also switch personalities“) on a recent study by Luna, Ringberg and Peracchio that touches upon some of the issues of personalities and language in the post about bilingualism and psychosis. However, in this study, a difference was found between real biculturalism and bilingualism in single culture people. By studying US hispanic women, the researchers found that women would be perceived as more self-sufficient and extroverted when speaking Spanish than English, and the women would classify themselves as more assertive in Spanish. 

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So I don’t only write about advertisers: IBM has a site dedicated to globalization of business, with advice, events and quite probably IT solutions to corporate globalization. One of the free services they have on their site is their weekly culture clash scenario. Here, one touchy situation is presented weekly, with possible solutions and explanations. I particularly like some of the Hong Kong scenarios - don’t give away free green hats? 

Although I’m not supposed to click the ads on my page myself, one of them was just too interesting, offering a course in cultural diversity skills. They (a company called Preferred Training Networks) offer this on-site to companies as one of many courses. What I found interesting, though, was that in their course outline they offer a check-list of cultural diversity skills:

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Cartoon artist Daryl Cagle is travelling China on the request of the U.S. State Department to meet with his Chinese cartoonist counterparts and introduce Chinese audiences to American political cartoons. The result appears, to judge from his blog, to be successful in introducing two different cultures to each other, as the blog documents a series of curious cultural clashes. They are almost so strange it is hard to believe two cultures are so different. He reports that some of the questions he gets are like this (with his answers):

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