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CATEGORIZING CULTURES 51

Work
Tennis
Family colleagues
and
golf
Radio
and Relatives
TV

Old School
teachers friends

Friends
of Reading
family
Café
Godfather University gossip
peers

I N F E S
O R M AT S O U R C
I O N

Figure 3.14 Information Sources: Dialogue-Oriented Cultures

especially when negotiating, information is power. Sweden, Norway, Australia,

New Zealand and several other data-oriented cultures will have to expand and
intensify their intelligence-gathering networks in the future if they are to com-
pete with information-hot France, Japan, Italy, Korea, Taiwan and Singapore. It
may well be that the EU itself will develop into a hothouse exchange of business
information to compete with the Japanese network.
Listening cultures, reactive in nature, combine deference to database and
print information ( Japan, Finland, Singapore and Taiwan are high tech) with a
natural tendency to listen well and enter into sympathetic dialogue. Japanese
and Chinese will entertain the prospect of very lengthy discourse in order to at-
tain ultimate harmony. In this respect, they are as people oriented as the Latins.
The Finns, inevitably more brief, nevertheless base their dialogue on careful
consideration of the wishes of the other party. They rarely employ “steam-
rollering” tactics frequently observable in American, German and French debate.
Monologues are unknown in Finland, unless practiced by the other party.