Week 7: Latin America and Latin Europe

This week my team presented the Latin America and Latin Europe clusters from the GLOBE Study and we developed some interesting activities in which our classmates participated and it was funny. I would like to highlight two moments from the presentation.

Before talking about wine as the French Metaphor, we decided to do a short quiz on French culture for our classmates to see how much they knew about it. It was very interesting because one of them is from France, so he ratified many of the facts and, for others, he told us it may depend on the circumstances, age or the region in France. This way we realized and confirmed that we cannot generalize people’s behavior just because they belong to a certain country.

The second moment was the final activity of our presentation which consisted on forming groups and thinking of the best Colombian metaphor. They were required to argue the reasons and characteristics that reflected those of the Colombian culture. We asked the class’ foreigners to form one group because we wanted to know the perception they had about our culture, and they were precisely the winners. Their metaphor was Colombian coffee and folkloric dances being their main argument that since there are different types of coffees and different dances like cumbia o sanjuanero, they reflect the diversity found in Colombia but without losing the essence of what being Colombian means.

How this would become relevant? When we talk about a country, we have a mental picture about their culture based on what we know or what we have learned. However, when we check those beliefs against cultural studies we find that, in reality, many of them are just generalizations and stereotypes. In our research, we found metaphors to be a good approach and description of these countries’ culture, though some of them, as in France’s case, generalize things that might not be true for the entire country. Learning the common characteristics according to which these countries are linked and grouped into the same clusters, let us to identify critical points to be taken into account in an international negotiation.

Research Question: How is women’s role in business perceived in Latin America and Latin Europe?

Nowadays, woman is gaining ground as an agent of change. It is evidenced, for example, in this year’s Nobel Peace Prize: Malala Yousafzai. But this is not only happening in the social dimesion, but also in business and politics world in which we can see more women leading the biggest companies or strongest countries (e.g. Angela Merkel, Janet Yellen, Dilma Rouseff). But how do people perceive women’s performance in business?

I took a look on the World Values Survey (2009), specifically for Latin American and Latin European countries, and it is very clear how this perception has improved. Initially, I had expected certain differences between Latin America and Latin Europe, since here in Latin America there is still a rooted machista culture, however the survey showed a high similarity with respect to Latin Europe. For example, one of the most relevant items was: Men make better business executives than women do, and most people answered either disagree or strongly disagree as follows:

Retrieved from: http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSOnline.jsp